Ask HN: How do you drive adoption when your product requires a behavior shift? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How do you drive adoption when your product requires a behavior shift?

I’m working on a product where the value proposition depends on users adopting a new behavior.

We know behavior doesn't shift just because something “could” be better. People stick to familiar tools unless there’s a clear incentive, a low-friction experience, or strong social proof. So we’re trying to be intentional about how we guide that change.

For those who’ve built products that asked users to do something new or uncomfortable:

What actually moved the needle for adoption?

Was it user education, incentives, or community-led momentum? Did you start with a small niche and expand?

Any frameworks or even personal mistakes you learned from? Would love to hear your stories, lessons, or anything you'd like to share. Thanks!

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Behavior change at a group level is often driven by sociological forces that start small and build up over time. I highly recommend the work of Damon Centola. His books “Change: How to Make Big Things Happen” and “How Behavior Spreads: The Science of Complex Contagions” are full of stories that help illustrate the concepts he studies. He’s a legit sociologist whose research points to the value of strong ties to help drive persistent adoption and behavior change (whether societal or in product adoption, it’s all based on the same principles).

I would not recommend the works by Jonah Berger that also deal with the same topic, because they are primarily based on marketing observations that are often shallow and misleading. For example, the misinterpretation of the “influencer” phenomenon, whereby he concludes that people who gain a following and become popular online actually help shape behavior. That is often, as we now know, only a fleeting phenomenon more akin to a lottery than anything that drives actual change.

When you really study the ways in which big products like say, Twitter, blew up, you see that they started with a small group of people who loved them. By the time the “influencers” picked up, the product already had a dedicated audience that made it feel “safe” for the popular person to promote them.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy Centola’s work if you check it out. And good luck!

From what I learned in my MBA that specialised in digital transformation I would advise against developing a product where the value proposition depends on the user adopting a new behaviour. To me that suggests your product isn’t fulfilling a need, and thus, is not really of value to the user. I know you sometimes hear people say things like create something people don’t even realise they want/need - but it still needs to fulfil a need/desire, just one people haven’t identified as a problem, or a thing that can be done easier/better/more efficient.

Changing behaviour of people, en masse is actually kind of difficult. You’d probably need to actually hire behaviour analysts/other behaviour experts to affect the kind of change you’re hoping for, which really… if you need to go to those lengths to get people to use your product, your product is shit. Fail fast and then start again.

You need a crowbar. Enter at an angle, then pry it off.

Slack is my favorite example. It looked like chat. It had a hash, like IRC channels did. But it was actually email! It cut down back and forth in email. You can just give someone an emoji callback instead of emailing them, "Noted." You can send documents. You have a history of conversations and it was easy to CC the boss if someone didn't cooperate. People no longer spent the whole day replying emails.

Or Amazon. Instead of selling everything online, they started with books. Books were annoying to buy and easy to "ship".

A modern example might be Cursor. People already use VSC. They kept the exact same interface, added a few extra features, and end up selling agents. There's lots of agents out there which are great like Aider, but many are too far from someone's workflow.

Most of these are in the form of "create a channel people use, then sell things down that channel".

I'm building a product helping a group of people to adopt new way of thinking. In my case users are locked in certain type of organisations, I promote change from the top- get top tier to understand benefits and change will be pushed downwards- sometimes it will be forced because there are people among us who will say no just to say no.

“Nobody made a cent selling people what they need. You have to sell them what they want.” — somebody somewhere. If people in a free society, or any society, don’t want to change, generally they have several very good reasons why, based on painful past experiences. Do you have even more good reasons why they should change, based on evidence even more persuasive that lived experience? I’m guessing not, if you’re asking random Internet people.

Death.

New people who don't have built in patterns learn something better.

Locked in people stop doing the old thing because they're dead.

Eventually the new replaces the old. Its why its so important we don't let one of those startups "cure" aging or locked in feedback loops won't ever terminate. Also why events like COVID are so damaging, a whole tranche of new users learned maladaptive patterns.

My former CEO would tell you "if you depend on people changing their nature, your product is not likely to succeed".

This is a hard problem. It's like telling a born and raised vscoder than vim is better. The vscoder may even realize vim is more efficient and objectively better, but the cost of change is too high.

Can you make the transition easier? Is there a middleground?

> the value proposition depends on users adopting a new behavior.

Where's the value then? Is it in your product, or in the user's new behavior?

Behavior is remarkably hard to change. Smoking kills you, but people still smoke. Remarkably people still take up smoking.

People like sugar, and the effects of that are well understood, yet we still eat it (some in more moderation than others) because, well, it tastes good.

Behavior can be a habitual. It can be hormonal or chemical. You might get a few people to change a habit - but you've got no chance with the others.

You might get one person to change, but if your product requires a group, ie social behavior, you've got no chance.

It's good that you recognize that behavior needs to change. It's good that you understand this will be the hardest part of the problem.

I'm not optimistic- but it is possible IF (very big if) the payback to the user is high.

Good luck.

I’m working on a product where the value proposition depends on users adopting a new behavior

If the perceived value for the behavior change is marginal, there’s no trick or tip that will make people change.

If the perceived value is high, you don’t need a tip or trick…other than to create the perception of high value.

It is worth noting that perceived risk is a massive factor. Price is marginal value for a B2B offering that requires changing accounting behavior. For consumers, price might be the biggest risk.

So why are your potential users resistant to changing behavior? Ask them and solve their actual problems. Good luck.

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