Building Products That Stick

What makes products stick ?

Building sticky products is hard and overall notion of ‘stickiness’ is considered a good inherent characteristic of a product.

But why is a ‘sticky’ product better than a ‘non sticky’ one :

1. higher stickiness of product ensures you have more time to generate revenue from customer, thus higher lifetime value
2. stickiness ensures you can focus on getting new customers, adding to your net number of customers instead of constantly pluggin the holes of your leaky bucket. thus lower churn

Think of a product like a nail. Lot of product designers and managers, commit the fundamental mistake of making sure they penetrate the market or proverbial adoption wall with a highly pointed edge. This gets their foot into the door. People start using the product,

But often one thing that gets missed out is the stickiness aspect or adding scales or screws around the nail. thinking hard about what will make your customers keep on using your product after it has found the adoption is what separates good products from great products.

Adding sticky components in your product might delay your gtm a bit, but it’s imp to co prioritize it along with early functionality you are working on.

Then there is concept of good stickiness vs bad stickiness. Example of good stickiness is network effect vs bad stickiness includes ‘lock-in’ etc.

So what features would you priotise in your roadmap to make it ‘sticky’ ?