The *35,000 people waitlist* positioning-strategy I see nobody using 🍏
The VIRAL product that ______ *existing* habits
Most creators try to fix problems by *forcing* new habits.
But the smartest products don’t demand behavior change — they leverage existing habits.
I call this **habit-piggybacking**.
Here’s how you can use it to design your next viral product:
The 🔑 — don’t fight the habit loop, sneak into it…
Step 1: Find a problem
Last week I stumbled across a product and I’ve been thinking about it all weekend —I can’t believe I’ve never seen this before.
This is the story of JellyDrops.
It started rough… Lewis’s grandma was rushed to the hospital with severe dehydration. Lewis hadn’t realised that something so simple could have such devastating consequences.
After the ordeal, he spent months in his grandma’s care home to try and understand why dehydration happens, what the cause was, and how it could be solved so that his grandma and many other elderly people wouldn’t have to suffer.
The problem:
❌ — How do you get elderly people to drink more water
✅ — How do you keep elderly people hydrated
It’s a subtle shift but an important one. The first assumes the answer is in drinking water; the second assumes no solution, just a problem to be solved.
Because, of course, drinking water is the most conventional way to keep people hydrated, but convention isn’t always the best way…
Step 2: Hijack a competing habit
So you’ve got your problem, the thing you want to solve —hydration.
Now, what we need to do (what Lewis did) is recognise a consistent habit. Afterall, what we’re trying to do here is make something that isn’t happening all the time, to happen *more* frequently.
So, if you can pick out something that is happening all the time, you can start to reverse engineer it and hijack that habit to solve your problem.
The question to ask is: What other habits do these people have?
The habit that was pinpointed for hijacking?
Sweets.
It turned out that his grandma had a real sweet tooth, and so too did many of the folks in the care home where Lewis’s grandma lived. And so he had a thought—what if I could make sweets the mechanism for hydration?
In other words, how can I turn the thing they are already doing into the thing I want them to do… how can I piggyback the habit?
And so Jelly Drops were born — the sweet that is 95% water.
All of a sudden, you’ve got a product that solves 2 problems in one:
The sweet tooth problem
The hydration problem
It’s brilliant.
Step 3: Don’t create new habits, piggyback off existing ones
Now, let’s say you’re creating your next product.
You’ve identified the problem (here’s a rough example):
Problem: Dog owners don’t brush their dogs’ teeth
Consequence: Leading to dental problems (and pain) for the dog
Habit-to-piggyback: Dog walking, feeding, poop pick
Now the question is how.
Let’s pick dog walking. Instead of just creating another toothbrush product, let’s think about how this could work into the dog owner’s daily life:
A chew before a walk
A mouthwash mid-walk that can be spat out
A dental chew after a walk as a ‘calm-down’ snack
The point isn’t the product (just yet), the point is to figure out when you can piggyback off a habit that already exists, meaning that the product is likely to stick better, be used more, and celebrated by your customers.
The wrap-up
Don’t just think about *what* you are building, think about *when* people are going to use it. Get smart. Hijack existing behaviours as a way into making your product stick.
Remember, it’s about getting people to use your thing, then talk about your thing —that’s the marketing flywheel.
So maximise your chances of being used by designing for people’s existing behaviours, not by trying to create a new one.
That’s all for today.
Much love,
Eve
Founder - Part-Time Creator Club