Friction Free Habits

Fred Wilson is going short on concert tickets.  First, Lead Zepplin and now Neil Young tickets bite the dust.

His blog was the process. Nothing fancy, nobody gets a cut, just put it out there and see who wants them.  Totally a reverse trust thing.  Fred is a public (by blog standards) figure so the odds are zero that you will get ripped off by him. He wants Paypal only so the odds HE will get ripped off are also effectively zero.

What he didn't do was use Ebay, try out that new Mark Cuban thing on Facebook, Amazon auctions (are they still active) or any other means, just put em out on the blog and first come first served. Done.  He could have done Ebay and posted the Ebay link in the blog postings but nope, write the entry and be done with it.

I point this out to you, kind start up people, as you are putting together that plan where you tell the VC suits why people are going to a) flock to your site/service and b) pay for it.  If there is an existing habit/behaviour you have to change, you need to plan for it.

People's habits are very hard to break.  Friction Free is even harder.

Comments

[Braydon JM]

Great post Rick, thanks for again helping refocus my own thinking a bit.

In terms of habits, I look at it from an incentive standpoint - and a recurring incentive. The only way to break a habit is to put something in the way of the existing habit that drives a person to a new behavior. And that something should not be a negative barrier. For example, in rVibe's space (music download and streaming), the RIAA suing file-sharers is not enough of a barrier to current behavior to change the "habit" (in this case the habit is accessing a "super catalog" of music that is, in effect, free). What you need is a good reason to change - not a one-off reason, but a reason that comes back again and again.

So, in our example again, you have to provide other services that are more desirable than the existing habit, but you have to also cover the existing habit's reward (getting the music). We'll have to provide for easy access to a super catalog, make it almost free and add a host of other value-add features that people will want to leverage (and pay for). The pay for piece is the most interesting (of course) and getting people to pay is the biggest challenge.

In our case, once people have money in their rVibe account, they use it without hesitation - but reducing the barrier to adding money to their account is a challenge we're working on. That is the core habit changing activity for our space - getting people to put money into the system. That's the frictionless part you mention - how can we make adding money virtually frictionless.

We have some things we're trying out; we'll see how it goes.

Thanks again for the post.

[Derek Johnson]

Dude, the name of band is Led Zeppelin not Lead Zeppelin. I know you're an easy listening light FM kinda guy (how do you live with yourself?) but we're talking about the gods of rock here. Show some respect and learn to spell the name of band correctly. ZOSO.