Atomic features: small details that make a BIG difference (Part 3)
How to use the power of routines to drive demand for your product
In early 2016, the meditation app Calm was struggling to keep the lights on.1
They were still in #2 place behind Headspace – then the “Goliath” of meditation apps. Headspace had raised $38 million from investors and were spending heavily on marketing.
Calm had raised just $1 million, and were struggling to keep their small team on the payroll.2
And yet, Calm started growing much faster than Headspace, claiming the #1 spot in 2017, and today are nearly twice the size of Headspace.34
What happened?
In 2016, Calm discovered that most people were using the app around 9-11 pm. People were using it to calm down for sleep. This was a pivotal insight.
Not every person will meditate.
But everyone sleeps.
Calm decided to lean into this sleep trend, and began producing content specifically around sleep and relaxation. Headspace, in contrast, kept focused on their linear, guided meditation courses.
Calm fit their product into a widespread routine – going to bed. Not only did Calm target a bigger market than Headspace, but they got more consistent users too. If you just wanted to learn how to meditate, you’d stop using the app once you were done.
But if you needed to calm down to sleep, you’d keep using Calm every single night.5
This is the third article in the series about “atomic features” – small details of your product or distribution that have an outsized impact to customers.
In my first post, I wrote about taste atomic features – how features such as product demos and free samples that help customers taste your product can 2-3X sales.
In the second post, I covered fear-relief features – how finding and reliving points of fear for your customers can be the difference between failure and rocketship success.
In this article, I introduce a third kind of atomic feature: the “routine” feature.
The routine feature – make your product part of a widespread routine
Routine features are those details that expand the demand for your product by making it part of a common routine.
As the Calm story shows, when a product becomes part of a routine it both 1) dramatically increases your market size, and 2) creates a more loyal customer base.
That’s why routine features have such outsized impact.
There are many different routine features, but they typically fall into one of three types:
Create a new routine around your product
Make an existing routine easier
Switch the routine your product is part of
Let’s explore each of them!
1. Create a new routine around your product
Creating a new routine around your product is not easy. But if you crack the code, it will unlock a whole new level of demand!
Two strategies to nudge customers into habits around your product are:
1.1 Implement usage reminders
One of the most atomic features for the Calm app has been the daily reminder.
Calm initially didn’t push users to set a reminder. But when they investigated their user data, they found that those who had set a daily reminder to meditate were far more likely to stay.
Inspired, they began prompting new users to set a daily reminder after completing their first meditation session.
The result was a 3X increase in daily retention.6
Vice versa, when reminders disappear, the result can be a dramatic drop in usage.
Mark and Scott – founders of the food brand Sir Kensington’s – had had great success with their mustard and mayonnaise. But their ketchup just wasn’t selling.
The taste wasn’t the problem: customers said they loved it. So Mark and Scott began considering the shape of the ketchup bottle.
It turned out that the bottle was so short that, when customers placed it in their fridge door shelf, the ketchup disappeared behind the shelf’s non-transparent guardrail.
As Mark put it, “If you can’t see the bottle, you don’t take it out as often. Out of sight, out of mind.”
This insight led Mark and Scott to design a taller bottle for their ketchup. As soon as the new design hit the market, sales jumped by 50%.7
1.2 Make the product satisfying to use
Calm is also a great example of a satisfying product.
When I open the app, it starts playing my favorite background noise – bird song and rippling waves – that instantly make me feel more peaceful. And the feeling afterward of having meditated is nearly as satisfying as after a workout.
Another satisfying product we can learn from is toothpaste. In just a decade, the toothpaste Pepsodent grew from being used by just 7% to 65% of all Americans.
A big part of this “toothbrushing wave” was large-scale advertising. But another factor was that Pepsodent used mint oil and citric acid that created a satisfying freshness after usage. When people forgot to brush their teeth, they soon missed that feeling.8
What do both Calm and toothpaste have in common? They are:
✅ Free from frustrations
✅ Give a pleasant feeling from usage
Products that combine both traits have a great chance being used habitually.
2. Make an existing routine easier
If creating a new routine isn’t possible, you can increase demand through a different tactic:
Turn your product into a tool that makes an existing routine easier.
One example of this is Facebook’s birthday reminders, which has become one of the most used features on the platform.
Before this feature, keeping track of all your hundreds of friends’ birthdays was a monumental task few bothered with. By keeping tabs for your friends birthday’s for you, Facebook turned all the hundreds of birthdays into an opportunity for you to engage with the platform. They tapped into an existing routine (birthday congrats) and made it easier.
Another example is Amazon’s wish list, that lets you save products to your birthday or Christmas wish list.
Before this feature, creating a wish list was almost a chore. You’d forget a lot of cool products you had seen during the year. By letting you save the products to wanted on their website, Amazon tapped into the huge dollar-spend routine of buying birthdays and Christmas gifts.
They found a large routine that was hard to perform, and just made it easier.
3. Switch the routine your product is part of
A third way to expand demand fir your product is to change where, when, and what for it used. More specifically, you want to:
Fit your product into a routine where it’ll be used heavily.
Let’s look at two stories as examples:
Estée Lauder – Selling perfume by the bottle instead by the drop
In the 1950s, women rarely ever used perfume. Fragrances were something special your lover bought you as a gift. It was even considered “narcissistic” for a woman to buy perfume for herself.
Estée Lauder was determined to change this perception. She believed women should smell great every day.
Her solution was “Youth-Dew”: a bath oil that sneakily doubled as a perfume.
Taking baths was something most women did on a regular basis. Instead of using perfume by the drop behind each ear, women began using Youth-Dew by the bottle in their bathtub.
Youth-Dew sold 50,000 bottles in the first year.
By 1984, it sold 150 million bottles.
Lauder “sneaked” her product into a routine that demanded heavy usage – taking baths – and expanded her market 100X. The word “perfume” was never used in marketing.9
Roasted nut carts – From $100 a day to $1,000s in ten minutes
John Mautner started with a single roasted nut cart, and expanded it into one of America’s 500 fastest-growing companies selling nuts of $100 million a year.
But before then, he nearly went bankrupt due to one wrong detail.
He had opened in an Orlando shopping mall. But 6 months in, sales were just $100 per day. What was the pivotal insight that changed everything? Here’s the story in John’s own words:
“I used the process of elimination to determine what the real problem was:
Was my product bad? Nope.
Did I give poor service? Nope.
Is the cart ugly? Nope.
Was my hair parted on the wrong side of my head? Nope.
I eliminated everything that could be the problem and reduced it down to one issue. The location was the problem.”
Most people don’t spend money on snacks when visiting a shopping mall. It wasn’t part of the typical shopping mall routine.
But where did people spend money on snacks?
In sports arenas and theme parks.
John moved his nut cart from the mall to the Orlando sports arena. At the first football game, 22,000 people showed up at the stadium.
John sold out completely in about ten minutes.
As he later reflected on the success:
I had found the 'secret sauce' - it wasn't me (or how I was parting my hair).
It was that customers who were going to parks and arenas were already spending $10 for a hot dog and $7 for a beer. So spending $3 for a bag of roasted nuts didn't seem to impact their wallets.
What John actually got wrong wasn’t the location, but the routine around the location. Once he fit his product into a routine with a bigger appetitive for it, huge sales were almost a given.10
When deciding which routine to fit your product into, look for the routine with the greatest total usage of your product. This consists of three factors:
Scale (how many people do this routine?) x
Frequency (how often do they do it?) x
Intensity (How much will my product be used each time?)
= TOTAL USAGE
For John’s nut carts, most people visit both shopping malls and arenas/parks. People likely visit arenas/parks less frequently than malls. But when they do, they are way more likely to spend intensely on snacks. That intensity more than made up for the lower frequency.
How to find the right product-routine fit
There are an infinite number of routines. But the number of use cases for your product is much more limited. So to find the right product-routine fit, it makes sense to start from your product.
What universal need does your product fulfill?
What widespread routine do people have that need?
Let’s clarify this with some examples:
What universal need did Estée Lauder’s Youth-Dew help women achieve?
To smell great.
What widespread routine do women perform to smell better?
Taking baths.
⇒ Create a bath oil that doubles as a perfume. 🛁🧴
What universal need did Amazon help people achieve?
To buy products.
In what widespread routine do people buy lots of products?
For birthdays and Christmas gifts.
⇒ Create a product wish list. 🎁📝
What universal need did Calm help people achieve?
To relax and calm down.
In what widespread routine do people need to relax and calm down?
When going to sleep.
⇒ Create a sleep relaxation app. 💤😌
The key is to strip away all the specific needs your product fulfills, to find its universal need.
If Calm had narrowed their need to “teach people how to meditate”, or if Estée Lauder had narrowed her need to “make women feel special on special occasions”, the size of their markets would have been much smaller.
Find the need with the fewest restrictions on your market size.
Summary
Nearly every product is used at a certain time or place – or as part of a habit or regular occurrence. And the scale, frequency, and intensity of that routine determine the demand for your product.
To harness the power of routines to drive demand, you can either:
Create a new routine around your product
Make an existing routine easier
Switch the routine your product is part of
Start by identifying the universal need your product fulfills. Then, look for the greatest routine you can fit your product into.
And always, look for ways to create reminders and satisfying feelings around your product.
A product that both 1) fits into an existing routine, and 2) creates a new routine around itself, will enjoy the large market size with the most loyal customer base.
What's Your Problem?: To Solve Your Toughest Problems, Change the Problems You Solve - by Thomas Wedell-Wedellsborg, chapter 10
Estée Lauder: A Success Story – by Estée Lauder, chapter 4