How To Build Sticky Products
Here's how the best products keep users coming back and why yours might be forgettable
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Now, let’s dive into today’s insights…
Most products fight to get noticed but the best ones don’t. They quietly earn their place in your life until you can’t imagine leaving. That’s stickiness.
Stickiness is simply the difference between an app people try and one they keep using for years. From observing a lot of apps I use, I believe the foundation of sticky products are two powerful yet silent forces:
Accruing Benefits: The more you use the product, the better it gets for you.
Mounting Loss: The more you use it, the harder it becomes to walk away.
If you take a moment to think about it, when you use that app, you are not just engaging. You are also investing—your time, attention, money in some cases, and resources.
Let’s break it down.
1. Accruing Benefits: Usage Feeds Value
By design, great products turn activity into compounding value. Spotify learns what you love with every song you play. Not only does “discover weekly” get better, but your entire listening experience also becomes uniquely yours. This is an accruing benefit: the product gets smarter the more you engage.
There are two types of inputs that powers this:
Explicit actions: Choices you make to improve your experience.
For example: On LinkedIn, have you noticed the more connections you add, the more relevant your feed and job alerts become?
Implicit behavior: Data the product gathers quietly, without asking.
For example: Netflix doesn’t just log what you watch. It tracks what you skip, what you pause, and what you binge, all in a bid to make future suggestions sharper for you.
However, the best products build both pathways. They reward interaction and observe behavior to make the experience more personalized, more relevant, and more useful over time.
For example: Facebook mastered utilizing a combination of both inputs early on. Add a friend (explicit action), and your feed becomes richer. But the messaging app also notices what you like, comment on, and ignore (implicit actions), ensuring that the feed stays interesting, not overwhelming.
2. Mounting Loss: Leaving Comes at a Cost
The second half of stickiness is emotional yet psychological. When users pour time, identity, data, or social capital into a product, it starts to feel expensive to leave.
On Instagram, quitting isn’t just deleting an app. You’re walking away from your audience, your reels, your FYP, your conversations, your story.
On Notion, you’ve built systems. On Dropbox, you’ve archived your life. On Reddit, you’ve earned a reputation. The more people give, the more they want to protect what they have built even if alternatives exist.
Walmart excels here, strongly. A longtime customer doesn’t just walk away from low prices, they leave behind curated recipes and lists, recurring orders, saved preferences, delivery addresses, pickup routines, and a deeply tuned rhythm of everyday life. For millions of families, the Walmart app isn’t just for shopping, it’s a control center for groceries, pharmacy refills, household essentials, and time-saving convenience. The deeper your routine gets embedded, the harder it is to imagine rebuilding it elsewhere. It’s not just what you lose — it’s everything you would have to relearn. That is expensive.
Mounting loss isn’t just about data or switching costs. It’s about emotional weight. It’s about identity.
Why “Magical” Matters
A few weeks ago, someone in a group chat was ranting about their fitness tracker. It couldn’t handle biphasic sleep. It broke when they got up for water at night. And as I read through their rant, it clicked: the product just wasn’t magical.
Magic is when complexity disappears, and delight replaces effort. Read that again
See, the iPhone was magical. Uber was magical. Sending a real-time photo in HD to your mom across the world with a tap is still magical. These products took something hard or previously impossible and made it feel natural, even effortless.
Compare that to many fitness trackers. They show you the steps. Then what? You miss your goal and feel bad. They log your sleep but don’t help you change it. They surface data without delivering meaning.
Magic is the bridge between data and motivation. It’s when your product does more than inform. It guides, enables, and surprises.
If your product wants to stick, don’t just optimize the flow. Ask: Where’s the magic?
How To Design For Stickiness
You can bet that stickiness doesn’t happen by accident. You design it, you sweat the details through intentional loops that reward use and deepen investment.
Here’s a simple framework to follow:
The Stickiness Loop
Engage → Get users to perform a core action (e.g., listen, post, track, shop).
Accrue → Capture value from that action (data, preferences, purchase behavior).
Reward → Improve the user experience based on their input (personalization, faster reordering, tailored offers).
Retain → Create emotional or functional reasons to return (trust, convenience, everyday savings).
Repeat → Bring users back to re-engage, now with even less friction and even more value.
One of the most elegant applications of this loop in the real world is Walmart.
Unlike many retailers that treat every visit as a clean slate, Walmart compounds value across touch points: online, in-store, mobile, and even voice. A customer doesn’t just shop, they train the system to understand their preferences. Their delivery windows get tighter. Their baskets get smarter. Their loyalty deepens. The more they shop, the better the experience becomes and the harder it is to imagine shopping anywhere else.
It’s a masterclass in how to scale both utility and emotional stickiness and why Walmart remains the most trusted and habit-forming retailer in the world.
Design tactics to reinforce the loop:
Build visible progress: Show streaks, levels, or milestones.
Reinforce personalization: Surface what users have “trained” your product to understand.
Highlight user contributions: Saved playlists, followers, karma, shared docs.
Make history matter: Reward consistent behavior or archive meaningful interactions.
Sticky products don’t just retain users. They grow with them.
Where Products Get It Wrong
Apps like Clubhouse saw viral growth but they couldn’t hold onto users. The major reason was they had no sustainable identity. No history. No reason to stay. You could log off, come back months later, and your experience would be the same. Nothing remembered you. Nothing rewarded investment.
Compare that to Reddit or Twitter. You can be anonymous, but your account carries weight. Followers. Posts. Reputation. Investment.
Summary
Don’t Just Drive Engagement. Build Compounding Value.
If your product isn’t learning from users and users aren’t building equity in return you’re leaving stickiness to chance.
Here’s a quick test I use often:
Can users say: “This product gets better the more I use it”?
And also: “If I left today, I’d lose something I care about”?
If the answer to both questions is yes, then you have built more than a product.
You have built something they are coming back to and not just out of habit.
“Stickiness is where lasting products are made. Magic is what makes them unforgettable.”
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