Nir And Far: Business, Behaviour and the Brain

Nir’s Note: This guest post is by Ryan Hoover. Ryan blogs at  ryanhoover.me  and you can follow him on Twitter at  @rrhoover . When Snapchat first launched, critics discounted the photo-messaging app as a fad – a toy for sexting and selfies. Their judgements were reasonable. It’s impossible to predict the success of a product on day one, let alone its ability to change user behavior...

Nir’s Note: Irene Au is a design partner at Khosla Ventures and former Head of Design at Google, Yahoo, and Udacity. She’ll be speaking at the upcoming Habit Summit in April. (You can register here !) In this interview, she chats with Max Ogles about design strategy for startups. Q: You have an impressive background as a designer at Google, Yahoo, and now at Khosla Ventures. Could you describe how...

Nir’s Note: This book review is by Sam McNerney. Sam writes about cognitive psychology, business, and philosophy. In Moneyball, Michael Lewis tells the story of Billy Bean, the general manager of the Oakland Athletics who transformed the A’s using sabermetrics, the data-driven approach to understanding baseball. Bean noticed that instead of using data to predict player performance, baseball profes...

Is the world more distracting? Sometimes it seems that way. With our digital devices buzzing, world events demanding our attention, and more things to entertain us than ever before, it certainly seems harder to focus on what’s really important. And yet, focus is exactly what it takes to get things done and get ahead. Distraction might appear more available than ever, but it is nothing new. Over 2,...

Nir’s Note: In this guest post, Sharbani Roy explores techniques she used to break bad habits related to eating, sleeping and exercising. Sharbani blogs at sharbaniroy.com and you can follow her on twitter @Sharbani. It’s 2 AM and you’re exhausted, but unable to sleep. You’ve been cycling through Facebook, email, and other online media for hours. You want to stop, but you can’t. This technology-in...

Nir’s Note: In this guest post, Ryan Hoover takes a look at Tinder, a red hot dating app. Ryan dives into what makes the Tinder app so popular and engaging. Ryan blogs at ryanhoover.me and you can follow him on Twitter at rrhoover. The Tinder app has become a fixture in the U.S. App Store as one of the top 25 social networking applications, generating 1.5 million daily matches as more than 50 perc...

Nir’s Note: This guest post is written by Max Ogles. Max is an editor for NirAndFar.com and heads marketing for CoachAlba.com, a mobile health startup. Follow him on Twitter and read his blog at MaxOgles.com. Weight gain happens pound by pound, over many years, and that’s how Dave Haynes found himself sixty pounds away from a healthy BMI. In his career, Dave was immersed in the startup world; he h...

Nir’s Note: An edited version of this essay appeared in The Atlantic. Below is my original. It’s not often an app has the power to keep someone out of a strip club. But according to Bobby Gruenewald, CEO of YouVersion, that’s exactly what his Bible app did. Gruenewald says a user of his app walked into a business of ill repute when suddenly, out of the heavens, he received a notification on his ph...

Nir’s Note: This guest post comes from Brendan Kane who has built technology for MTV, Paramount, Taylor Swift, Rihanna, and the NHL. In this article, Brendan describes how he reprogramed the way he views the world using little more than his iPhone and iPad to find happiness. Using phones and other technology to find happinessSave We all have the power to change our lives and find happiness. I know...

Note: This post originally appeared in Techcrunch. I’m proud to have co-authored this post with Katy Fike, PhD. Dr. Fike is a gerontologist, systems engineer and Partner at Innovate50, a consulting firm helping companies create products and services for the 50+ market As web watchers, entrepreneurs, and investors search for the next big thing, they’d be wise to focus on innovations that can be eas...

“Successful entrepreneurs recommend reading this article about the persuasion techniques companies use to drive engagement.” Scratch that, how’s this? “Tons of people are tweeting this article. Find out why.” You can read the Nir and Far blog post on: Mass Persuasion, One User At A Time https://www.nirandfar.com/2012/10/mass-persuasion-one-user-at-a-time.html Nir & Far, a podcast about business, b...

The first thing Don Draper does when he gets to his office is give his busty secretary a suggestive wink. The second thing he does is take off his fedora. Finally, depending on the severity of the previous night, he completes his morning routine with a stiff drink. What can we learn from Don’s habits? First, that scotch and submissive secretaries always equal drama. But what of that fedora? There’...

Nir’s Note: In this guest post, Ryan Hoover takes a look at how new behaviors are shaping tech opportunities. Ryan blogs at ryanhoover.me and you can follow him on Twitter at rrhoover. Startups that build a product attached to nascent behaviors have an opportunity to form habits before anyone else. First mover advantage matters. Once a habit is formed, it’s difficult to change and often provides a...

If you’re like me, you’ve had enough of the Facebook IPO story. For tech entrepreneurs struggling to build stuff, the cacophony of recent press is just more noise. That’s why when my friend Andrew Chen posted an insightful analysis of Facebook user data, I was happy to get back to learning from what the company did right instead of debating what its bankers did wrong. Chen calculated Facebook’s hi...

Face it; you’re hooked. It’s your uncontrollable urge to check for email notifications on your phone. It’s your compulsion to visit Facebook or Twitter for just a few minutes, but somehow find yourself still scrolling after an hour. It’s the fact that if I recommended a book to purchase, your mind would flash “Amazon” like a gaudy neon sign. If habits are defined as repeated and automatic behavior...

The belief that products should always be as easy to use as possible is a sacred cow of the tech world. The rise of design thinking, coinciding with beautiful new products like the iPhone, has led some to conclude that creating slick interfaces is a hallmark of great design. The law that design should always decrease the amount of effort users expend doesn’t always hold true. In fact, putting user...

“Nearly everyone I know is addicted in some measure to the Internet,” wrote Tony Schwartz in a recent essay in The New York Times. It’s a common complaint these days. A steady stream of similar headlines accuse the Net and its offspring apps, social media sites and online games of addicting us to distraction. There’s little doubt that nearly everyone who comes in contact with the Net has difficult...

The first step in the art of building a company is understanding customer motivation. Unless you deeply understand the job your customer is hiring your product to do, you may be surprised to learn what is, and is snot, the reason to buy your products. You can read the Nir and Far blog post on: What Is, and Is Not Your Product's Job https://www.nirandfar.com/2012/02/what-is-and-is-not-your-products...

Nir’s Note: Jonah Berger is a marketing professor at the Wharton School and author of the New York Times bestseller Contagious: Why Things Catch On. Contagious explains the science behind word of mouth, how six key factors drive products and ideas to become popular, and how you can apply that science to get your own stuff to catch on. Whether you run a small business or work for a large one, and w...

App makers are returning to the roots of what our phones are for. They are after all communications devices. So called “invisible apps” engaging in “conversational commerce” are popping-up in all sorts of unrelated industries. Over the next few years, smart entrepreneurs and savvy designers will use similar techniques to dramatically improve the way they connect and serve their customers. You can...

Chances are you’ve experienced the following: You’re with a small group of friends at a nice restaurant. Everyone is enjoying the food and conversation when someone decides to take out his phone — not for an urgent call, but to check email, Instagram, and Facebook. You can read the Nir and Far blog post on: Why People Check Their Tech at the Wrong Time (and the Simple Trick to Stop It) https://www...

The Hook Model goes beyond reinforcing behavior; it creates habits, spurring users to act on their own, without the need for expensive external stimuli like advertising. The Hook Model is at the heart of many of today’s most habit-forming technologies. Social media, online games, and even good ol’ email utilize the Hook Model to compel us to use them. You can read the Nir and Far blog post on: Var...

There is a reason why jocks become Fortune 500 CEOs. But you don’t need a varsity jacket to apply these lessons to your own life. In fact, I’m a born nerd who until recently hated athleticism. You can read the Nir and Far blog post on: What A-Players Do That You Don't https://www.nirandfar.com/2012/01/what-players-do-that-you-dont.html Nir & Far, a podcast about business, behaviour and the brain b...

Nir’s Note: My friend Jake Knapp just published a fantastic book titled, Sprint: How to Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in Just Five Days. The book details a process he and his colleagues at Google Ventures use to quickly go from idea, to prototype, to live test. Jake put together an exclusive excerpt from the book for NirAndFar.com readers. Here it is: You can read the Nir and Far blog post...

We are a species that depend on one another. Scientists theorize humans have specially adapted neurons that help us feel what others feel, providing evidence that we survive through our empathy for others. We’re meant to be part of a tribe and our brains seek out rewards that make us feel accepted, important, attractive, and included; all in the form of social rewards. You can read the Nir and Far...