This post argues that rather than being consumed by Product-Market Fit (PMF) as a lagging indicator, the key to business success is capturing recurring problems in users' daily lives and forming 'habits.' Through the examples of Slack and Gamma, it explains how reducing friction and drawing user investment within the first 30 seconds leads to powerful retention.
1. PMF Is Just a Result — It Starts with 'Habits'
Many founders obsess over PMF, meticulously tracking sign-ups, churn rates, and reviews. Solving a problem is the basis for market entry, and PMF is important as evidence that people want your product. But PMF is merely a lagging indicator of what's already happened.
To truly build a successful service, you need to change the question: "Am I simply building a 'solution,' or am I designing a user 'habit'?" James Clear defined habits this way:
A habit is a recurring solution to a recurring problem. — James Clear
Not every problem is worth solving. Infrequent problems like annual tax filing or vacation booking are closer to 'utilities' than 'habits.' Utility businesses must re-acquire customers every time they're needed, making operations extremely difficult. But when you occupy a moment that repeats daily or weekly, users open your app without even thinking.
2. Identify the Frequency of Recurring Pain
Nir Eyal's book Hooked describes the loop of trigger-action-variable reward-investment. But most products miss the most important first step: accurately identifying the recurring problem. They get so caught up in the solution that they overlook how frequently users feel the pain.
A prime success example is Slack. Slack displaced email for internal communication because "the need to collaborate instantly with teammates" occurs 50+ times a day. Email was slow and inefficient; Slack offered a solution matching the problem's frequency. By 2022, 57% of workers preferred messaging apps over email for internal communication — not just a tool change but a habit change.
3. Reduce Friction So It Feels Like Play, Not Work
The presentation tool Gamma started from the same thinking. Knowledge workers face the problem of professionally communicating complex ideas every week. But existing PowerPoint — rooted in 40-year-old overhead transparency printing — was too cumbersome. Users spent 90% of their time aligning boxes and choosing fonts, with only 10% on the actual story.
The goal was to make this process feel like 'building blocks' rather than 'filing taxes.' Products that fight user instincts eventually fail.
When users feel a specific discomfort or desire — boredom, confusion, deadline pressure — and the automatic, instant solution that comes to mind is your product, you've won.
4. The Magic of the First 30 Seconds and the Importance of 'Investment'
The final stage of the Hook model — 'investment' — is when users leave content, data, or settings in the product. The remarkable finding: the first 30 seconds after onboarding determine everything.
Most apps have a 30-second retention rate of 53-60%. Nearly half of users leave before experiencing value. But if within those brief seconds you get them to create something or change a setting — to 'invest' — users unknowingly build switching costs (reluctance to move to another service).
If you get users to invest within the first 30 seconds, their likelihood of staying increases exponentially. If you don't, they leave and never come back.
5. Conclusion: Build for Habits, Not Markets
Reducing friction is the surest way to form habits. When the iPhone launched in 2007, it reduced email checking from 12-15 clicks on a PC to just 3-4 clicks. Radically reducing the steps to reach a result is the core of innovation.
The best products work as if reading users' minds before they realize their own need. This is possible when you understand users' recurring problems more deeply than anyone else.
Markets change, but deeply ingrained habits don't disappear easily. It's time to move beyond the old way of building products for markets and toward designing user habits.
Closing
This post makes you think beyond simple feature implementation to how you embed yourself in users' daily lives. A product's success isn't about how impressive its features are, but about how quickly and comfortably it becomes the 'obvious choice' in the moment users feel pain. This insight remains as relevant as ever in 2026 — apply it to your business