The “aha! moment”, a term I first heard mentioned in relation to startup product design by Qualaroo CEO, and the original growth hacker, Sean Ellis, defines the moment when a customer truly experiences the value of a product during actual usage. The time and effort needed to achieve this moment differs greatly from product to product. Ellis relates the challenge of getting users to “aha!” with LogMeIn, a product where users had to install software on their work computer, find themselves in a situation where they needed to remotely access that computer, and finally remotely login from a different computer and take care of whatever task justified all of that effort. Ouch.
At the moment of “aha!” we experience a strong emotion. It might be the relief of pain caused by something formerly tedious or difficult. It might be the thrill of being recognized as a tastemaker or authority on a particular topic. It might be feeling prepared for your job or not being embarrassed by forgetting something important to a friend, colleague or employer. The emotion experienced in that moment of product value realization is as varied as there are products to use, but at least one always exists.
A Perfectly Orchestrated “Aha!”
Gentry Underwood, Mailbox CEO and former-IDEO, tells the story behind the brilliantly executed promo video with which Mailbox launched. Their optimal goal would be to grow a waiting list before the product was even ready for launch. They decided that a short and heavily shared promotional video was the appropriate vehicle for their message. The Mailbox team looked at what commonalities there were amongst viral videos for clues, and what they found was that they all evoked a strong emotion. It didn’t matter what emotion (shock, happiness…), but just that you felt one upon watching the video. They decided the ideal emotion for a product video was desire. Giving people a juicy, tantalizing taste of what it felt like to use the app’s most remarkable features, in all their delightfully post-PC, swipe-riffic glory, would result in the desired effect: “I want that.”
In terms of inducing an “aha!” moment, what the Mailbox team did was extraordinary. They shrank the usually long and burdensome path from product discovery to value realization down to 1 minute and 11 seconds without even requiring the customer to actually use the product. Few marketing efforts yield such stunning rewards (more than 800,000 people queued up waiting to use the product and experience inbox zero), but the lesson to be learned is to focus on the emotion you need to inspire to achieve your goals and work backwards from there.
How to Find Emotion
If you’re still developing your product, your mission is to hone in on an emotion strong enough to compel someone to repeatedly use what you make. You should deploy a number of differing experiments to find the most compelling emotion and product fit. There’s never a better time to try risky, quirky ideas to gauge an emotional reaction than before you have paying customers and a brand and quality commitment to uphold. What unexpected feature might result in triple the engagement? What effect does involving a secondary audience have on your key metrics?
If you already have a product, you can make use of the product/market fit survey popularized by Survey.io, which will surface people who would be “very disappointed” if they could no longer use your product. These customers have reached “aha!” and have experienced a positive emotion strong enough to repeatedly engage with your product. Interview them and listen to how they describe these feelings in their own words and how they arrived at that moment. If your product includes “must have” features, then your job is to figure out how to get more people to experience that emotion. If most of your customers aren’t experiencing a strong, positive emotion yet, you’ll need to keep iterating on your core product if you intend to grow.
“Aha!” + emotion-centric resources:
http://www.nirandfar.com/
http://www.bjfogg.com/
http://www.startup-marketing.com/