which product you found here this year are you actually still opening?
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i try a lot of AI products and my honest hit rate is low. most of what i install is gone inside a week, and usually not because it was bad. it just never turned into a habit.
the few that stuck have almost nothing in common on paper. the only thread i can find is that they took away a step i was already doing, instead of adding a step i probably should be doing. the ones that asked me to build a new routine all died.
so: something you found on PH this year that you are genuinely still opening. what is it, and what did it replace?
interested in the boring ones too, not just the AI stuff. and if you are a maker, i would rather hear what you still use than what you built.
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Honestly I would love to see a list of products people stopped using too. that might reveal more about retetion than success stories.
@charles_eric3 the stopped-using list is the better dataset and nobody publishes it, because written plainly it reads as an insult to whoever built the thing. the version people will actually answer is what replaced it. something usually took the slot rather than the slot just closing.
@rabnoor_s The replacement angle is interesting because it gives you an actual comparison point. I’d want to know what made the new product win the slot in the first place.
The “what did it replace?” question is the interesting part. If the answer is "nothing , it just added another dashboard, " I already know how that story ends😂
@luke_bell the dashboard case is the one i keep falling for, because a new dashboard always demos well. it shows you something you did not have before, and that is the entire pitch. the cost turns up later as one more place you have to remember to go and look, and there is no way for a demo to show you that part.
Promomix
The boring tools usually win for me. if something saves me 30 seconds every day without asking for attention i keep it
@irsa_doham the without asking for attention part is the hard half to actually design for, since every incentive pushes the other way. what is the 30 second one for you? and did you build promomix to that rule, or did you only notice the rule afterwards?
Promomix
@rabnoor_s The without asking for attention part is what makes a tool stick for me too if I barely notice it but it keeps removing little bits of friction, that’s usually a good sign.
One of my favorite product hunt finds replaced a manual copy paste step. nothing revolutionary but that tiny shortcut became a daily habit.
@jackson_reed90 which one was it? the copy paste replacements are the ones i keep too, and they are almost never what anyone leads a launch with. curious whether yours is still installed or whether something else eventually absorbed the job.
@rabnoor_s same here. The small workflow improvements are usually the ones that stick with me. Once something saves a few clicks every day, it’s hard to go back.
The products that stick usually become invisible. you stop thinking about the product and just notice that the old annoying task disappeared.
@uttam_kumar31 santosh is describing the same thing a couple of comments up, the one that runs without asking anything of you. the part i cannot work out is how you would ever notice one of those degrading. if yours quietly stopped tomorrow, what breaks first?
The ones i still open are usually the products that quietly replaced one annoying step. if i have to remember to use it. its already in trouble.
@charlotte_pierce the if i have to remember test is the sharpest version of this in the thread. the ones that pass it seem to move into something you already had open rather than asking for a new window. did anything you kept do that, or did you end up building the habit anyway?
I have abandoned plenty of impressive tools because they added another workflow instead of removing one. convenience wins eventually.
@andrew_dale2 which impressive one did you drop? charles eric further up was asking for exactly this list and nobody ever posts it, probably because naming the thing you abandoned feels like an accusation rather than a data point.
I am much more likely to keep a tool that works in the background than one that expects me to build a new routine around it.
@santosh__kumar9 so what is running in your background right now? uttam is making close to the same point further down and neither of you has actually named one, which is funny given that was the whole question. i am guilty of it too, i wrote the post and did not name mine either.
I would measure retention by habits removed not features used. the strongest products seem to make an old behavior unnecessary.
@joseph_collins2 habits removed is measurable in a way features used is not, and charles eric is asking for the same thing further up, the list of what people stopped using. the problem with both is that you can only count it after the fact. at the point you are deciding what to build there is no habit there yet to remove.
The products I keep opening are usually the ones I stopped thinking of as “tools.” They quietly replaced a manual step and became part of the workflow.
That’s probably a better retention test than feature usage: what did the product make unnecessary?