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Intro​

What are habits? Do things just like doing no brainers. Businesses cultivating customer habits gain a significant competitive advantage. This book proposes The Hook Model describing how to form a user habit with four steps:

1. Trigger
2. Action
3. Variable reward
4. Investment

The Habit Zone​

1. Benefits of Habits

   1. Increasing LTV
   2. Providing Pricing Flexibility. Warren Buffett: People are less sensitive to the price of products they formed routines around.
   3. Supercharging growth. ==More is more principle:== Linear decreasing of the Viral Cycle Time can speed up the user acquisition exponentially.
   4. Sharpening the competitive edge. 9x Effect: new product has to be 9x better than its existing competitor (which users have been familiar with) to win the market.

2. Successful companies build the mind monopoly.

3. How to identify the product's habit-forming potential?

   • Not all software usage could form a habit. As presented above, only a behavior happens with ==enough 1) frequency and 2) perceived utility==, a.k.a entering a habit zone, can help to make it a default behavior.

4. Habit-forming technologies often start as vitamins, but once the habit is formed, they become painkillers.

The Hook Model​

Trigger​

What cues people to take action? Triggers.

1. External triggers to attract users first
   1. Paid triggers
   2. Earned triggers
   3. Relationship triggers
   4. Owned triggers
2. Internal triggers
   1. Related to thoughts, emotions (particularly negative ones), or preexisting routines
   2. people suffering from symptoms of depression used the Internet more.
3. The goal of a habit-forming product is to kill or relieve the user's pain.

Action​

How to initiate any behavior?

B = MAT (behavior = motivation + ability + trigger)

1. Motivation
   1. Three ==Core Motivators==. all humans are motivated
      1. to seek pleasure and avoid pain;
      2. to seek hope and avoid fear;
      3. and finally, to seek social acceptance and avoid rejection.
   2. examples
      1. Barack Obama's Hope Poster
      2. Sex Sells
      3. Sports Ads
      4. Ads trigger negative emotions such as fear
2. Ability
   1. Easier task leads to the higher adoption rate
      • 
   2. Six elements of simplicity
      1. Time
      2. Money
      3. Physical effort
      4. Brain cycles
      5. Social deviance
      6. Non-routine
   3. examples
      1. Login with Facebook
      2. Share with twitter
      3. Search with Google
      4. Snap a picture with iPhone lock screen
      5. Pinterest infinite scroll
      6. Twitter uses the homepage to encourage certain behaviors
3. Daniel Kahneman: Four mental biases
   1. The Scarcity Effect: The appearance of scarcity affected their perception of value
      • e.g. Amazon "Only 6 left in stock."
   2. The Framing Effect: The mind takes shortcuts informed by our surroundings to make quick and sometimes erroneous judgments.
      • e.g. Tasting the same wine, the higher the price, the more pleasure people will feel.
   3. The Anchoring Effect: People tend to anchor to one piece of information when making a decision.
      • e.g. 30% off
   4. The Endowed Progress Effect: people are more motivated when they believe they are nearing a goal.
      • e.g. Linkedin Progress Bar near to finish to improve your profile strength.

Variable Reward​

1. Principles in our brains
   1. When do people feel happy about rewards?
      • People feel happy not when they receive the reward itself but when in anticipation of it.
   2. Same rewards do not work over time. Fondness = familiarity + novelty.
2. Three variable reward types
   1. The tribe: We seek rewards that make us feel accepted, attractive, important, and included.
   2. The hunt: We need to acquire physical objects, such as food and other supplies that aid our survival.
   3. The self: We desire to gain a sense of competency.
3. Finding the proper variable rewards is not easy. Gamification is effective only when they really scratch the user's itch.
4. Maintain a sense of autonomy. Let the user choose what to do.
5. ==Finite variability== leads less engagement because they eventually become predictable. e.g. Zynga's FarmVille. People usually don't watch the Breaking Bad twice. Thus UGC is super valuable.

Investment​

1. The escalation of commitment: The more users invest time and effort into a product or service, the more they value it. Our labor leads to love.
   • e.g. The origami bidding game: those who made their own origami animals valued their creation five times higher than the second group's valuation and nearly as high as the expert-made origami values
   • e.g. IKEA effect is a kind of cognitive dissonance. The more effort we put into something, the more likely we are to value it; we are more likely to be consistent with our past behaviors; and finally, we change our preferences to avoid cognitive dissonance.
   • E.g. social game mafia war
2. People tend to use the product again if it stores values, which are
   • Content
   • Data
   • Followers
   • Reputation
   • Skill
3. How to compound user retention? Loading the Next Trigger with virtuous loops.

Should I use the hook model?​

How to apply the hook model?​

1. Pros and cons analysis based on the model
2. Habit Testing
   1. Identify the user workflow
   2. Identify the habitual users' workflow
   3. Experiment with promoting the habitual users' workflow to more users.
3. Observe yourself
4. Find ==nascent behaviors== that can go popular in the future

The Vast Differences Between Western and Chinese Marketing Markets​

How Western Marketers Can Learn from Their Chinese Peers​

1. Build good relationships with major companies like BAT
2. Prioritize mobile
3. Embrace all-in KOL-driven viral marketing on social networks
4. Focus on content marketing rather than simple promotions and collaborations
5. Manage multiple channels in the West while navigating large companies' multi-platforms in China
6. Balance "thoughtful planning" with "plans not keeping up with changes"

New products fail at the stunning rate of between 40% and 90%. Why? The 9x Effect: You have to be 9x better than the existing alternatives to win their market.

• companies often overweight the new product's benefits by a factor of 3.
  • dissatisfied with the status quo and convinced the innovation works.
  • IKEA effect: labor alone can be sufficient to induce greater liking for the fruits of one’s labor.
  • view the innovation as the benchmark.
• consumers often overweight the old product's benefits by a factor of 3.
  • satisfied with the status quo and have change aversion.
  • don't know the product and are skeptical about the new product's performance.

Warning Signs of Economic Recession​

• Ballooning corporate debt .
• Government yields that are dramatically lower than the previous long-run average.
• Negative returns on the S&P 500.
• Lower GDP growth in China relative to what it was before 2010.

How did Resilient Company Prepare?​

Back in 2008, companies turning out to have higher total shareholder return(TSR) did these things:

• By the time of reaching the lowest point of the recession, they had increased EBITDA(Earnings Before Interest, Taxes, Depreciation, and Amortization) by 10%.
  • By reducing operating costs earlier in the recession, and more deeply.
• Introduce more flexibility into the investment-planing
  • Reduce > $1 per$1 of total capital on their balance sheet
• Prepare far more cash than peers for acquiring assets once on the upswing of the economy.
• Maintain high-value customers’ loyalty.
  • Forgo revenues from price changes, while peers are reducing the price.

==However, slashing costs may hurt the brand and the company moral==.

Finally, getting ahead of peers create a huge advantage.

As a highly profitable company, Facebook's operating profit margin reaches 42%.

Operating profit margin = Operating income / Net sales
Operating income = Total revenue - (Operating expenses + Depreciation and amortization)

As it transitions to a privacy-centric super app, it will face three challenges.

1. Technology. How to bridge the gap between apps like WhatsApp and Instagram, turning them into a unified platform?
2. Economics.
   • In China, there is no dominant app store, allowing WeChat to grow as the preferred platform. However, in the U.S., there are already Apple and Google.
   • ==WeChat is not a cash cow.== Targeting privacy-conscious users for segmented advertising is challenging.
3. Privacy and competition.
   • No country wants a single company to monopolize the internet.
   • Social networks + private messaging = Windows OS + IE

What is architecture?​

Architecture is the shape of the software system. Thinking it as a big picture of physical buildings.

• paradigms are bricks.
• design principles are rooms.
• components are buildings.

Together they serve a specific purpose like a hospital is for curing patients and a school is for educating students.

Why do we need architecture?​

Behavior vs. Structure​

Every software system provides two different values to the stakeholders: behavior and structure. Software developers are responsible for ensuring that both those values remain high.

==Software architects are, by virtue of their job description, more focused on the structure of the system than on its features and functions.==

Ultimate Goal - ==saving human resources costs per feature==​

Architecture serves the full lifecycle of the software system to make it easy to understand, develop, test, deploy, and operate. The goal is to minimize the human resources costs per business use-case.

The O’Reilly book Software Architecture Patterns by Mark Richards is a simple but effective introduction to these five fundamental architectures.

1. Layered Architecture​

The layered architecture is the most common in adoption, well-known among developers, and hence the de facto standard for applications. If you do not know what architecture to use, use it.

Examples

• TCP / IP Model: Application layer > transport layer > internet layer > network access layer
• Facebook TAO: web layer > cache layer (follower + leader) > database layer

Pros and Cons

• Pros
  • ease of use
  • separation of responsibility
  • testability
• Cons
  • monolithic
    • hard to adjust, extend or update. You have to make changes to all the layers.

2. Event-Driven Architecture​

A state change will emit an event to the system. All the components communicate with each other through events.

A simple project can combine the mediator, event queue, and channel. Then we get a simplified architecture:

Examples

• QT: Signals and Slots
• Payment Infrastructure: Bank gateways usually have very high latencies, so they adopt async technologies in their architecture design.

3. Micro-kernel Architecture (aka Plug-in Architecture)​

The software's responsibilities are divided into one "core" and multiple "plugins". The core contains the bare minimum functionality. Plugins are independent of each other and implement shared interfaces to achieve different goals.

Examples

• Visual Studio Code, Eclipse
• MINIX operating system

4. Microservices Architecture​

A massive system is decoupled to multiple micro-services, each of which is a separately deployed unit, and they communicate with each other via RPCs.

Examples

• Uber: See designing Uber
• Smartly

5. Space-based Architecture​

This pattern gets its name from "tuple space", which means “distributed shared memory". There is no database or synchronous database access, and thus no database bottleneck. All the processing units share the replicated application data in memory. These processing units can be started up and shut down elastically.

Examples: See Wikipedia

• Mostly adopted among Java users: e.g., JavaSpaces

Facebook is a very profitable company. Its operating margins = 42%

operating margin = operating income / net sales
operating income = gross income − (operating expenses + depreciation and amortization)

When it is transiting into a privacy-centric super app, there are three challenges.

1. Technical. How to bridge apps like WhatsApp and Instagram when turning them into a uniform platform?
2. Economic.
   • China has no dominant app stores so that WeChat grows to the platform of choice. However, in the US, there are Apple and Google.
   • ==WeChat is no cash cow.== It's hard to micro-target ads against privacy-preserved users.
3. Privacy and competition.
   • No country wants one firm to monopolize the Internet.
   • Social network + private messaging = Windows OS + IE

1. Millions of users love the brands and leaders of those unicorns. Those tech stars have everything - except a path to high profits.

2. In the past 25 years, Three things changed.

   1. Growing fast became more accessible thanks to cloud computing, smartphones, and social media.
   2. Low interest rates left investors chasing returns.
   3. Superstar firms (e.g. Google, Facebook, Alibaba, and Tencent), proved that wealth is made by
      • huge markets, high profits, and natural monopolies
      • limited physical assets and light regulation

3. Because the unicorns’ markets are contested, margins have not consistently improved, despite fast-rising sales.

4. The blitzscale philosophy of buying customers at any price is peaking. After the unicorns, a new and more convincing species of startup will have to be engineered.

Alas! Andrew Grove says - Success breeds complacency. Complacency breeds failure. Only the paranoid (who embrace change) survive.

In Toutiao Recommendation System: P1 Overview, we know that content analysis and data mining of user tags are the cornerstones of the recommendation system.

What is the content analysis?​

content analysis = derive intermediate data from raw articles and user behaviors.

Take articles for example. To model user interests, we need to tag contents and articles. To associate a user with the interests of the “Internet” tag, we need to know whether a user reads an article with the “Internet” tag.

Why are we analyzing those raw data?​

We do it for the reason of …

1. Tagging users (user profile)
   • Tagging users who liked articles with “Internet” tag. Tagging users who liked articles with “xiaomi” tag.
2. Recommending contents to users by tags
   • Pushing “meizu” contents to users with “meizu” tag. Pushing “dota” contents to users with “dota” tag.
3. Preparing contents by topics
   • Put “Bundesliga” articles to “Bundesliga topic”. Put “diet” articles to “diet topic”.

Case Study: Analysis Result of an Article​

Here is an example of “article features” page. There are article features like categorizations, keywords, topics, entities.

What are the article features?

1. Semantic Tags: Human predefine those tags with explicit meanings.

2. Implicit Semantics, including topics and keywords. Topic features are describing the statistics of words. Certain rules generate keywords.

3. Similarity. Duplicate recommendation once to be the most severe feedbacks we get from our customers.

4. Time and location.

5. Quality. Abusing, porn, ads, or “chicken soup for the soul”?

Article features are important​

• It is not true that a recommendation system cannot work at all without article features. Amazon, Walmart, Netflix can recommend by collaborative filtering.
• However, in news product, users consume contents of the same day. Bootstrapping without article features is hard. Collaborative filtering cannot help with bootstrapping.
  • The finer of the granularity of the article feature, the better the ability to bootstrap.

More on Semantic Tags​

We divide features of semantic tags into three levels:

1. Categorizations: used in the user profile, filtering contents in topics, recommend recall, recommend features
2. Concepts: used in filtering contents in topics, searching tags, recommend recall(like)
3. Entities: used in filtering contents in topics, searching tags, recommend recall(like)

Why dividing into different levels? We do this so that they can capture articles in different granularities.

1. Categorizations: full in coverage, low in accuracy.
2. Concepts: medium in coverage, medium in accuracy.
3. Entities: low in coverage, high in accuracy. It only covers hot people, organizations, products in each area.

Categorizations and concepts are sharing the same technical infrastructure.

Why do we need semantic tags?

• Implicit semantics
  • have been functioning well.
  • cost much less than semantic tags.
• But, topics and interests need a clear-defined tagging system.
• Semantic tags also evaluate the capability in NPL technology of a company.

Document classification​

Classification hierarchy

1. Root
2. Science, sports, finance, entertainment
3. Football, tennis, table tennis, track and field, swimming
4. International, domestic
5. Team A, team B

Classifiers:

• SVM
• SVM + CNN
• SVM + CNN + RNN

Calculating relevance​

1. Lexical analysis for articles
2. Filtering keywords
3. Disambiguation
4. Calculating relevance

Motivation and incentives are at the core of performance management. Without motivation, employees lack the drive to perform well, making all feedback and training efforts futile.

The Respect from Leaders is Correlated with Employee Motivation​

Offensive behavior can directly undermine employee motivation and performance, so managers need to curb such behavior by:

1. Leading by example.
2. Upholding employees' dignity. Public praise, private criticism.
3. Hiring respectful employees and not tolerating bad behavior. Address feedback issues promptly.

Incentives Primarily Come from Two Aspects: Extrinsic and Intrinsic​

1. Extrinsic rewards—money (promotions, raises, bonuses)

   1. These rewards do not necessarily enhance employee performance.
   2. Their effects are usually short-lived.
   3. It is often difficult to distinguish individual contributions within a team, and what constitutes an appropriate reward varies for everyone. In fact, most employees' primary concern is fairness; when providing monetary rewards, it is crucial to ensure fairness and consistency.

2. Intrinsic rewards—satisfaction (a sense of achievement, control, appreciation, intellectual growth, skill enhancement, autonomy, and overcoming challenges)

   1. It is essential to note that these rewards should be tailored to the individual.

How to Provide Intrinsic Rewards?​

1. Recognize their work. "The key to recognition is making people feel unique." If everyone receives the same recognition, no one will feel special.

   1. Different individuals value recognition sources differently. From colleagues? Publicly praise them in front of peers. From clients? Share a thank-you note from a client. From the profession? Award professional accolades. From the boss? Describe their importance to the team vividly during one-on-ones.
   2. Tailor recognition to personality. Introverted or extroverted? Public or private? If unsure, ask them directly.
   3. Recognition frequency should be high, at least once every two weeks.
   4. Handwritten notes are low-cost but highly effective rewards.

2. Provide decision-making authority.

   1. People enjoy having a sense of ownership and control.

3. Offer challenges.

   1. The greater the challenge, the higher the sense of achievement upon completion.
   2. Provide opportunities to undertake tasks they haven't done before, helping them develop new skills. Note that they should have relevant talents and skills, rather than starting from scratch.