Jie Yang

Heard something on a podcast recently that reframed how I think about retention features.

On average it takes ~60-70 days for a new behavior to feel automatic. But motivation, the thing that gets people to start, decays way faster than that. So there's a gap: motivation dies around week 2-3, the habit isn't formed until week 9-10, and that gap is where most users quit.

Streaks are supposed to bridge that gap. But most of them fail because the daily ask is too big. If your streak requires real effort every day, you're burning motivation the user doesn't have anymore.

I've hit day 40 on an app purely out of guilt, then quit and never opened it again. The streak didn't build a habit. It just delayed the uninstall.

Because building products has become much more accessible thanks to AI, the bar has had to rise a bit, or at least the expectations have become stricter.

I built my own tool  SafeLimit, but personally, I wouldn t launch it on Product Hunt yet because it s still very basic and doesn t even have a website.