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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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?
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?
@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.
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?
The framing of replacing a step instead of adding one is the whole story, most tools fail the test the moment you have to remember they exist. The honest version of this list is short for everyone, mine included, because most of what gets installed is solving a problem you didn't actually have that day. The stopped-using list further up is the more useful dataset and nobody wants to publish it, since it reads as a verdict on someone's work rather than a fact about your week.