How does behavior change happen - Inverted Passion
A founder's post-mortem of a VC-backed habit app reveals why behavior change is so hard: apps have marginal influence compared to friends and culture, and most approaches fail by suggesting big changes instead of tiny, compounding wins with clear paths to goals.
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For any change to happen in humans, two forces help:
- Gas (motivation)
- The more motivated I’m for something, the more likely I’ll do something
- Brake (friction)
- The smaller the delta b/w my current life and what new is expected from me (i.e. the less the friction), the more likely I’ll do something
For a behavior to get built into a habit, we also need:
- Right context and repetitions
- Context can be a trigger or a location or visuals of it
- Repetitions are how behaviors transform into habits
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TLDR
• Most habit apps work like gyms—charge upfront when motivation is high, accept high churn. The author returned VC funding rather than pursue this model.
• Telling someone to "give up sugar" is equivalent to reading a tweet—it requires changing 4+ interconnected behaviors (no cake with friends, no sugar in tea, no post-dinner ice cream walks, no celebration sweets).
• Apps can only make it easy for people to do what they're already doing, not create new behaviors from scratch—the friction between current and desired habits is too large.
• Tiny changes only work if you show the compounding path and proof of how others have grown them into big changes.
• Triggers to NOT do something (like skip coffee) require fundamentally different design than triggers TO do something (like start push-ups).
In Detail
The author built Nintee, a VC-backed habit coaching app, then shut it down after realizing apps have marginal influence on human behavior compared to friends, family, and culture. The core insight: behavior change requires both Gas (motivation) and Brake (friction reduction), plus the right context and repetitions to transform behaviors into habits. But motivation fluctuates daily, so you can't rely on it.
The framework breaks down why most behavior change approaches fail. Using sugar as an example: telling someone to "give up sugar" seems simple but actually requires changing 4+ interconnected behaviors—resisting cake with friends, eliminating sugar from tea, skipping post-dinner ice cream walks, avoiding sweets at celebrations. The gap between current and desired habits is so large that suggesting big changes is equivalent to reading a motivational tweet—useless. Instead, the author argues for suggesting extremely tiny changes with clear education on how they compound over time, plus proof of how others have grown them into significant habits.
The key realization that killed the business: apps can only make it easy for people to do what they're already doing, not create new behaviors from scratch. For the minority of cases where you suggest something new, it must be extremely tiny AND show the big picture of how it grows. The author also discovered that triggers to help someone NOT do something require fundamentally different design than triggers TO do something. The three Jobs-to-be-Done are: consistent (already doing), want consistency (biggest pain point and best target), and untried (vitamin/nice-to-have).