The Law of three for creating faithful users

For a content site, be it a tech news site like this one or a social networking site like Twitter. Attracting--and keeping--users is the hardest thing they do. Scaling? Hiring? Securing funding? That's all cake compared to getting millions of people to use their product, which is the new baseline for success.

In all my internet travels, I've seen a lot of content sites come and go, I've even tried my hand at one of my own, and one thing all content sites have in common is how they turn a random visitor into a loyal user--and also how they lose that same user later down the road. I call this pattern the law of three:


  1. A user has to visit a site three times to become a loyal user.

  2. A user needs to find three interesting things each visit.

  3. A loyal user is lost if they don't find three interesting things three times in a row


Simple, right? Yet most entrepreneurs, when they talk about acquiring new users, they talk sign up flows, a/b testing, and viral coefficients. Those are all important, but they all should come after they've made sure the site's content is interesting to the users they are trying to attract. Otherwise, no matter how many users they get coming through the door, those users just turn around and go right back out.

My favorite anecdote about greasing viral coefficients before getting the interesting content part in place (aka, putting the cart before the horse) was a startup that so effectively greased their viral coefficient, using techniques learned from Greg Tseng, that they literally increased their user sign ups from hundreds a day to tens of thousands a day and finally had to rollback to their original--less successful--site design because they were losing most of those new users due to lack of compelling content.

What sites people visit to get their content fix is constantly changing (Fun question, how many sites do you visit today that you also visited five years ago?), and each new site that rises up abides by the law of three. Currently, my wife is addicted to Pinterest because every time she visits she's flooded with tons of new and interesting pictures. For me, the king of the law of three is Ars Technica, I've been a faithful reader for over a decade (the only site I visit today that I also visited five years ago).

In contrast, there was a time I couldn't go even a few hours without checking Digg. Then one day I didn't find anything interesting. After a few more visits, and nothing interesting catching my eye, I stopped regularly visiting Digg altogether, and I haven't really been back since. Users only have a certain number of content sites they visit regularly and so once you've lost a loyal user, it's hard to get them back.

Having trouble getting users to your own content site? Step one is figuring out what type of content is interesting to the people you are trying to attract. After all, your content is your core mechanic, and if it isn't up to snuff you'll never attract the audience you so richly deserve.