🔎 Product Review: James Clear’s Atoms

Why launch momentum doesn't always equal sustainable growth

Dear Builders, I hope you are well! Before we jump in, my team (at Duolingo!) is hiring. Do you know any incredible product builders looking for their next thing? Have them apply here and LMK by responding to this email 🫡

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A few weeks back, we talked about the easiest way to build product sense: by trying other people’s products. I invest my time here each week because it’s fun and it helps me do my job better (tho ☠️ my screen time). 

Why does this habit work? By diving into the user experience of successful apps, you learn to recognize patterns and best practices that you can reuse in your own context. It’s an easy inspiration machine.

That said, without a bit of structure, you’re just doom-scrolling. How do you structure your doom-scrolling juuuuust enough to make it productive for you?

We’re trying something different this week with a product review. Our first victim is James Clear’s new app called Atoms. Download the app and we’ll sniff out their vision, intuit what they’re measuring, discuss what is working and what they could do better, and riff on how they might 10x their impact.

🧩 What is Atoms?

Back in February, James Clear of Atomic Habits fame dropped a new app called Atoms. All the “tech influencers” I follow on Twitter made a big hoo-hah about it on launch day because it shot to the top of the app store charts. The launch exemplifies a trend we’re seeing more of, creators building sticky networks that create a tight feedback loop for them to launch and grow other products (some digital and some physical like Emily Mariko’s market totes).

I liked this take from Greg Isenberg because I think he’s right in that we’ll see a lot more of this (though time will tell if this specific app will create a new multi-billion dollar category 👀):

via Greg Isenberg on LinkedIn

In the case of James Clear, who has sold over 15M copies of his book and distributes his newsletter to millions of people, I’m surprised he didn’t do this sooner. He worked with the folks at Tiny and Metalab to bring this to life and the MVP is delightful. 

That said, I’m sure his team learned an important lesson on launch day: launch momentum does not equal sustainable growth. Your app can have a huge volume of initial downloads but fizzle out quickly if it’s not built with growth in mind. I’d guess they’ve reached “trough of sorrow” status as most new products do.

🗺️ What are they trying to do? 

Open the app, go through onboarding, and let’s play out what we think they’re trying to accomplish. James Clear’s niche is people looking to create meaningful changes in their lives. People find him because they hope to change something and use his book to teach themselves how to create a new habit or reset bad old ones.

The app supports the book by being a tactile tool that helps you create a small habit (using their formula: habit, location, time) and then it reminds you to do it daily. The core loop centers on habit creation and the experience is simple but effective! 

I’d guess Clear and his team are hoping enough people will benefit not just from content, but from a habit tool that will further amplify his teachings while growing the Atoms community. Noble goals!

🧪 How do they measure success? 

If I were working on this app at this stage, I’d spend most of my days thinking about retention. Retention is a clear product market fit marker and an obvious signal that the product experience creates meaningful value to the people using it.

If I had to guess just by looking at the product, retention is low because the product execution is weak in getting you to come back consistently. 

💪🏻 What is working?

That said, poke around! Tap on the nav and see how they’ve grouped the user experience (by home, progress, mindset). Go through the core loop (ie. creating a habit and logging it for the day), how does that feel? What do we think is working?

Habit creation is a tight loop

The app onboards you into a habit, doubling as a hook to get you to come back. The flow grounds their formula (define the habit, get specific, ground it in an identity), which you’ve heard before if you’ve read the book. The flow is animated and adds delight to what could easily be a monotonous onboarding experience.

Accountability partners work

They also nudge you to share your habits with an accountability partner. Social pressure works and doubles as an easy word-of-mouth hook. If I were them, I’d lean in here and move this into the core loop ASAP! Create a habit, share it with a friend, etc.

📈 How can they make it better?

The MVP is a good start, but it’s not designed with growth in mind. They’re doing very little to drive retention beyond habit creation, and I doubt that will be enough to get people to come back consistently. If they don’t come back, they don’t share with their friends, they don’t monetize, and then the entire thing fizzles before they even get started! How might they build with retention in mind?

Invest in the streak

They call their streak “repetitions,” but it’s hard to find and not celebrated enough to make me want to stick to it. If I were them, I’d center the experience around the act of completing your daily repetition, make it easy to find, feel delightful af, and better celebrate key milestones like a weekly and monthly streak. People love streaks and this should be a foundational, well-executed pillar.

Monetize later 

I would also ditch monetization at this stage. If the core experience isn’t quite right, charging for it is a losing game. Building out and maintaining a full monetization flow that very few people will use at this stage isn’t the right spend of their team’s time.

💡How might you 10x the impact? 

Here’s a fun frame. If you were leading this team, how would you push the team to not just think in small tweaks but with a 10x mindset? What are some big bets you could make that would truly 10x growth? Some of my ideas:

Lean into community 

One unique aspect of Clear’s empire is his community. How might he leverage it to create more engagement inside the app? I would study some humming online communities (my current fave is Good Inside) to mimic what they’re doing well. Creating roles around behaviors you want to influence (like celebrating when people hit a big milestone) are easy ways to make sure people are both motivated and rewarded for hitting their goals by real people.

Example post in the Good Inside community where members interact around their wins.

Create more structure around habit-type

Finding a more structured way to group people who are forming similar habits could be an easy way to create some camaraderie. Peloton does this with hashtags where you can find other people like you and come together. Could bringing people together around shared goals help bring them back? If I was trying to quit smoking, connecting with people who are like me could be extremely motivating.

Peloton’s hashtags help you build community with other members around shared interests.

Test leaderboards

What if instead of making people outright compete against each other, you instead celebrate people who are the most committed to their habit? Enter: commitment boards. Rising in a leaderboard that celebrates your hard work and dedication is an empowering way to reward and motivate.

📣 Share your thoughts  

Take a look at the app and answer the above questions. What do you think? If you were the Chief Builder™️ on this project, how would you 10x growth? And finally, this was fun, which app should we review together next?