The habit stacking startup lesson for every entrepreneur
For me, strategy at its best has always taken the form of a story.
A great strategy is simply a story you tell yourself over and over again about the business you’re trying to build and how you’re going to build it. Your strategy story should be easy to repeat, easy to share and easy to understand. That matters because most successful businesses aren’t built on a blinding flash of inspiration or one game-changing idea. They’re built through hundreds of decisions — some large, most small.
Get enough of them right and those decisions accumulate into success.
The myth of the ‘big idea’ is one of the things we most often misunderstand about business. I’ve long argued there was no single big idea behind Four Pillars Gin. There was strategic clarity, hundreds of decisions that we got more right than wrong, an obsession with design, hospitality and attention to detail, and, above all, outrageously delicious gin.
The power of small decisions
Last week, on my new podcast StoryWork, my conversation with Up founder Dom Pym reinforced a belief I’ve held for a long time: small decisions beat big ideas.
Up wasn’t built on a single breakthrough moment. It was the result of decades of compounding ideas, relationships and capabilities that eventually came together to create something that barely felt like a bank at all. In the process, Up changed its customers’ relationship with money.
The Up case study proved a second thesis of mine too:
Not only is all business just decision-making at scale, but we’re also all in the same business, really – the business of behaviour change. Whether we’re trying to grow a company, build a career or launch a new product, our success depends on someone choosing us.
Our growth depends on our ability to influence the behaviour of others.
When it comes to driving behaviour change, our business culture romanticises the idea of disruption. We celebrate founders who change behaviour overnight and forever. And who doesn’t want to be the Uber or Airbnb of their category, upending decades of category norms in the blink of an app? It’s an appealing idea, but not realistic or relevant for most of us.
Zara’s habit stacking idea
Zara Seidler, the co-founder of The Daily Aus, was a quest on my podcast’s second episode. I first met Zara a couple of years ago at an event celebrating ten years of Go-To Skincare and was immediately struck by her clarity of thought around making news accessible, relevant and engaging for the social media generation. Since then, The Daily Aus has gone from strength to strength, and Zara was the first name I wrote down when I began planning my podcast.
Listening to her talk, and despite the extraordinary impact of The Daily Aus, I found myself thinking that she isn’t really in the business of disruption at all. One of the ideas Zara kept returning to was “habit stacking”. The theory is simple: Instead of asking people to build an entirely new habit, you attach yourself to one they already have.
In the case of The Daily Aus, young Australians weren’t sitting around wishing they consumed more current affairs content on traditional news websites. But they were already opening Instagram and scrolling. So The Daily Aus didn’t try to pull people away from social media. Instead, it brought the news to where people already were. It might look like a simple channel decision, but it was actually a profoundly strategic one.
The more we spoke, the more I realised almost every important decision Zara and her co-founder Sam Koslowski made was governed by the same logic of habits:
They publish at the same time every day because habits are built through consistency. In the early days, Zara posted screenshots from her Notes app because she was creating content on the bus to work. It looked terrible, she laughed, but consistency mattered more than polish. People came back because the facts mattered more than the formatting. And the habit was everything.
Be worthy of their time
When Facebook threatened to remove all news from its platform, they didn’t panic about losing distribution (at least, not for long). They started building an email newsletter that same day. Today, that newsletter reaches hundreds of thousands of readers and has become one of the business’s strongest products.
Zara’s philosophy remained exactly the same:
Don’t treat email as a marketing channel that demands something of people. Design it to be content they genuinely value and make opening an email from The Daily Aus part of someone’s routine. A positive new habit.
Later in the interview, Zara described how The Daily Aus had begun working with online influencers. Rather than trying to pull audiences away from creators they already trusted, they offered those creators editorial support and fact-checking, allowing them to keep doing what they did best while strengthening the quality of the information they shared.
Once again, they weren’t trying to replace existing habits. They were building on top of them.
Zara wasn’t looking for the one brilliant insight that would suddenly transform how young Australians engaged with current affairs. She was making hundreds of small decisions that respected the habits those people already had. None of those decisions was revolutionary on its own. Together, they have helped change a generation’s relationship with the news.
Walk alongside, not in the way
We tend to imagine innovation as disruption. The Daily Aus points to a different model.
Instead of disrupting people’s behaviour, they attached themselves to behaviour that already existed. And there is the lesson for all of us in that same universal business of behaviour change:
Start with the habits people already have, then make hundreds of good decisions that quietly make your business and your product a part of them.
- The StoryWork podcast with Matt Jones, exploring the role of story in building brands, businesses, movements, and ideas, is available on Spotify, Apple, Youtube and Substack.
Matt is a keynote speaker and brand growth adviser at Think Story Experience.
