Users compare your product to their current habit — not to nothing.
One thing I’m starting to realize about product-building:
Users almost never compare your product to “nothing.”
They compare it to:
- their current habit
- their muscle memory
- the path requiring the least attention
A workflow can be technically “better” and still lose if the interruption cost feels higher than what users already do instinctively.
That changes how I think about friction.
Sometimes the issue isn’t:
- quality
- features
- pricing
- design
Sometimes the real competitor is simply:
“the thing they already know how to do without thinking.”
I think this is why early-stage feedback from a handful of real users matters so much more than vanity metrics.
One brutally honest sentence can reveal more than analytics dashboards ever will.
Trending on Indie Hackers
This applies to content marketing and AI visibility too - and most people haven't caught up yet.
Your blog post isn't competing against your competitor's blog post. It's competing against ChatGPT's built-in answer.
If GPT has a confident, structured response to a user's query, your article never gets the click. The comparison isn't 'your site vs. their site.' It's 'your site vs. an instant answer.'
The implication: traditional SEO still matters, but 'get to page 1' is no longer the finish line. The new game is being cited in the AI's answer. That requires different content structure - clear definitions, direct answers early, authoritative sourcing, and presence in communities where AI models crawl.
The habit you're competing against is 'ask AI first.' That habit is already formed for a huge chunk of users. The question is whether your content is surfaced in those answers or invisible to them.
This is especially true for consumer apps. The competitor is usually not another app, it is a note, a screenshot, memory, or “I’ll do it later.” The fastest test is asking users what they did in the 30 seconds before they felt the pain.
Sharp framing, and the AI-search angle (3vo, hilgard) deepens it well.
One add: the "current habit" model assumes there IS a habit. There's a real subset of products where the customer's current habit is not doing the thing at all — and then the comparison isn't to a habit, it's to the perceived cost of inaction (insurance framing).
Example from a category I work in (operational ops for short-term rental hosts): there's no incumbent photo-checklist tool most hosts use today. The comparison isn't "your tool vs Tool X" — it's "your tool vs the gut-punch of finding out 3 months later that a guest left a 4-star review because of something I never inspected, that I have no photo evidence of."
Different page structure than feature-vs-feature. It leads with the cost-of-the-thing-that-already-happened-to-them — a war story that triggers the "oh no, that's me too" reflex.
Diagnostic: when you ask early-stage prospects "what do you use today?", if 30%+ say "nothing, I just deal with it when it goes wrong" — you're in insurance-frame territory, not switching-cost territory. Different copy, different ICP, different motion.
That is a really strong distinction honestly.
The “insurance framing” point is something I think a lot of founders miss because they assume every product is replacing an existing workflow when sometimes the user is just tolerating risk until something painful finally happens.
Your example with short-term rentals explains it perfectly because the trigger is emotional damage + operational uncertainty, not efficiency optimization.
I also agree the messaging changes completely in those cases. Instead of “save time,” the copy becomes more like “avoid the mistake that already burned someone else.”
That diagnostic question is excellent too:
“What do you use today?”
→ “Nothing, I deal with it later.”
That probably tells you almost immediately what type of positioning you need.
This hits especially hard for mobile apps. The real competitor is often "I'll do it later" or a Notes entry, not another polished app. One thing I'm trying with a food logging app is making the first action feel closer to the existing habit than to a full workflow.
The habit-comparison frame gets more complicated in 2025-2026 because AI search is changing what users arrive already knowing. When someone finds you through Perplexity or ChatGPT, the AI already ran the comparison for them before they landed on your page. They weren't comparing you to nothing -- they were shown 2-3 alternatives side by side in the answer that sent them to you. So the comparison baseline isn't just 'current habit' anymore, it's 'the alternatives the AI mentioned in the same breath as you.' The pages that convert best right now are built for evaluation-mode visitors who already know what category you're in and are deciding between the top 3 options the AI surfaced. That's a fundamentally different page structure than one built for awareness-mode visitors arriving from Google with zero prior framing. Which stage of the comparison journey is your traffic primarily entering at?
The habit-comparison frame gets more complicated in 2025-2026 because AI search is changing what users arrive already knowing. When someone finds you through Perplexity or ChatGPT, the AI already ran the comparison for them before they landed on your page. They weren't comparing you to nothing -- they were shown 2-3 alternatives side by side in the answer that sent them to you. So the comparison baseline isn't just 'current habit' anymore, it's 'the alternatives the AI mentioned in the same breath as you.' The pages that convert best right now are built for evaluation-mode visitors who already know what category you're in and are deciding between the top 3 options the AI surfaced. That's a fundamentally different page structure than one built for awareness-mode visitors arriving from Google with zero prior framing. Which stage of the comparison journey is your traffic primarily entering at?
That is a very good point honestly, especially about AI already pre-framing the comparison before the visitor even lands on the page.
I think a lot of traffic now is entering somewhere in the middle of the decision journey instead of true discovery mode like older Google search behavior.
What’s interesting is that it almost forces founders to design pages differently:
less “what is this?”
and more “why this over the alternatives you already saw?”
For Prosperity Hub specifically, I think a lot of users still enter in awareness/problem mode because local marketplace behavior is fragmented, but for SaaS products like booking systems or operational tools, I completely agree the visitor is probably already evaluating 2-3 options before arrival now.
The AI-search angle is definitely changing positioning faster than most founders realize.
this matches what i saw running hosting90 for 18 yrs — half our churn risks werent about price or feature gaps, it was that competitors had the muscle memory and we hadnt earned the switch yet. the "interruption cost" framing is sharp. one thing i'd add: that current habit usually has a name in their head, and if your messaging doesnt trigger that name, you're not even in the consideration set. how do you usually surface that habit in early convos — direct ask, or let them describe their workday first?
This reframe is exactly right -- and it creates a useful positioning filter.
Products that compete against 'ask ChatGPT' need to either (a) provide persistent state that AI doesn't have, or (b) automate the next action after the AI answer.
I've been thinking about this specifically for solo founder tools. The habit used to be 'open 5 tabs and manually piece together your business picture.' The new habit is 'ask Claude what to focus on this week.' But Claude doesn't know your actual client MRR, project status, or revenue data -- it gives generic advice, not YOUR answer.
The positioning that survives this is: 'Claude can give you frameworks. This gives you YOUR data, live, connected, so when you do ask Claude you're feeding it real context.'
Products that fail the new comparison: anything that gives structured answers to questions the user could ask AI. Products that pass it: anything that holds your actual operational data in a form that either stands alone OR makes AI answers more relevant.
For anyone building in the ops/productivity space right now -- explicitly testing your product against a Claude conversation about the same problem is probably the fastest way to find out if you have a real wedge.
This is such a crucial framing shift. I've been thinking about this in terms of onboarding flow — if your "replacement" action isn't obvious from day one, users default back to their old habit before they ever experience the value.
The comparison baseline is shifting fast in 2026. It used to be 'current habit' (spreadsheet, email, manual process). Now there's a third reference point: what ChatGPT or Perplexity gives them for free when they ask the same question your product answers.
Founders who aren't tracking AI search are missing that the 'habit' they compete with has changed. Someone looking for a market sizing tool no longer just compares you to doing it manually in Excel - they compare you to asking Claude and getting a decent first cut in 30 seconds.
The products winning this comparison are ones that either (a) get cited by AI search themselves, or (b) do the next step after the AI answer. The ones losing are stuck selling against the old habit that barely exists anymore.
Curious whether others on IH are explicitly benchmarking against AI-generated answers when testing positioning.
This is especially true now that AI search is in the mix.
When someone finds your product via Perplexity or ChatGPT, the comparison isn't 'nothing' - it's whatever the AI recommended alongside you. You're being compared against whoever else got cited in the same response.
That shifts the positioning question from 'what's the incumbent habit?' to 'what's the AI saying about us vs. the alternatives it mentioned?' Which is harder to control but possible to influence with the right content strategy.
The habit framing still holds - you're competing against inertia plus whatever narrative the AI built around your category. Knowing that changes which objections you write for.
This completely reframed how I think about onboarding. Building in the productivity space, I used to assume that showing people a "better" way to plan their day was enough — but the real barrier is that their current habit (opening Notes, a random spreadsheet, or just keeping things in their head) feels cognitively free. The question I now ask in user interviews isn't "would this be useful?" but "what would you stop doing if you started using this?" That second question surfaces the actual switching cost in a way feature comparisons never do. It also tells you whether the habit you're replacing is something they're even slightly frustrated with — because if they're not, no amount of polish will overcome the inertia.
I think this is especially true when the current habit already feels “good enough” emotionally, even if it is objectively messy or inefficient.
People often do not optimize for the best workflow. They optimize for the workflow that feels familiar, reversible, and mentally inexpensive.
I have seen this a lot in WordPress environments too. Users will continue using fragile or cluttered setups simply because they already understand the rhythm of them, even when cleaner approaches exist.
That is why reducing cognitive interruption sometimes matters more than adding capability.
The interesting part is that a technically better product can still lose if it asks the user to think more consciously than their current habit does.
This is the clearest version of the challenge we face in job search tooling. The real competitor is never another app. It's the 5-tab workflow people already have: job board in one tab, Glassdoor in another, Word doc for the CV, ChatGPT for the cover letter, Google for interview prep. Each piece feels cognitively free because they've already done it that way for years. It's messy but familiar, and familiar wins.
What shifted how we thought about onboarding: the user has to produce something genuinely useful before we ask them to abandon a single existing habit. Not a demo, not a tooltip tour. Something they can actually use. The question I kept coming back to was "at what point does this feel cheaper to the user than opening another tab?" Until that moment, the habit always wins
Yes, “cheaper than opening another tab” framing is really good.
And I think it explains why many products fail even when the core functionality is objectively better. The user is not evaluating only capability. They are evaluating interruption cost against an already internalized workflow.
What I find interesting is that a lot of successful tools seem to win gradually rather than through full replacement. They attach themselves to an existing habit first, reduce friction in one small area, and only later become the preferred workflow.
Trying to replace the entire mental model upfront usually feels too expensive cognitively, even if the end state is cleaner.