By Mari Luukkainen in Startups — 27 Jan 2026

The habit moat: why B2C retention is about routines

The difference between a product people like and one they keep? Whether it finds a role in their routine.

Most B2C companies obsess over the wrong question.

They ask: "Why would someone buy this?"

They should ask: "Where does this fit in their day and what happens to their life if they stop?"

The difference between a product people like and a product people keep is whether it finds a role in their routine. Not their consideration set, but their actual, physical, daily routine.

If it does, churn drops. Not because customers love you more, but because canceling means rebuilding a part of their life.

The Freska number

I learned this at Freska, a home cleaning subscription service.

We discovered that the magic number was 3-4 cleanings. After that threshold, churn dropped dramatically. Customers who made it past the third or fourth cleaning were significantly more likely to stay for years.

At some point, the retention data was so strong we considered giving the first three cleanings away for free. The math worked because what happened during those cleanings wasn't about service delivery, but habit formation.

By the fourth cleaning, the customer's life had reorganized around not cleaning their own home.

Their Saturday mornings looked different. Their weekly rhythms had shifted. The vacuum cleaner had migrated to the back of the closet. They'd made plans during time slots that used to be blocked for mopping floors.

To cancel Freska, they wouldn't just be ending a subscription. They'd have to rebuild the habit of cleaning their own home. Find the time. Remember how they used to do it. Re-buy supplies they'd let run out.

That's not a subscription decision. That's a lifestyle reversal, and most people won't do it unless something forces them to.

The science of stickiness

This consistent with decades of behavioral research.

Habits form through what psychologists call the habit loop: a cue triggers a routine, which delivers a reward, which reinforces the loop. Over time, the behavior becomes automatic and moves from deliberate decision-making in the prefrontal cortex to the basal ganglia, where it requires almost no conscious thought.

BJ Fogg's research at Stanford shows that habits form fastest when a new behavior is anchored to an existing routine (what he calls "anchoring") and when it's small enough to require minimal motivation. Once the loop is established, the cognitive cost of breaking it is high and we default to the status quo because change requires mental effort we'd rather spend elsewhere.

Nir Eyal's Hooked model describes how products can engineer these loops: a trigger (external or internal) leads to an action, which delivers a variable reward, which prompts investment that makes the next cycle more likely. The products that dominate our lives (Instagram, Duolingo, Spotify) aren't just useful, but they've embedded themselves into moments of our day so deeply that not using them feels like a gap.

Research from University College London found that habit formation takes anywhere from 18 to 254 days, with an average of 66 days. The variance is huge because it depends on the complexity of the behavior and how seamlessly it integrates with existing routines.

The implication for B2C is clear: your job isn't to make customers happy with your product. It's to make your product disappear into their day so completely that removing it would feel like surgery.

The Slurp problem

I've been thinking about habit formation for Slurp, a Finnish specialty coffee subscription, for years.

I did consultancy for them a while back, and one of the questions I kept circling was: what's the habit trigger? What's the Freska moment for coffee subscriptions?

I couldn't figure it out even for myself. And I was the target customer. I like coffee. I drink it every day. I care about quality. I'd ordered from Slurp occasionally for years, but I never subscribed.

There was no rational reason not to. The coffee was good. The subscription was convenient. The price was fair. I just didn't do it. I'd order a bag when I ran out, enjoy it, then go back to whatever was on the grocery store shelf until I remembered to order again.

The product had no role in my routine. It was a nice-to-have that lived in my consideration set, not my calendar.

What changed

One Christmas, I got a coffee machine with a bean grinder as a gift and within weeks, I became a Slurp superuser.

It was not because the coffee changed or because I suddenly had more money or time or love for caffeine. For me, it was because the grinder changed the routine.

Before the grinder, coffee was background. A pot of Moccamaster I'd brew in the morning and drink half-cold throughout the day. I didn't think about it. I didn't savor it. It was just there.

After the grinder, coffee became foreground. A one-cup-at-a-time ritual. Grinding fresh. Watching the pour. Each cup was a small, intentional moment in the day.

Suddenly Slurp had a role.

Now the beans mattered. Now I noticed the difference between a Kenyan light roast and an Ethiopian natural process. Now I looked forward to opening a new bag, checking the tasting notes, adjusting the grind.

Now I show off what we're drinking when friends come over. I don't know if it drives referrals, but I'm definitely contributing word-of-mouth. And I can't imagine canceling. The subscription is part of how my mornings work now.

Here's the thing: Slurp didn't change. I changed. Or more precisely, my routine changed and Slurp slotted into it.

The insight

For me the difference between occasional Slurp customer and Slurp superuser wasn't about the product. It was about whether the product had found a routine to attach to.

Before the machine with a grinder: coffee was a commodity, consumed passively, barely noticed.

After: coffee was a ritual, consumed actively, thought about multiple times a day.

Same person. Same product. Completely different relationship.

This is the part most B2C companies miss. They optimize the product, which could be better features, better price, better onboarding. But they don't think about the routine context the product needs to survive in.

Freska worked because it attached to a routine everyone already had (cleaning their home) and replaced it so completely that reverting felt like work.

Slurp worked for me only when I had a routine worth attaching to. Without the grinder, coffee wasn't a ritual. It was just caffeine delivery. And you don't build a subscription habit around something you don't think about.

Implications for building B2C

If you're building a consumer product, here's what this means:

1. Find the routine, not the use case.

Use cases are rational. Routines are behavioral. People might understand why your product is useful and still never build it into their day. Your job is to figure out which existing routine your product can attach to or which new routine it can create.

2. Identify your "Freska number."

What's the threshold after which customers stick? It might be 3 uses, or 7 days, or one specific action. Find it. Then engineer your onboarding to get people past it as fast as possible. The free trial math might work differently than you think if activation equals retention.

3. Consider the enabling behaviors.

Sometimes the habit doesn't have anything to do with your product specifically, and it's about something adjacent. I didn't become a Slurp subscriber because of Slurp. I became one because of a grinder. What's the "grinder" for your product? What adjacent behavior or tool makes your product necessary instead of optional? Can you encourage it, bundle it, or educate around it?

4. Measure routine integration, not satisfaction.

NPS tells you if people like you. It doesn't tell you if you're embedded in their life. Track frequency, timing, context. When do people use your product? What happens right before and right after? Is it at the same time each day? That's the signal that you've become automatic.

5. Make cancellation feel like loss, not decision.

If canceling your product is as easy as clicking a button, you haven't built a habit moat. If canceling means the customer has to rebuild a part of their day (find new time, develop new skills, remember how they used to do things) you have something defensible.

The cheap luxury insight

One more thing about Slurp.

Part of why it stuck is that specialty coffee is a relatively cheap luxury that compounds across the day.

I drink multiple cups. Each one is a small moment of quality. That means I'm thinking about Slurp not once a day, but four or five times. Each cup reinforces the routine. Each cup reminds me that this is a priority purchase, not a discretionary one.

Compare that to a luxury product you use once a week or once a month. The habit loop fires less often. The reinforcement is weaker. The routine integration is shallower.

If your product is a daily-use, multiple-touchpoint, small-luxury experience - you'll have a structural advantage in habit formation. If it's not, you need to think harder about how to create touchpoints and reminders that keep the loop spinning.

The question

Here's the B2C question that actually matters:

Not "why would someone buy this?"

But "what part of their day does this become and what breaks if they stop?"

If you can answer that, you have something. If you can't, you have a product people might like but won't keep.

Retention is about integration.

Build the habit, and the moat builds itself.