Your hook isn't the problem. Your second line is.

I've watched retention graphs for a few hundred accounts now, and the shape is almost always the same. The first three seconds hold fine. People are curious. Then somewhere around seven seconds, half of them leave.

That's not a hook failure. The hook worked — they stayed. What failed is the handoff: you opened a loop and then made them wait too long, or you opened a loop you never actually intended to close.

The fix is boring and it works: whatever you promised in line one, start paying it off by line three. Not fully. Just enough that staying feels rewarded.