“How many meetings did you have this year? And how many do you remember?”
That question came from my old manager at a team offsite a few years ago. For most people in the room, the answer to the first question was in the triple digits. But the number of meetings that were truly memorable? They could count those on one hand.
There’s a deeper story there (maybe for another post), but the lesson has stuck with me: delighting your users or customers requires thoughtfulness, commitment, and finesse. It also, almost by definition, requires you to think differently than everyone else.
The Delight Deficit
Most companies are optimising for efficiency, not memorability. They’re focused on conversion rates, engagement metrics, and user flows. These things matter, of course. But somewhere between the wireframes and the A/B tests, we’ve forgotten to ask: Will anyone actually remember this experience?
The brutal truth is that your product is likely one of dozens your users interact with each week. You’re competing not just for market share, but for mental real estate. In a world of infinite scroll and forgotten SaaS subscriptions, being merely “good” is the same as being invisible.
Is it just me, or these days all the logos start looking alike and chatbots UX feels uninspired and monotonous? This viral X thread by David Perell noticed the same thing and came down with two conclusions:
In tech, it’s not much different:
PostHog: Making Analytics Exciting
Today, I had one of those rare, memorable experiences. It was with the website of PostHog, a seemingly “boring” company in the world of data and analytics. Their website is anything but boring.
Smart branding. Sharp copy. Hidden gems everywhere. You can get lost clicking around and exploring. No wonder it was dubbed ‘the most viral website of 2025’. Take a look for yourself.
What makes PostHog’s approach work isn’t just clever design—it’s a fundamental understanding that delight is a competitive moat. In a category where most competitors look and sound identical, being memorable is being different. And being different is how you win.
Airbnb: The 11-Star Experience
In the early days of Airbnb, Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia ran a thought experiment with their team. They asked: “What would a 5-star experience look like?” The team described the obvious things: clean home, good location, friendly host.
Then Chesky pushed further: “What would a 6-star experience look like?”
Maybe the host greets you at the door with your favorite drink. There are fresh flowers and a personalized welcome note.
“Okay, what about 7 stars?”
Now you’re picked up at the airport in a luxury car. The home has been stocked with your favorite foods based on your preferences.
“What’s an 8-star experience?”
A famous chef cooks you dinner. There’s a private concert in your honour.
By the time they got to 10 and 11 stars, the ideas were absurd—landing on the roof via helicopter, being greeted by the Obamas. But here’s the insight: by imagining the ridiculous, you discover what’s possible.
Airbnb didn’t implement 11-star experiences. But this exercise changed how they thought about every touchpoint. It gave them permission to go beyond “good enough” and ask “what would be magical?”
That mindset of pushing past the obvious is what separates memorable companies from forgettable ones. It worth diving deeper on the 11 Star Experience framework in the conversation between Brian Chesky and Reid Hoffman.
What Makes an Experience Delightful?
After thinking through what made the PostHog experience stick with me, I wanted to read more about delightful UX and what makes us appreciate an experience as customers.
I came across A Theory of User Delight, by NN group and this resonated with me:
UI embellishments can only produce surface delight; deep delight can only be achieved in functional, reliable, and usable interfaces.
Therese Fessenden, NN Group
Diving a bit deeper, below are a few examples of what makes a website or app stand out and achieve
1. Delight lives in the details It’s not about grand gestures. It’s about the micro-interactions, the unexpected copy, the easter eggs that make users think “wait, did I just see that?” PostHog’s website is full of these moments: hedgehogs, playful animations, copy that actually sounds human.
2. Personality is a feature, not a bug Most B2B companies are terrified of showing personality. They default to corporate-speak and stock photography. But personality is what creates emotional connection. It’s what turns users into advocates. PostHog doesn’t sound like everyone else in their category, and that’s precisely the point.
3. Delight requires giving up control When you create something explorable and surprising, you’re inviting users to wander off the predetermined path. That’s scary for growth teams obsessed with conversion funnels. But it’s also what creates those memorable moments that people share.
4. It’s about respecting intelligence The best delightful experiences don’t talk down to users. They assume intelligence and reward curiosity. They’re saying: “We know you’re smart. Here’s something worth your time.” That respect is rare and powerful.
How to Start Delighting Users
You don’t need a massive budget or a world-class design team. You need to care, and you need to give yourself permission to be different. Here are some practical starting points:
Audit your touchpoints: List every interaction a user has with your product—signup, onboarding, empty states, error messages, support emails. Pick the three that matter most and ask: “Is this forgettable or memorable?”
Find your voice: What would your company sound like if it were a person at a dinner party? Probably not like your current marketing copy. Write in that voice instead.
Question the defaults: Every industry has unspoken rules about what websites should look like, what emails should say, what onboarding should feel like. Question all of them.
Celebrate craft: Make someone on your team responsible for moments of delight. Not as a side project, but as a core part of their role.
The Contrarian Bet
In a world optimizing for scale and efficiency, delighting users is almost contrarian. It’s investing in things that don’t immediately show up in dashboards. It’s caring about experience in ways that don’t obviously drive KPIs.
But here’s the thing: the best founders I know are contrarian in precisely this way. They understand that in saturated markets, being remarkable isn’t optional—it’s the strategy.
So ask yourself: how many interactions did your users have with your product this year? And how many will they actually remember?
If the answer makes you uncomfortable, you know where to start.
I'm a former general partner at google ventures, head of Google for Entrepreneurs in Europe and founding head of Campus London, Google's first physical hub for startups.
I'm also the founder of Techbikers, a non-profit bringing together the startup ecosystem on cycling challenges in support of Room to Read. Since inception in 2012 we've built 11 schools and 50 libraries in the developing world.
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