Growth & Strategy
Personas
SaaS & Startup
Time to ROI
Medium-term (3-6 months)
Three years into freelancing, I had a problem that was killing my client relationships. I was building "perfect" products – technically flawless websites with pixel-perfect designs, conversion-optimized funnels, and every best practice checkbox ticked. My clients loved them initially, but then something weird happened: their users didn't.
I remember one B2B SaaS client telling me their beautifully crafted product felt "sterile" and "disconnected." Another e-commerce store owner mentioned that despite having all the right features, customers weren't emotionally connecting with their brand. That's when I realized I was optimizing for perfection instead of lovability.
Here's what I discovered: lovable products aren't about having every feature or following every best practice. They're about creating experiences that make users feel understood, valued, and genuinely excited to return. It's the difference between a product people use and a product people recommend to friends.
In this playbook, you'll learn:
Why "perfect" products often fail to create emotional connections
The counter-intuitive strategies I used to make products more lovable
Real experiments that transformed user engagement and retention
How to balance technical excellence with human connection
Specific tactics for SaaS products and e-commerce stores
Reality Check
The "perfect product" myth everyone believes
Walk into any product development meeting and you'll hear the same mantras repeated like gospel. "User experience is king." "Eliminate all friction." "A/B test everything." "Follow the data." The entire industry has convinced itself that the path to product success is paved with conversion optimization, feature completeness, and technical perfection.
Here's what most product teams focus on:
Conversion optimization: Maximizing every metric from click-through rates to completion funnels
Feature parity: Building everything competitors have, plus more
Frictionless experiences: Removing every possible obstacle or confusion point
Technical excellence: Fast load times, perfect responsive design, zero bugs
Best practice adherence: Following every UX principle and design pattern
This approach exists because it's measurable, teachable, and feels scientific. Executives love spreadsheets showing 15% conversion improvements. Designers love citing usability studies. Developers love clean, optimized code. Everyone can point to metrics that prove they're doing their job well.
But here's the problem: this optimization-first mindset creates products that are technically impressive but emotionally vacant. They're like perfectly engineered cars that nobody wants to drive on weekends. They work flawlessly, but they don't spark joy, create memories, or inspire loyalty.
The conventional approach misses a fundamental truth about human psychology: people don't just want products that work – they want products that make them feel something. They want to feel smart, creative, powerful, or connected. They want products that understand their frustrations and celebrate their wins. They want to feel like the product was built specifically for people like them.
That's where the concept of lovable products comes in – and it requires a completely different approach than what most teams are taught.
Consider me as your business complice.
7 years of freelance experience working with SaaS and Ecommerce brands.
My wake-up call came during a project with a B2B startup that was struggling with user retention. On paper, everything looked perfect. Their onboarding conversion rate was solid, their product worked flawlessly, and they'd implemented every best practice from leading SaaS playbooks. But users would sign up, use the product once or twice, then disappear.
The founders were frustrated. "We built exactly what users said they wanted," they told me. "We followed every UX guideline. We A/B tested everything. Why aren't people sticking around?"
That's when I made a controversial suggestion: what if we stopped trying to make the perfect product and started making a lovable one instead? The difference might seem semantic, but it fundamentally changes how you approach product development.
I started digging into what their most engaged users actually did differently. Instead of just looking at conversion funnels, I examined behavior patterns, support tickets, and user feedback. What I found surprised everyone: the users who stuck around weren't necessarily the ones who completed onboarding fastest or used the most features. They were the ones who felt like the product "got them."
This revelation led me to completely rethink my approach to product development. Instead of optimizing for efficiency, I started optimizing for connection. Instead of removing all friction, I began identifying which friction points actually helped users feel more invested. Instead of following every best practice, I started questioning which practices might be making products feel generic.
The shift wasn't just philosophical – it required practical changes in how I built and positioned products. I had to learn to balance technical excellence with emotional resonance, which meant sometimes making choices that seemed counterintuitive from a traditional product development perspective.
Through multiple client projects spanning SaaS platforms, e-commerce stores, and service businesses, I developed a framework for creating lovable products. The results weren't just better retention numbers – they were users who became evangelists, customers who provided unsolicited testimonials, and products that people genuinely missed when they couldn't access them.
Here's my playbook
What I ended up doing and the results.
Creating lovable products requires a fundamental mindset shift from optimization to connection. Here's the systematic approach I developed through multiple client projects:
Step 1: Identify Your Product's Emotional Job
Every product has a functional job (what it does) and an emotional job (how it makes users feel). Most teams obsess over the functional job while completely ignoring the emotional one. I start every project by asking: "Beyond solving their practical problem, how do we want users to feel when they use this product?"
For a B2B SaaS client, we identified that while their tool functionally managed team workflows, its emotional job was making project managers feel confident and in control. This insight completely changed how we approached the interface design and communication.
Step 2: Embrace Strategic Friction
Conventional wisdom says eliminate all friction, but lovable products understand that some friction actually increases emotional investment. When users have to make small efforts or decisions, they become more committed to the outcome.
I implemented this with an e-commerce client by requiring customers to create a simple profile before checkout – not for data collection, but to make them feel like members of an exclusive community rather than anonymous purchasers. Conversion rates initially dropped 8%, but customer lifetime value increased by 34% because people felt more connected to the brand.
Step 3: Create Moments of Delight
Lovable products don't just solve problems efficiently – they create positive emotional peaks. These aren't random easter eggs or gimmicks, but carefully designed moments that reinforce the user's smart decision to choose your product.
For a SaaS client, instead of a generic "Task completed" notification, we created personalized celebrations that acknowledged the specific achievement and its impact. Users started screenshot-sharing these moments on social media without any prompting.
Step 4: Build Personality Into Interactions
Most products communicate like robots – technically accurate but emotionally flat. Lovable products have distinct personalities that users can relate to and remember. This doesn't mean being unprofessional; it means being human.
I worked with an e-commerce store that was losing customers to larger competitors. We developed a conversational tone that felt like getting advice from a knowledgeable friend rather than reading corporate copy. Error messages became helpful suggestions, product descriptions told stories, and even the checkout process felt like a conversation rather than a transaction.
Step 5: Design for Stories, Not Just Tasks
Users don't just complete tasks – they create stories about their experiences that they share with others. Lovable products are designed to generate positive stories that users want to tell.
This meant thinking beyond individual features to consider the entire narrative arc of someone's relationship with the product. What story does a user tell after their first week? After their first success? After recommending it to a colleague?
Emotional Jobs
Understanding the feeling your product creates, not just the function it serves
Strategic Friction
Why some obstacles actually increase user investment and loyalty
Delight Engineering
Creating specific moments that make users feel smart, successful, or special
Story Architecture
Designing experiences that users naturally want to share with others
The transformation in user behavior was dramatic across multiple client projects. Instead of the typical new user pattern – initial enthusiasm followed by gradual disengagement – I began seeing sustained engagement curves that actually increased over time.
For the B2B SaaS client, we saw a 67% increase in day-30 retention and a 45% increase in feature adoption within the first month. More importantly, their Net Promoter Score jumped from 6 to 42, indicating users were actually recommending the product to others.
The e-commerce store experienced even more dramatic changes. While overall conversion rates remained similar, customer lifetime value increased by 34%, and repeat purchase rates improved by 28%. Perhaps most telling: their customer service tickets became overwhelmingly positive, with users reaching out to share success stories rather than just report problems.
What surprised me most was how these changes affected team dynamics. When products became more lovable, internal teams became more motivated. Support staff enjoyed their work more, sales teams had better stories to tell, and even developers started using the product in their personal time.
The timeline for seeing results varied by project complexity, but meaningful changes in user behavior typically appeared within 2-4 weeks of implementation. The key was that once users formed emotional connections, those relationships became self-reinforcing – leading to organic growth through word-of-mouth recommendations.
What I've learned and the mistakes I've made.
Sharing so you don't make them.
Creating lovable products taught me that the product development process itself needs to change, not just the output. Here are the seven key lessons that transformed how I approach every project:
1. Measure Connection, Not Just Conversion
Traditional metrics miss emotional engagement entirely. I learned to track story-telling behavior – how often users share, recommend, or create content about the product. These leading indicators predict long-term success better than conversion rates.
2. Personality Is Strategic, Not Superficial
Adding personality isn't about writing quirky copy. It's about making consistent choices that reflect user values and aspirations. Every interaction should feel like it comes from the same thoughtful human who truly understands the user's world.
3. Perfect Is the Enemy of Lovable
Pursuing perfection creates sterile experiences that feel machine-made. Lovable products embrace intentional imperfections that feel human and relatable. Sometimes the quirks become the most memorable features.
4. Context Beats Content
What you say matters less than when and how you say it. The same message can create delight or annoyance depending on the user's emotional state and situational context. Timing and relevance trump clever writing every time.
5. Community Emerges from Individual Love
You can't force community, but you can create products that people naturally want to share. When individual users love something deeply, they seek out others who share that love. Focus on individual emotional connection first.
6. Friction Can Be a Feature
Strategic friction creates investment and meaning. The effort users put into mastering or customizing your product becomes part of their emotional connection to it. Easy isn't always better.
7. Stories Scale Better Than Features
Features require explanation and training. Stories spread naturally through social networks and word-of-mouth. Products that generate compelling user stories grow faster and more sustainably than those that just work well.
How you can adapt this to your Business
My playbook, condensed for your use case.
For your SaaS / Startup
For SaaS products, lovability translates into:
Onboarding as relationship building: Focus on connection before feature education
Success celebrations: Acknowledge user achievements beyond product usage
Contextual personality: Match communication tone to user stress levels and goals
Progressive disclosure: Reveal complexity as users become emotionally invested
For your Ecommerce store
For e-commerce stores, lovable experiences include:
Community building: Make customers feel part of an exclusive group
Story-driven product pages: Help customers envision their success story
Personalized interactions: Remember preferences and celebrate milestones
Post-purchase relationship: Continue the connection beyond the transaction