After 15 years of partnering with top product people and investing in their product companies, I can conclude that product LOVE is the ultimate superpower but it is damn hard to come up with a repeatable process for creating it.

Through loved products in our portfolio (Citymapper, Thursday, Typeform, Progression amongst others) and through other iconic Consumer and SaaS products that we all use every day, we see the power of giving users a tremendous amount of value, empathy and delightfulness.

People love products that give them recognition and make them heroes in the eyes of their stakeholders — being family or community members or colleagues at the workplace.

Product love creates a special and long-lasting bond between the company brand and its customers. In-love customers are intimate champions of the product, they invest time and value in it and contribute to its development.

Product love is the greatest business driver and it scales almost infinitely. It makes users turn into loyal customers, committed to providing product feedback and paying a premium price. It makes customers turn into powerful ambassadors that virally distribute and promote the product itself, by inviting peers to collaborate with and via word-of-mouth.

No surprise that at Connect Ventures Product Love it’s the core part of our investment thesis: We invest in opinionated products, crafted with love and loved by many. Our thesis is our compass to identify and pick the founders and the companies we aspire to partner with.

But how do you create Product love? How do you go beyond the product value alone and create the magic 🪄? Connect’s Product Partner Graham Paterson and I came out with a formula: Table Stakes + Delight + Butter = Product Love.

🍽 — Table stakes are the core functionalities that are necessary “to do the job” that users are expecting and why they employ your product for. They came to you with a problem, you need to solve it.

🤩 Delight — Usability on steroids: going above and beyond their expectations in solving that problem.

🧈 Butter — the rich, beautiful touches that make your product smooth and memorable.

This framework is easy to say, but hard to execute. So here 👉 is the full blog post from Graham with examples and tips on how companies can create a product that people genuinely love.

Happy reading and we’d love to hear your thoughts on it.