Obsessed: Building a Brand People Love from Day One

In most cases, UX is now more about elegance and simplicity than a major overhaul of how people are accustomed to having things function.

These are businesses that understand that every single consumer interaction—from talking with customer service, to shopping on a website, to reading an interview with the founder—counts as “brand.”

Brand needs to be ingrained in a business’s very reason for being, which is why it’s so important to get it right from the beginning.

look at how tension and surprise play a critical role in today’s brand playbook.

the difference in success largely boils down to brand.

There’s the part that people can see (important), and then there’s the part they feel (more important!). Leading brands are able to form deep emotional connections because they stand for something that people care about.

And armed with this intel, you’ll never look at what it means to launch a business—or at your personal product obsessions—the same way again.

If you’re launching a particular business, you can be sure that someone else is too.

It never seems like they’re trying to sell you something, or convince you of something; instead, it feels that you’re in a relationship based on a shared set of values.

The single most important question we ask in our first conversation with founders is not how their business works, or who their competition is, but what the problem is that they are solving for people.