Stuff that makes you rock
— August 11 2009
I’ve followed Kathy Sierra for some time, and I really miss her blog, creating passionate users.
In her presentation How to grow and nurture your community, she talks about an interesting concept: Products that stick are products about you, not about how cool they are or about how well they solve a problem.
Some people will buy your products because they’re good, cool or useful. But every single day I notice that stickiness comes from products about you, about you getting things done, about you uʍop ǝpısdn buıʇıɹʍ, about you learning or becoming better in some skill.
Remember when instant messaging came, and people would start conversations with you just to try all those stupid smileys? It was annoying, but it sticked. Users would feel they could do something they couldn’t before, and that helped creating a passionate community for fancy instant messaging above plain text chats.
Think about it as your product’s charisma: Everybody likes a person who drives conversations about you. You can never have enough of those. Can your product reflect your users in that way?
Those are the kind of sites or products people will go back to every day, thirsty for more.