I was talking to a friend yesterday about AHA moments in products. He is working on the strategy for a late stage unicorn startup. His management feels they have a solid enough product already, they just needed to package it better, explain it well, help users reach that magical AHA moment faster.

My point to him was: not every product has an AHA moment.

Remember when everyone in product was obsessed with finding their North Star? Facebook made it seem so simple - get users to add X friends in the first Y days, and boom, they have enough content to stay engaged. Their growth team spent years decreasing the time to add X friends. Cut all friction. Reach the AHA money earlier.

But that was Facebook. Connecting to your friends and sharing your life updates was novel.

What if you’re building the 10th fintech app?

Unless you can genuinely show users why this is revolutionary - make them go “wow, I never realized I could do this” or “I always needed this” - you probably don’t have an AHA moment.

What are some companies that nailed the AHA moment?

Zepto. We’ve had on-demand delivery forever. Swiggy and others were doing 40-minute delivery. So what made Zepto different? A VC friend explained it perfectly - it changed his behavior. Earlier, if his friends came over, he’d stress about getting drinks or snacks. The thought of waiting 40-50 minutes for a diet coke or going down to buy it yourself. But with Zepto? It takes 5 minutes to get things deliver to your home. No need to plan what snacks to order in advance. That’s the AHA.

Another friend completely stopped grocery planning. No more budgeting, no more meal prep anxiety. His cook comes in the morning, they discuss breakfast and lunch, and groceries appear in 5 minutes. Imagine the reduction in cognitive load. No planning the night before, no stress. Just wake up and decide what you want to eat. The groceries arrive while your cook is kneading the atta. It’s amazing.

Then there’s Superhuman. Their AHA moment was different - it was about realizing you could use shortcuts for the fastest email experience ever. But they didn’t wait for users to discover it. They made you sit through a mandatory 1-hour onboarding. Sometimes you can force the AHA moment. It’s more extrinsic than intrinsic, but it works.

I remember our obsession with finding our North Star when building a Slack-like enterprise app in my previous product role. We thought if people sent X messages, created Y channels, and added Z colleagues on day one, they’d reach their AHA moment faster. We kept adding hooks to drive these actions.

But here’s what we missed: correlation or causation? People who love your product will do these things anyway. You don’t need 50 hooks in the app. Plus, Slack already existed. Was there really a strong reason to choose us except pricing?

When Slack first launched, they had a genuine AHA moment. Enterprise communication tools like Yammer were pretty bad. Everyone was stuck with emails and endless sync meetings. Slack changed that.

But the 5th Slack clone? Probably not.

Same with Nubank in Brazil. Banking there had terrible NPS scores. They came in with an amazing experience - clear AHA moment. But if you’re launching a new online bank in India today, what’s your AHA moment? Why would people go “this is so much better than what I had before”?

Sometimes what feels like a positioning problem might actually be an existential one. Not every product needs to change the world. But if you’re chasing that AHA moment, make sure it’s real.