Sports and Sweet Emotions

Nov 2, 2025

This may sound like a LinkedIn post, but let's just roll with it.

I love sports. Last night's Game 7 of the World Series between the Dodgers and the Blue Jays was an instant classic: at least half a dozen future Hall of Famers battling it out into extra innings. So many clutch moments, such high stakes, and that suspense of a close game. Insanely good. 1

And it's why anything that moves you emotionally works: sports, reality TV, smutty novels... A compelling story sells.

Now, I'm no sales expert, but I know this: when I buy something, after a certain threshold, it's rarely about features or cost. It's about how the product makes me feel. If I don't get a positive gut feel,2 I won't buy it unless I need it.

With AI, adding features to software is becoming trivial. So if products are equal, which one will I choose? The one with a story, with branding that makes me feel good. Branding, marketing, and name recognition all matter, but so do design and UX. Just like well-written code is self-documenting, well-designed UX is part of your brand.

That's why when you're building your product, think about the emotions it evokes in your users. In fintech, users usually want to feel safe and calm. In other industries, it could be excitement, joy, or even anger3.

Some software I've enjoyed lately:

  1. Heroes of Might and Magic 3 Complete (with HD mod). I used to play this game A LOT as a kid. Nostalgia is powerful, and the modern mods make an old game like HoMM3 more fun.
  2. Claude Code. I took a 15-week sabbatical during the summer and missed the initial hype. I've since been using it for four weeks, and it's been awesome — powerful, intuitive, and I love the aesthetic of a good terminal-based UI.
  3. Stripe. I hadn't used the Stripe Dashboard much before, but it's actually really nice. The documentation and test environment are top-notch; for complex software, it feels intuitive. Kudos to the DX team at Stripe!
  4. Mermaid.js. Charting as code. Version control for diagrams has never felt better. As an added bonus, AI can easily convert your existing charts into Mermaid code.

Footnotes

  1. Admittedly, I dozed off during the bottom of the 5th because it was 4am in Finland, but even as I was watching the highlights the next morning, I could feel the energy as if I were watching it live. I've seen enough close games to know what it feels like to witness a great one. ↩

  2. A few years back, I read a book that introduced me to the concept of the brain-gut connection. Fascinating stuff, though not yet well-understood by science. Many readers have flagged this particular book for its lack of scientific sources, but the concept itself is interesting and explored in more credible literature. ↩

  3. Just look at Twitter X. People love to engage when they're angry. ↩