Taste → Resonance

Practical advice on developing taste in pursuit of resonance

Thank you Jae Lubberink, Max Marchione, Julie Zhuo for reading drafts.

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Taste.

So hot right now.

Though, hardly new.

Taste has been dissected through the ages, and certainly as long as Silicon Valley has existed.

Steve Jobs identified taste as heading in the right direction — and what Microsoft lacks — in 1995. Paul Graham articulated taste as principles of good design in 2002. Julie Zhuo detailed concrete techniques for developing taste in 2013, as did Emil Kowalski in this elegant memo in 2025.

The topic is ever-present in technology’s collective consciousness. But it’s experiencing a cultural renaissance.

Why?

Spurred by the tidal wave of AI content flooding our everyday lives.

Anu Atluru astutely observed in September 2024:

In a world of scarcity, we treasure tools.

In a world of abundance, we treasure taste.

The barriers to entry are low, competition is fierce, and so much of the focus has shifted — from tech to distribution, and now, to something else too: taste.

— Anu Atluru, Taste Is Eating Silicon Valley

Experience the AI tidal wave and you will quickly recognize the tasteless hallmarks of AI slop.

In writing: meandering, delving. In images: high-gloss yet lackluster. In audio: metallic and interruptive, barely bridging uncanny valley despite claims.

Quadrillions of calculations hurtle towards AGI’s final frontier: Will Smith devouring spaghetti. But for now, in our million-year-old brains, a different quadrillion calculations sense deception.

Synthetic Smith slurps; we squirm.

Resonance

The pendulum is swinging back towards craft, quality, authenticity — both culturally and economically.

Code is cheap.

Money now chases utility wrapped in taste, function sculpted with beautiful form, and technology framed in artistry.

— Anu Atluru, Taste Is Eating Silicon Valley

Taste has always been a primary concern for designers. Accordingly, most discussion of taste has focused on capital-D Design.

But taste is now increasingly prized across the board. This includes Growth, where not long ago, mere functional competence sufficed.

Growth grew up in a world where it was fine, even encouraged, to disregard everything except for the number.

Remember “throw spaghetti at the wall and see what sticks”?

I assure you that spaghetti did not taste good. Synthetic Will Smith would agree.

Production is cheaper than ever; frameworks are commoditized. You and you competitor with comparable product use the same gen-AI adtech, studied the same onboarding playbook, attended the same virality course.

In this world, standing out demands a specific manifestation of taste: resonance.

Reach is how many people see you. Resonance is how much they care.

Awareness is a proxy for what we really want. We want affinity.

We don’t just want others to be aware of us. We want them to love us.

— Jay Acunzo, Two Revealing Definitions to Inform Better Work

So much of Growth focuses purely on reach.

Maximize impressions. Grow followers. Rank in search results.

But resonance is how we form lasting impressions.

Resonance is the message that sits with you. The experience you must share. The inspiration to take action.

Resonance is Duo’s death then resurrection. It’s Linear feeling more like a social movement than B2B SaaS. The Superhuman onboarding you recall 8 years later, the psychedelic journey through Superpower’s homepage, the awe of Stripe’s Black Friday cash register.

It is possible to deliver reach devoid of resonance. Distribution channels open up to deep enough pockets. A sufficiently well-resourced party can push any message to the world, no matter how insipid. They merely need to imagine it, genmoji it.

A spectacle is also prone to go viral, but ultimately lack emotional connection. Cheap thrills flood our news feeds.

Conversely, it is possible to deliver resonance that lacks reach: a hidden gem. Certainly, resonance can amplify reach through word of mouth. But in today’s algorithmically policed world, this is far from guaranteed.

Both resonance and reach is, of course, the ultimate prize.

And a sense of taste is the foundation for delivering resonance.

Taste is how we anticipate, ahead of time, that we are producing experiences beyond utility — striking ads, viral stunts, sites that sing, opinionated onboardings, copy with character.

Practical Foundations

So how might one develop taste in pursuit of resonance?

Let’s first set realistic expectations. Jae Lubberink aptly notes:

The mimetic urge to simply ‘acquire Taste’ reveals why it does not come naturally to many. It’s oxymoronic.

Taste, like wine, demands terroir: the grit, the grind, and the unglamorous labour of digging deeper

At its core, taste is a love letter to effort.

— Jae Lubberink, Capital-T Taste doesn't exist

Nonetheless, it’s useful to identify which effort.

I hope this provides a practical foundation for founders, Growth professionals, and beyond.

1. Learn The Rules

Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist.

— anon, commonly attributed to Pablo Picasso

If you’re already in Growth, this should feel natural.

The entire field builds on the idea that companies can be grown by applying well-defined frameworks. These frameworks are composed of rules across mathematics, technology, and psychology.

So in pursuit of taste, learn the rules.

Spend time to fundamentally understand how things work.

Start within Growth. Subscribe to Substacks, read Reforge, wander Wikipedia. Don’t just A/B test: understand the underlying statistics. Don’t just send emails: dig into deliverability, domain reputation, responsive design.

Next, pursue interdisciplinary influence. Growth lives between Product and Marketing, so study these disciplines. What questions should your homepage answer? What frameworks create deeply cherished products?

Go further still. At Superhuman we encourage depth and mastery. It is common to recommend niche textbooks from The Art Of Game Design to The Visual Display Of Quantitative Information.

2. Gather Data

Design-focused advice recommends following the greats, and surrounding yourself with their work.

The same advice holds in Growth.

Voraciously explore products.

Seek growth flows. Explore branching pathways. Observe macro decisions and minuscule details.

Let’s acknowledge that growth flows can be hard to conjure at will. Unlike hammering a feature, it is laborious to redo an onboarding just to see if it’s changed. Other flows are fleeting and cannot be re-invoked; a transient notification, for example.

For precisely this reason, resources exist to curate growth artifacts. Subscribe to these to efficiently gather data.

User Onboard details product onboardings. Good Better Best snapshots pricing pages. Growth.Design chronicles end-to-end growth flows. Siteinspire captures homepages. Really Good Emails has … really good emails.

If you’re starting out, gather data as an undirected search. This is acquisition for acquisition’s sake, as you don’t know what you don’t know. You will inevitably focus over time.

3. Practice Discernment

While gathering data, evaluate the goodness of each experience. Use reach and resonance to do this.

Reach is easy to assess.

How many views, likes, and comments does a piece of content have? How many shares? Spot and absorb numerical proof points.

Resonance is less obvious, but still tractable.

How did that campaign make you feel? Why? Could you remember the message weeks later? How about months? What do others say, particularly high-taste testers?

I recommend active evaluation.

Next time a product asks you how likely you are to recommend it to a friend, write down why your answer is what it is.

When you next onboard to a new product, record in Loom and verbalize your thoughts.

4. Effortful Creation

I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand.

— anon, commonly attributed to Confucius

You must create as part of developing taste. An hour of practice is worth a day of study.

I put emphasis on effortful creation. Muscle is built through exerted effort.

You might use AI to speed up your process, but it cannot tackle the core of creation. You must.

In Growth, creation is commonly parceled out to other individuals. Engineers engineer, designers design. And rightly so, for efficiency.

But to build taste you must be part of production. You must know when to take the pen and let the ink flow.

In Growth Product, scaffold the experience and write the copy. In Growth Marketing, articulate the emotions and draft the message.

5. Seek Feedback

Feedback refines taste.

Your creations are already measured on reach. You pursue goals and track metrics. You know when you hit the number.

So how do you get feedback on resonance?

Proactively ask.

Ask hard questions, particularly of those you admire, or seek to reach. How did it make them feel? What worked, what didn’t?

What we make people feel is just as important as what we make.

— BMW, commonly attributed to Rahul Vohra

Don’t only listen to what people say to your face. Hear what strangers tell each other.

Some of my biggest realizations of when we’d missed the mark at Superhuman were from passive but public critique.

You’ll hear things that don’t feel good; things you outright disagree with.

Maybe you deliberately decided to not polish before shipping. Or maybe you’re criticized on an effort that is a numerical success.

Amidst the noise there will be salience, and that salience will refine your taste.

6. Repeat

Iterative repetition unlocks increasingly sophisticated production.

By the time you have executed your 100th viral campaign, landing page, or product launch, you’ll know a thing or two about doing them very well.

Little by little, you might shift from taster to taste maker. You might receive requests to review. You might notice your work curated, referenced, or outright copied by others.

This is good!

Whether or not this happens, remember that developing taste and pursuing resonance is lifelong. “A love letter to effort”.

There is no ceiling: keep learning; keep creating.