So, lemme explain.

Take My OneApp, right? Safaricom's big super app moment. I've used it, and honestly? The design isn't thaaaaaaat great. There are moments in the navigation where you just stop and go "wait, what?" which is always a bad sign. But it doesn't matter, because it'll hit a million users without breaking a sweat. Your M-PESA is in there, your airtime, your bills. Nobody's choosing it because it feels good to use. They're using it because it's Safaricom. The product doesn't need to earn you, it already has you, lol.

And that's the whole problem, every company watching that draws the same quiet conclusion: you can win here without caring about the experience. That belief trickles down fast. Most founders stop asking "how does this feel?" and start asking "does it work?" PMs cut design time to hit sprint deadlines. Engineers ship and move on. Nobody's being malicious about it, it's just that Safaricom set the bar, and honestly? The bar is on the floor. And everyone decided that was fine.

So the lesson keeps spreading. And it's costing people way more than they realise.

What makes bad design so sneaky is that you never actually see the damage. Like, nobody sends you a message saying "hey, three people rage quit your loan application today because your error screen looked like a crash." Someone hits a wall, closes the app, moves on with their day. No tweet, no support ticket. It just gets chalked up to "low engagement" and someone in a meeting suggests running more push notifications, lol.

And here's the thing, none of it feels urgent enough to fix because none of it breaks anything. The app still works. The feature still ships. But users are quietly checking out, and nobody's connecting the dots.

Safaricom can afford that, though. Your startup? I don't think so.

Now look at the companies that actually won in competitive markets. Not the ones with built-in distribution. Not the ones where you're using them because you literally have no choice. The ones that had to earn every single user.

Take Nothing, right? Think about trying to break through an already completely saturated smartphone market. They didn't do it by undercutting prices or winning a raw spec sheet war. They did it entirely through hardware and software identity. Carl Pei literally said that design is their biggest selling point. In a world of identical glass slabs, they bet everything on a distinct visual language, and it became the sole reason they survived.

Revolut didn't become the most valuable neobank in Europe because they had better APIs. Every serious competitor had the same APIs, I think. What they did differently was make the experience feel alive. The spend analytics were genuinely beautiful, onboarding felt like unboxing a new Apple product. The metal card with your name laser etched on it was a feeling. At some point the design became the whole pitch.

Cash App's entire thesis was that sending money should feel as easy as texting. Not a technical insight, more of an experiential one. It's like comparing a WhatsApp message to filling out a bank transfer form. Same outcome, completely different feeling. Square bet on that simplicity, and the $Cashtag went viral not because of some backend breakthrough, but because the whole thing just felt…easy.

And then there's Airbnb. Think about what they were actually asking people to do: sleep in a stranger's house. That is, on paper, an insane proposition. The only reason it doesn't feel insane is because of how carefully the product was designed. Every review, every listing photo, every trust signal was quietly doing the work of saying: this is safe, this person is real, you can trust this. Chesky and Gebbia are designers by profession, and honestly it shows. The whole product is basically one big trust exercise, and design is what makes you not think twice about it.

What all of these have in common is that they couldn't rely on distribution. They couldn't just exist and expect you to show up. So they made the experience the reason you showed up. Safaricom never had to do that. That's the difference.

Here's what actually frustrates me about this market; that opportunity is sitting wide open and almost nobody is claiming it. The incumbents have low bars. And users are way more sophisticated than we give them credit for. They're on Spotify, TikTok, Pinterest, Instagram every single day. Their sense of what a product should feel like is quietly rising, even if they can't articulate it. They might not be able to tell you what's wrong with your app. They'll just close it, feel vaguely annoyed, and keep doing that until something better shows up.

If you're building a fintech right now, your interest rate is not what's going to set you apart. Neither are your integrations, honestly. A well-funded competitor can copy both of those within a year, probably less. What's actually hard to copy is how your product feels. It builds quietly in the background, in retention, in word of mouth, in whether people recommend you to their friend on the matatu. And almost nobody here is building for it, because everyone's too busy doing it the Safaricom way.

And look, I want to be clear about something. The designers aren't the problem here. The issue is that design keeps getting treated like a finishing step, like paint. You build the thing, then you call the designer in to make it look nice. And by that point half the decisions that actually affect the experience are already locked in. The flows, the information architecture, what's two taps away vs six, all of that is decided before design even enters the room.

And it shows. Most Kenyan apps are built for utility, not experience. Technically, they do the job, but there's no delight in them. No moment where a little animation makes a transaction feel satisfying, no micro interaction that tells you "yes, that worked" in a way that actually feels good. Nobody thought about what the empty state looks like, or what happens when something fails, or how the loading state should behave. Those things feel small but they're actually the whole personality of a product. They're the difference between an app people tolerate and one people genuinely enjoy using.

So if you're building right now: hire your designer before you think you're ready. Put them in the founding conversations, treat a confusing flow with the same urgency as a bug. And actually use your own product when you're tired, distracted, in a place with terrible reception, and in a rush, because that's exactly the state your users are in when they open it, at times.

Look, the Safaricom mentality makes sense if you're Safaricom. You've already won. But if you're a startup trying to earn users in a market where people's expectations are quietly rising every single day? Building like you have guaranteed distribution is genuinely one of the worst bets you can make.

You're not Safaricom. Stop designing like you are.