Keep Products and Business Models Simple: Give Users the 5% of Features They Actually Use

An aside from Robin: your product and business model may both fall into the trap of becoming increasingly complicated and difficult to use. I recall seeing a claim that most Evernote users use only around 5% of its features. My guess is that Word and Excel are similar. In other words, to meet the needs of a tiny minority, you make the product more complex and harder to use with each upgrade, forcing consumers to spend considerable time learning and adapting to new interfaces. More often, though, users simply do not need all those functions. They may think, “Just give me the 5% or 10% I use regularly. Do not make the product so complicated.” The complexity makes it less approachable. Users see a high learning cost and give up learning or adopting it. When building products and business models, I think we should keep them as simple and straightforward as possible and solve important problems. Many functions can even be handled by compatible third-party software, which users can add if they need it. Often, simplicity has the greatest power. ---- Two small observations: 1. Estonia is a remarkable small country. It produced Skype and many software startups, including Pipedrive, discussed in this piece, which has also become a unicorn. Robin: “Taiwan’s hardware and software capabilities should be no weaker than Estonia’s. Taiwanese startups still need to face the world boldly if we are to build unicorns.” 2. In pursuit of growth, giants make their businesses more complex and add more projects, becoming increasingly like broad, general-purpose platforms. Startups, however, must focus: be a nail, concentrating resources to pierce through quickly. This piece comes from Manny’s Newsletter. You can subscribe to support it.