The Paradox of Constraints

How to build products that users actually use

Last week, Mario Zigliotto and I launched Somebody.io, which is a ridiculously simple way to build a beautiful personal website.

It’s “ridiculously simple” because we give users almost no choices. All sites made with Somebody have the exact same format, color scheme, and elements. Users have no power to reposition, resize, or reorder. Somebody only let’s users add very basic content, one main photo, and some links.

You might think this makes for a really bad product, but surprisingly, it’s just the opposite — Somebody’s appeal is its massive constraints.

The secret: Most people want a personal website, but are really bad at starting and/or finishing.

In particular, while building Somebody, we found that there are a few main things stopping you from building an awesome personal website:

1. There are too many options, themes, templates, website builders, etc. to know where to start or what to pick. This is a classic case of choice paralysis.
2. Perfectionism prevents you from ever clicking publish. You spend way too long sizing, resizing, changing fonts, changing colors, changing images, etc.
3. You have no clue what information to put on your site, what to leave off, what to put where, etc. You want structure, but there is none.
4. You have no clue how to host your site or connect it to a domain name you own. Unsuccessfully messing around with your Godaddy DNS settings is super frustrating.
5. You simply don’t have the time to invest in making something that looks half decent.

The magic of Somebody is that we’ve removed all five of these barriers simply by constraining what the product can do.

The Magic of Somebody

1. Solving for choice paralysis: Somebody only has one template and you can’t edit it at all. You fill in your information, and Somebody renders your site. No choices necessary (or even possible).
2. Solving for perfectionism: Somebody doesn’t let you preview your site. If you want to see what your site looks like, you have to publish it. Even if you’re annoyed at first, we know that this is good for you in the long-run.
3. Solving for the content problem: Somebody doesn’t let you pick the content structure of your site. Every site has the same exact structure optimized for telling the perfect story.
4. Solving for hosting and domain setup: Somebody takes care of both things for you.
5. Solving for limited time: Because of its simplicity, you can make a solid Somebody site in 5–10 minutes. With another 30 minutes, you can create the best Somebody site ever made (with tons of beautiful projects and photos).

By taking away all your options, we let you focus on the only thing that matters: Your story. This is actually the “hard part” of making a personal site, but preventing you from getting distracted by all the easy, feels-productive kinds of things like changing fonts sizes and color schemes forces you to do the one thing that’s actually important.

That’s why Somebody is succeeding: The product is significantly more useful because we had the discipline to leave most stuff out. Building with constraints is way harder than building every conceivable feature, but it’s what makes a good product great.

If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter. — Mark Twain

As you build your product, think about how you can use less to give your users more. Do you really need all those validation messages, or configurable settings, or pricing options, or ways to sign up, or all those “cool” features, etc.?

Probably not. And not only are you spending time building things your users don’t need, you are building things that probably make the product experience worse.

Give users everything they need and nothing else, and they will love you for it. It’s the wonderful paradox of constraints.