The power of one

The most important thing that determines the success of a restaurant is the quality of their food. That’s it. If you’re food is delicious, people will come and will (hopefully) bring their friends too. I even have a priority of places I go to based on the mood I’m feeling. The quality of the food determines how many customers they’ll get. Nothing else. It doesn’t matter if their chairs are handcrafted and flown in from Italy, or their carpet is hand woven by one of the greatest artisans in the eastern hemisphere, or the restaurant itself was created by a superstar celebrity. If the quality of your food sucks, people won’t come; but at the same time, if your food is incredible, customers will often forgive you for other things you lack.

Notice the parallelism that can be drawn between restaurants and startups. If your product doesn’t do one thing really really well, then it doesn’t matter what you do: you will fail. Simplicity is so important, but companies often mistake this for ‘underdeveloped’. They think that you need every feature in the world on the first version of the product because they believe that saying that “my product can do [a,b,c,d,e,f,g,h,i,j]” is better than “my product can do [a] REALLY REALLY well”. This is where the problem arises. When users first see your product, they need something to remember it by. But if you give them a billion things to remember, you will surely be forgotten and sometimes, avoided. Companies that master simplicity, mastering of one tool, will stand the test of time and succeed. Think about it, even after more than a decade of being around, we still think of Google for search, eBay for marketplace, and Youtube for videos — even though they’re a lot more than that. You need to define your company with this template: “[company name] for [1 thing you’re really good at]”. Figure this out, and the product will do the marketing for you.