Keep your axe Simple Stupid
Building things on the internet is an amazing thing to do. Anything you can imagine you can create. From that thing you imagined, you can imagine something else, and from that, something else, and from that… What if? How about? It would be cool if…
And why not keep piling on the features? More features means for value, right? More features means that your product is more attractive to more people… right? In theory yes, but in reality the best digital products and services begin life in a super simple form.
Amazon. The EVERYTHING STORE.
Books to T.V’s, Smart Speakers to Ebook readers. Amazon has everything and anything. No wonder it’s a $700 billion business. It easy to imagine that more categories you add to your e-commerce store the more people it will attract.
Cast your mind back to 1994…
Books. Just books.
Google. All the worlds information.
Search a term on google today and you’ll be returned websites, news articles, videos, images, shopping results, social links, tweets and more.
Back in 1997 you got a list of web pages. That was it.
Why were amazon and google’s original proposition so simple?
Explaining a new concept to someone is hard. Explaining 5 new concepts wrapped in one is 100 times harder. You want to be able to tell a prospective user that they should “use X to get Y done because it’s faster/cheaper/easier than Z”. Not “use X to get A, or B, or C, or D, or E, or F, or….. done”.
“But to compete I need do everything too”
This is something we often hear when working with founders while developing their product or service. The truth is, your advantage is that you don’t need to do everything.
Imagine you need to put a screw into a wall. Which would you reach for?
OR
The screwdriver is much easier to understand while also getting the job done much better. The Swiss Army Knife is complicated and probably going to round the head of your screw. Yeah, the Army Knife is going to be useful when your camping and want to put a screw up — but how often does that happen?
The blank canvas which comes with building a new product or service gives us the opportunity to create the screwdriver rather than the Swiss Army Knife.
Often, we get proposed “AirBNB for X”. Often the founder will have heard “AirBNB could do that easily”, and usually, it’s true. It might take the form of an extra feature on a property listing or a new search filter but AirBNB understand that they don’t want to become a Swiss Army Knife. “just add that feature in” is something they actively fight against. This is where opportunity lies for entrepreneurs to build the nail clippers or the bottle opener as a distinct product.
From the 10 feature ideas you have, you need to find the one which creates the most value. A simple way to calculate that is the amount of time your ideas saves a user multiplied by the size of that audience.
From that list, build and launch the one which produces the most value.
Think of that one feature as your axe. It will have a sharp specific edge that will deeply penetrate a specific section on a user base that have a specific thing they want to get done.
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