7 ms·

"Take a competitor product, remove all features you don’t need, and make it crazy fast." Seems to me there are hundreds of lifestyle businesses just waiting to

by epaga 6y ago

"Take a competitor product, remove all features you don’t need, and make it crazy fast." Seems to me there are hundreds of lifestyle businesses just waiting to happen by following this formula. So many good ideas out there could be made so much better by reducing them to their essentials, but making them elegant and "crazy fast".

UncleMeat 6y ago
But what are the features you don’t need? That is not the same set for all users.
- avian 6y ago
  A small fraction of users of a big service is often enough to run a small, non-VC funded business.
  - vorpalhex 6y ago
    The moment your goal shifts from VC-backed acquisition or public offering bid to "I'd like to support myself and some employees comfortably" the things you can do profitably become almost endless. Want to run a little webhosting business focused on small businesses? Tried and true. Want to offer custom software development for some little vertical? Easy enough. Want to just make a really nice and clean note app? That works too. When your goal of success shifts from "mind boggingly rich" to "sufficient for the lifestyle I want", it's much easier to be successful.
- Sir_Substance 6y ago
  Yep. The late 90's and early 2000's was littered with people trying to make "light" copies of MS Word. The problem is that journalists need the wordcount feature, and teachers need the wordart feature. Remove either, you lose a demographic. That having been said, there are a lot of products out there that made their product intending it to be free, and then when they hit 1m users they started thinking "hmmm, if I could get a dollar out of every user, I could buy a house". They try to stuff a monetization model in sideways and damage their product in the process. Taking a moderately successful product that's crippled by attempting to shoehorn in monetization and redesigning it to have reasonable monetization from the beginning might be a better strategy.
  - elcomet 6y ago
    > Remove either, you lose a demographic. That's exactly the point of this approach. Don't try to solve everybody's use cases like Word. Target one specific group and make the product faster and easier to use by removing all unused features.
    - TheOtherHobbes 6y ago
      Word is a special case and I don't think the model works there - not least because users need an industry standard for content interchange, and it's very hard to build a 100% compatible Word clone. But there are a lot of opportunities elsewhere to make products that are faster, simpler, cheaper, and more useful than the current industry standards.
      - unnouinceput 6y ago
        Word is not a special case, it's just people getting used to it and that's all. If tomorrow Microsoft goes belly up and their office suite will be dropped by everybody due to always discovered vulnerabilities Libre Office will pick-up quite nicely. I have yet to find a feature of Word that I can't find its equivalent in Libre.
        icebraining 6y ago
        But Libre is a massive product was well, with a tremendous number of work hours put into it over decades. We're talking about alternatives that are nimble and have fewer features.
    - ghaff 6y ago
      That's sort of Google Docs/Sheets/Slides TBH (in addition to being hosted/shared). I'm not really a "power user" of any of these tools anymore. I use them a lot but I don't do anything fancy. That said, if Docs didn't have, say, a word count feature, that would be a major annoyance. I hate it when I have to use Word for something.
  - ClikeX 6y ago
stevoski 6y ago
Worked for me. That sums up so perfectly what I did with a B2B SaaS product of mine. I never found words so perfectly as this quote does to describe what I was aiming to do.
- elazzabi_ 6y ago
  Hey, OP here. I'm glad it resonated with you! I would love to take a look at your B2B project for inspiration if that's possible :)
  - tnorthcutt 6y ago
    https://featureupvote.com/ https://featureupvote.com/
    - mtm7 6y ago
      Really cool product! stevoski, if you see this and don't mind me asking, how do you position/sell a product that does less (but is more streamlined) than your competitors? When I've tried to cold-sell customers in the past, they often want that one feature (a random integration, feature matching from the service I'm replacing, etc.) and aren't willing to make the switch until I add it. Maybe this wouldn't be a problem if I was marketing instead of selling?
      - tnorthcutt 6y ago
        Just to be clear, that's not my product – I just looked at stevoski's profile.
  - ryaan_anthony 6y ago
    gonna make it faster?
  - lifeisstillgood 6y ago
    snap :-) Edit: Snap as in ditto - I would also like to know this, not Snap, the OP somehow founded SnapChat.
moonbug 6y ago
seems like he took out a few too many features..
treeman79 6y ago
Been forced to use Jira instead of pivotal tracker. Wow. Traded all useablity for endless features. Our setup barely works. And creating a story is such a massive pain. Sometimes things just won’t work. So I refuse to use it for stories beyond one mega story.
- nkrisc 6y ago
  One place I worked wanted multiple people to "own" a story, but JIRA doesn't work like that, so they implemented a totally new custom "owner" field that did allow it and then told everyone not to use the native owner field. Now you had to track everything two ways.
  - gen220 6y ago
    This isn't that bad. What makes this worse is when 1/3 of the teams in your org decide that they want a similar feature, but each comes up with their own custom-named tag ("owner", "lead", "point person", "point of contact", "jefe"). And then you want to run some jql queries against those tickets, and you have to use disgusting query generators to de-dupe the tag monstrosity. They've done an excellent job of giving you just enough features to shoot yourself in the foot with.
- snarf21 6y ago
  Exactly, Jira is garbage and only PjMs seem to like it. A spreadsheet is a better tool for actually tracking work.
  - jimmynopension 6y ago
    there is no work tracking tool better than .txt and asking people for updates. Maybe I should sell notepad as a fully extensible work prioritisation tracking platform that integrates with all email providers and now supports slack...
    - yvdriess 6y ago
      You want to sell a notepad org-mode mod?
oostevo 6y ago
I think you may have just re-discovered Disruptive Innovation (sometimes also called Disruption Theory): incumbents over-serve their customers by adding lots of features, complexity, and cost. Upstarts can attack them by focusing on only a few core features and/or low price. The incumbents can't respond without annoying their existing customers who have grown accustomed to all the features the incumbent provides. https://hbr.org/2015/12/what-is-disruptive-innovation https://hbr.org/2015/12/what-is-disruptive-innovation
- ip26 6y ago
  Is that really "innovation"? I thought that was pretty darn standard "business".
  - neuronic 6y ago
    Everything is innovation today. It's why every single tech presenter has to creepily emulate Steve Jobs in some way. To give you the innovation vibe.
- tachyonbeam 6y ago
  YouTube seems to be playing the boiling frog experiment with people. I started YouTubing in 2006 and there were no ads. Then, eventually they added monetization and you could place a single ad at the beginning of your videos. Now I see video with 10x two ads interspersed. You have to constantly click to bypass them. It's getting incredibly annoying, and it just seems greedy, especially coming from Google. That, combined with generally treating their content creators like they are completely disposable. I hope someday someone disrupts YouTube. It seems to me, besides the "network effect", the main difficulty here is unfortunately the cost of bandwidth. I could host a reddit clone from my home machine or some cheap VPS if I wanted and scale up to several thousand users, but video content at 5 megabits per second... How do you get bandwidth cheap enough to host that? Are there hosting providers that will just serve files over HTTP for super cheap?
  - unnouinceput 6y ago
    it's called uBlock Origins, available for all major browsers, try it, you'll be amazed. Haven't seen an ad on youtube since last decade (preemptive snark comment - current decade started on 1st Jan 2011 and will end on 31st Dec 2020).
munificent 6y ago
It's recipe for making a loved product, but necessarily a recipe for making a profitable business.
- Shared404 6y ago
  I think you dropped a 'not'.
  - munificent 6y ago
    Oops, yes!
Softcadbury 6y ago
Shameless plug! Following this formula, I made an app to have fast access to football results: https://footballpeek.com/ https://footballpeek.com/

by epaga 6y ago

UncleMeat 6y ago

But what are the features you don’t need? That is not the same set for all users.

avian 6y ago
A small fraction of users of a big service is often enough to run a small, non-VC funded business.
- vorpalhex 6y ago
  The moment your goal shifts from VC-backed acquisition or public offering bid to "I'd like to support myself and some employees comfortably" the things you can do profitably become almost endless. Want to run a little webhosting business focused on small businesses? Tried and true. Want to offer custom software development for some little vertical? Easy enough. Want to just make a really nice and clean note app? That works too. When your goal of success shifts from "mind boggingly rich" to "sufficient for the lifestyle I want", it's much easier to be successful.
Sir_Substance 6y ago
Yep. The late 90's and early 2000's was littered with people trying to make "light" copies of MS Word. The problem is that journalists need the wordcount feature, and teachers need the wordart feature. Remove either, you lose a demographic. That having been said, there are a lot of products out there that made their product intending it to be free, and then when they hit 1m users they started thinking "hmmm, if I could get a dollar out of every user, I could buy a house". They try to stuff a monetization model in sideways and damage their product in the process. Taking a moderately successful product that's crippled by attempting to shoehorn in monetization and redesigning it to have reasonable monetization from the beginning might be a better strategy.
- elcomet 6y ago
  > Remove either, you lose a demographic. That's exactly the point of this approach. Don't try to solve everybody's use cases like Word. Target one specific group and make the product faster and easier to use by removing all unused features.
  - TheOtherHobbes 6y ago
    Word is a special case and I don't think the model works there - not least because users need an industry standard for content interchange, and it's very hard to build a 100% compatible Word clone. But there are a lot of opportunities elsewhere to make products that are faster, simpler, cheaper, and more useful than the current industry standards.
    - unnouinceput 6y ago
      Word is not a special case, it's just people getting used to it and that's all. If tomorrow Microsoft goes belly up and their office suite will be dropped by everybody due to always discovered vulnerabilities Libre Office will pick-up quite nicely. I have yet to find a feature of Word that I can't find its equivalent in Libre.
      - icebraining 6y ago
        But Libre is a massive product was well, with a tremendous number of work hours put into it over decades. We're talking about alternatives that are nimble and have fewer features.
  - ghaff 6y ago
    That's sort of Google Docs/Sheets/Slides TBH (in addition to being hosted/shared). I'm not really a "power user" of any of these tools anymore. I use them a lot but I don't do anything fancy. That said, if Docs didn't have, say, a word count feature, that would be a major annoyance. I hate it when I have to use Word for something.
- ClikeX 6y ago

stevoski 6y ago

Worked for me. That sums up so perfectly what I did with a B2B SaaS product of mine. I never found words so perfectly as this quote does to describe what I was aiming to do.

elazzabi_ 6y ago
Hey, OP here. I'm glad it resonated with you! I would love to take a look at your B2B project for inspiration if that's possible :)
- tnorthcutt 6y ago
  https://featureupvote.com/ https://featureupvote.com/
  - mtm7 6y ago
    Really cool product! stevoski, if you see this and don't mind me asking, how do you position/sell a product that does less (but is more streamlined) than your competitors? When I've tried to cold-sell customers in the past, they often want that one feature (a random integration, feature matching from the service I'm replacing, etc.) and aren't willing to make the switch until I add it. Maybe this wouldn't be a problem if I was marketing instead of selling?
    - tnorthcutt 6y ago
      Just to be clear, that's not my product – I just looked at stevoski's profile.
- ryaan_anthony 6y ago
  gonna make it faster?
- lifeisstillgood 6y ago
  snap :-) Edit: Snap as in ditto - I would also like to know this, not Snap, the OP somehow founded SnapChat.

moonbug 6y ago

seems like he took out a few too many features..

treeman79 6y ago

Been forced to use Jira instead of pivotal tracker. Wow. Traded all useablity for endless features. Our setup barely works. And creating a story is such a massive pain. Sometimes things just won’t work. So I refuse to use it for stories beyond one mega story.

nkrisc 6y ago
One place I worked wanted multiple people to "own" a story, but JIRA doesn't work like that, so they implemented a totally new custom "owner" field that did allow it and then told everyone not to use the native owner field. Now you had to track everything two ways.
- gen220 6y ago
  This isn't that bad. What makes this worse is when 1/3 of the teams in your org decide that they want a similar feature, but each comes up with their own custom-named tag ("owner", "lead", "point person", "point of contact", "jefe"). And then you want to run some jql queries against those tickets, and you have to use disgusting query generators to de-dupe the tag monstrosity. They've done an excellent job of giving you just enough features to shoot yourself in the foot with.
snarf21 6y ago
Exactly, Jira is garbage and only PjMs seem to like it. A spreadsheet is a better tool for actually tracking work.
- jimmynopension 6y ago
  there is no work tracking tool better than .txt and asking people for updates. Maybe I should sell notepad as a fully extensible work prioritisation tracking platform that integrates with all email providers and now supports slack...
  - yvdriess 6y ago
    You want to sell a notepad org-mode mod?

oostevo 6y ago

I think you may have just re-discovered Disruptive Innovation (sometimes also called Disruption Theory): incumbents over-serve their customers by adding lots of features, complexity, and cost. Upstarts can attack them by focusing on only a few core features and/or low price. The incumbents can't respond without annoying their existing customers who have grown accustomed to all the features the incumbent provides. https://hbr.org/2015/12/what-is-disruptive-innovation https://hbr.org/2015/12/what-is-disruptive-innovation

ip26 6y ago
Is that really "innovation"? I thought that was pretty darn standard "business".
- neuronic 6y ago
  Everything is innovation today. It's why every single tech presenter has to creepily emulate Steve Jobs in some way. To give you the innovation vibe.
tachyonbeam 6y ago
YouTube seems to be playing the boiling frog experiment with people. I started YouTubing in 2006 and there were no ads. Then, eventually they added monetization and you could place a single ad at the beginning of your videos. Now I see video with 10x two ads interspersed. You have to constantly click to bypass them. It's getting incredibly annoying, and it just seems greedy, especially coming from Google. That, combined with generally treating their content creators like they are completely disposable. I hope someday someone disrupts YouTube. It seems to me, besides the "network effect", the main difficulty here is unfortunately the cost of bandwidth. I could host a reddit clone from my home machine or some cheap VPS if I wanted and scale up to several thousand users, but video content at 5 megabits per second... How do you get bandwidth cheap enough to host that? Are there hosting providers that will just serve files over HTTP for super cheap?
- unnouinceput 6y ago
  it's called uBlock Origins, available for all major browsers, try it, you'll be amazed. Haven't seen an ad on youtube since last decade (preemptive snark comment - current decade started on 1st Jan 2011 and will end on 31st Dec 2020).

munificent 6y ago

It's recipe for making a loved product, but necessarily a recipe for making a profitable business.

Shared404 6y ago
I think you dropped a 'not'.
- munificent 6y ago
  Oops, yes!

Softcadbury 6y ago

Shameless plug! Following this formula, I made an app to have fast access to football results: https://footballpeek.com/ https://footballpeek.com/