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> I kept finding myself using a small amount of the features while the rest just mostly got in the way. So a few years ago I set out to build a design tool just

> I kept finding myself using a small amount of the features while the rest just mostly got in the way. So a few years ago I set out to build a design tool just like I wanted. So I built Vecti with what I actually need... Joel Spolsky said (I'm paraphrasing) that everybody only uses 20% of a given program's features, but the problem is that everyone is using a different 20%, so you can't ship an "unbloated" version and expect it to still work for most people. So it looks like you've built something really cool, but I have to ask what makes you think that the features that are personally important to you are the same features that other potential users need? Since this clearly seems to be something you're trying to create a business out of rather than just a personal hobby project. I'm curious how you went about customer research and market validation for the specific subset of features that you chose to develop?

nielsbot 9mo ago
I think a successful product strategy can be "build something you love, see if others love it too". If that's enough customers, you can judiciously expand out from there. The "fail honestly" method. I think the Apple II is one example of this.
- reactordev 9mo ago
  >”you can judiciously expand out from there” Which is where the bulk of the other 80% of features come from. It’s a cycle. You start as you describe, you expand, you end up with this enterprise monstrosity, everyone using a different 20%. New tool comes along, you start as you describe…
  - nielsbot 9mo ago
    Assuming it's enterprise software.. then maybe? Hopefully you can afford to say "No" a lot.
- dvt 9mo ago
  This is the best way to build products imo. I'm like this, and I've been accused of being very "vibes-based." However, that's a way more tractable way of shipping stuff instead of "well Jim said he wants X, but Amy said she wants Y" so you end up just kind of half-assing features because you think they might get you users, instead of just being passionately all-in into a very defined product vision (which is a very Jobsian way of doing things). It's also easier to run a feedback loop. If you implement Y, but Amy doesn't give you $5 a month, what are you going to do? Knock on her door? Users have no idea what they want half the time, anyway. If you build a product and no one cares, it bruises the ego a bit more, sure, but if you self reflect, you can eek out your own bad assumptions, or bad implementation, or maybe a way to pivot that keeps your product ethos.
  - linkregister 9mo ago
    In order for this to work, you have to possess good taste. Not everyone has it, and it often does not translate across domains.
    - nerdsniper 9mo ago
      Good taste is an incredibly powerful differentiator in competitive markets like software. Seems like there’s 3-5 decent choices for darn near anything I need, and usually 1 smaller team has the product that stands head and shoulders above the rest.
      - raw_anon_1111 9mo ago
        Unfortunately, good taste doesn’t matter for a successful software product. First let’s look at B2B, there the “user is not the buyer”. The buyer doesn’t care about “good taste” they care about a lot of other things. (“Where is my SSO support for multiple users, I’m not going to have my IT department worry about tracking down usernames when Bob leaves) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46919794 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46919794 Second, if you have the feature that people need or a service or network effect, they will suffer through a bad app - see every Electron app ever. That “smaller team” may not be around in a year and if you are lucky, you’ll get an “Our Amazing Journey” blog post. Does this product export to a format that my design team can import into Figma if this product goes tits up?
- thfuran 9mo ago
  If ten people make focused tools covering different 20% subsets of the giant ones, there's a good chance of having a choice that matches what any given customer wants. And for most customers, that's going to be a better match than a big tool that does tons of other stuff they didn't want.
  - dotancohen 9mo ago
    How do the consumers find which of the dozen tools support the 20% they need?
    - Zopieux 9mo ago
      By, get this, trying out the products. Revolutionary.
      - crazygringo 9mo ago
        How about less snark? Especially when, who the heck has time for trying out a dozen products? That's at least a full day of work, which probably costs more than the software itself. No, you just read a few reviews to find the best full price option and best budget option and figure out if the budget does what you need or not. And often go for full price just because you don't even know what features you'll need in 6 months which you don't need now, so safer to just learn the option that is the most future-proof.
        ctxc 9mo ago
        You're right. Even across stuff I _really_ use it's hard to bring myself to try. Anecdotally I haven't tried Codex and use Claude Code. The day I try Codex will be when I hear from my friends/communities that it's much better. Same for IDEs, STT tools, etc
        Aditya_Garg 9mo ago
        I tried codex on a whim when my Claude code rate limited me. Canceled my max subscription and stuck with codex
james2doyle 9mo ago
Makes me wish more apps had feature toggles
- deleted 9mo ago
  [deleted]
- roberthahn 9mo ago
  The testing that would be required to support toggles would be for 2^n. I’m not sure that’s a good solution.
  - dlcarrier 9mo ago
    Makes me wish more apps followed the UNIX model of separating every feature into separate applications with well documented interfaces that only change when new features absolutely require it and otherwise are only updated for security patches.
    - roberthahn 9mo ago
      Yeah I like that idea too. Theres a lot of people who would have trouble with that approach though.
    - AlienRobot 9mo ago
      One common case I notice this is with FFMPEG. Everything that saves a video needs its own dialog with different settings. It would make a lot more sense if you had 1 single polished FFMPEG frontend that everyone just streamed data to. On the other hand, I'm afraid that if this did happen that FFMPEG frontend would look like a GNOME app and I would hate using it.
      - mylastattempt 9mo ago
        Me, on the other hand, love ffmpeg, because I notice my ytdlp using it and my vlc player sometimes using it and I have two homemade powrshell scripts using it to convert flac to mp3 and whatever. I don't want to open a program and figure out it's UI for those things. It has a job, it does it well, you can sort of pipe things to it and I'm very happy.
dlcarrier 9mo ago
I feel like HTML and CSS could remove 90% of the functionality and only affect 1% of developers, then we could get some actually good web browsers.
- drob518 9mo ago
  The issue here is backwards compatibility with web pages that will never be updated. Nobody wants a browser that works with “most of the web.”
  - dotancohen 9mo ago
    For this was invented Quirks Mode.
    - crazygringo 9mo ago
      Oh god. I world have been happy if I'd never heard that term again... flashbacks. :P
  - raw_anon_1111 9mo ago
    Well they did get rid of the blink tag https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Glossary/blink_element https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Glossary/blink_elem... And Gopher support…
    - rapnie 9mo ago
      And soon XSLT. https://xslt.rip/ https://xslt.rip/
    - drob518 9mo ago
      True. After two decades, though.
cosmic_cheese 9mo ago
> Joel Spolsky said (I'm paraphrasing) that everybody only uses 20% of a given program's features, but the problem is that everyone is using a different 20%, so you can't ship an "unbloated" version and expect it to still work for most people. To me this is an argument for more apps that do less extremely well instead of a handful of apps that do everything poorly. There's nothing wrong with a tool that's honed for very specific user. They'll never hyperscale, but that's also fine. Or then again maybe they can. Google Docs is plenty popular despite being closer to WordPad or TextEdit in terms of functionality than it is to MS Word.
- Hammershaft 9mo ago
  Then you'll need interoperability of development artifacts to work with teams.
  - andrekandre 9mo ago
    opendoc remembers...
    - raw_anon_1111 9mo ago
      Nah it’s 2026, you have to have an MCP server.
    - alsetmusic 9mo ago
      "I'm a developer who hates your decision to kill that tech. Can you please talk about your shitty adventure before you became CEO of this company cause I want to embarrass you?" Then Steve Jobs gives one of his most memorable statements about building good products while ignoring the taunt.[0] I got your reference. Cyberdog! 0. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oeqPrUmVz-o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oeqPrUmVz-o
      - andrekandre 9mo ago
        yes, haha, steve really showed he was ceo material there fr for reference if anyone is interested in poor old cyberdog (and the meme reference): https://oldvcr.blogspot.com/2023/10/teaching-apple-cyberdog-10-new-tricks.html https://oldvcr.blogspot.com/2023/10/teaching-apple-cyberdog-...
PeterStuer 9mo ago
"everyone is using a different 20%" In my experience, what people use is very malleable to how easy/good the flows are they are presented with. Given 100 equal options, they might use 20, and nobody picks the same 20, but given 25 options, 20 of which present a very good experience, almost 90% will go with those 20 without complaints.
Alex63 9mo ago
A quick web search suggests that you are probably paraphrasing a newsletter [1] that Joel Spolsky published in 2001. He was talking about software like Excel (of which he was the Product Manager) and Word. Maybe a tool that is more focused on a narrower task (like UI design) can be less "bloated"? [1] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/03/23/strategy-letter-iv-bloatware-and-the-8020-myth/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/03/23/strategy-letter-iv...
- conductr 9mo ago
  Agree. This quote is being used out of context here. Niche software can and does succeed especially when it’s only supporting a single dev. This isn’t trying to dethrone an adobe product, or doesn’t need to.
  - raw_anon_1111 9mo ago
    A tool focusing on design is not “niche software” - every company of any size has designers. It’s trying to get professionals to use their software instead of Figma. Why would I move my team from an industry standard that they know or would be willing to learn because they know it will be important at their n+1 job?
    - conductr 9mo ago
      Why did they move to figma from adobe? There’s tons of purpose built design software. I use a few different tools just for pixel art recently as I’m designing a game. I could use adobe or probably figma but this purpose built software made it super easy to focus on my one single design goal. What you’re saying is basically a majority of SaaS shouldn’t exist because it could just be an excel spreadsheet. Why would anyone pay for a subscription or something when they already pay for excel right? Problem is spreadsheets are a blank canvas and can be difficult for people to build. Just like a design software like adobes and figma. This product is trying to focus on one particular use case of design software and simplify it. It’s not a horrible idea and can exist in the market. I’m not sure it will succeed but conceptually it’s not destined to fail for the this reason. I think you need to also define what success means. For a single dev, could just be a thousand paying users. He’s not necessarily trying to be figma. My most successful company was a tool that focused on 10% of a ERP feature. One that I had used and implemented at corporates but knew ERP vendors were selling hard for having 100s of features of which I only cared about 20%. Not everyone cared about those same 20% but I found enough people that did and liked my opinionated take on the software. It would have never worked if I had this mindset.
vitaflo 9mo ago
Maybe the problem with software is feeling the need to satisfy 100% of users instead of being OK with "only" 20%. Not everything needs to be a min/max problem.
- drob518 9mo ago
  As long as the 20% is enough to sustain your company, sure. You might have to charge more, however. Luxury brands do this, for instance (fewer consumers is actually a strategic choice to make the product more exclusive). “Pro” products also do this (though often “pro” means more features, not fewer).
- crazygringo 9mo ago
  The point is that 20% of features doesn't satisfy even 20% of users. It's going to be only a tiny fraction of that because something like 99% of potential users are going to need at least one feature outside the 20%. And if a competitor has all the features they need, but you don't, then you lose the sale.
TheGRS 9mo ago
Every now and then I stumble on video game developers who have been chugging along for many years, even decades with a handful of dedicated fans. They make obscure niche games that play so well into that niche that they can sustain themselves. Honestly this is something I'd aspire to get to eventually, building a niche product that I love and that just enough people love that I could live sustainably on it, not trying to please anyone but a little collective of people who all agree on what the product should be.
- moritonal 9mo ago
  Creeper World, am I right?
  - somenameforme 9mo ago
    This is a far bigger small world than some might expect. The number of devs and games he's referring to numbers well into the thousands. A quick search [1] shows more than 4 games are released per day on Steam which will go on to earn more than $50k in revenue, so about 1500 per year. It's wild - I'm a big gamer but I strongly doubt I could even list 1500 games across all systems and time. And that many games make $50k+ each year. [1] - https://gameworldobserver.com/2023/10/06/steam-stats-41k-games-last-3-years-half-made-500-or-less https://gameworldobserver.com/2023/10/06/steam-stats-41k-gam...
    - TheGRS 9mo ago
      It's crazy! I don't think anyone in my sphere is some hardcore fan of a niche game. But then I stumble on them in the marketplace or watching some GDC talk and it's like, wow this solo dev has been making this obscure series of games for 20 years and they live comfortably (but not extravagantly) with their family. Good on them! I'm really just describing the long tail at this point. Gives me hope that maybe I can find that product before getting to retirement age.
socalgal2 9mo ago
Could it be more people want Instagram instead of Photoshop? Take a picture, choose from one of 10 filters. Have a ~12 adjustable settings. Vs Photoshop's 1000s of options. Like lots of people prefer Trader Joes (limited selection) to a bigger super market
FridgeSeal 9mo ago
I for one, would certainly prefer a wider ecosystem of _more refined_, less bloated tools. The current system of a near-monoculture of garbage sucks.
gchamonlive 9mo ago
> what makes you think that the features that are personally important to you are the same features that other potential users need? I think this is a weird question. Sure he can't be the only soul in the world to need only those features. Those 20% people need gotta overlap. So I think a more generous way to read your question would be "what makes you think that the features that are personally important to you are the same features that the mass audience need?". If that's what you meant then I'd ask why appealing to the mass audience so important? Why maximize sales and risk making your product worse if the core of your product is to make things you care about?
esperent 9mo ago
> everybody only uses 20% of a given program's features, but the problem is that everyone is using a different 20% This is a phrase that gets repeated and it sounds clever. But it's completely at odds with statistics, specifically the normal distribution. We should say, people use 80-90% the same features, and then there's a tail of less common features that only some people use but are very important to them. This is why plugin systems for apps are so important. You can build an app that supports the 80% with a tightly designed set of core features, and if someone needs to go outside of those they can use/build a plugin.
Terretta 9mo ago
> what makes you think that the features that are personally important to you are the same features that other potential users need? Good question, what's the pitch: “Vecti is a browser-based UI design tool built from the ground up with one core belief, that creators deserve tools built specifically for them. Better performance, better privacy, and better alignment with their actual needs. A tool that just works, built by someone who genuinely cares about the people using it.” Hmm. Did founders of Balsamiq or Figma not care about the people using it? And who if not creators were they built for? “Share & Present - Set viewer and editor permissions at the team or project level. When it's time to present … let your work shine.” Oh, right, for the people who pay the creator.
zaidf 9mo ago
He was talking about Excel. Google Sheets with a tiny fraction of Excel features destroyed Excel except for a tiny minority of hardcore finance and Windows users.
phyzix5761 9mo ago
Assuming a big enough audience, that 20% can still be significant enough to build a business around.
Aldipower 9mo ago
"customer research and market validation". This is a provocative joke, isn't it? Could you elaborate a little bit more, how a sole developer should do these things in a meaningful way, if even larger companies and start-ups fail with this?
- crazygringo 9mo ago
  Not at all. The most basic way is to do a 30 min interview with 20 designers that cover a few each of freelance, small company, med company, large company. Find out which features they use and don't, and what their pain points are, and whether a tool with less features is something that would be majorly helpful or not very important. Then do a round of validation with AdWords, can you get designers to click on the ad for something advertised as simpler and bloat-free, go to a landing page that explains what it has and doesn't have, and then put it their email to find out when it launches. To me, that is the absolute bare minimum to make sure you're developing something that can be a business, rather than just a hobby for yourself. And these are not my ideas or anything. They're pretty standard stuff, and there's a lot more you can and should do as well.
  - terwindt 9mo ago
    [dead]
kkkqkqkqkqlqlql 9mo ago
> Joel Spolsky said (I'm paraphrasing) that everybody only uses 20% of a given program's features, but the problem is that everyone is using a different 20%, so you can't ship an "unbloated" version and expect it to still work for most people. I remember reading something like this while talking about developing in C++.
bryanrasmussen 9mo ago
Assuming that users only use 20% of the program and that the usage is evenly distributed, which would be a really big assumption right there, then there is still a finite number of users before you will have used up every part of program functionality between your user base and that any users past that amount will be repeating an actual and specific percentage of program functionality already assigned to some other user, unless you want to argue that functionality can be reduced infinitesimally in a sort of Zeno-like process. If you agree however that functionality profiles will repeat among users given a large enough user base then it implies a particular limited feature set can still be totally adequate to support program development. And that is with assumptions stacked against you succeeding, if indeed, as would seem likely, that some user profiles are more widely distributed than others it would follow that a successful product can just focus on those.

nielsbot 9mo ago

I think a successful product strategy can be "build something you love, see if others love it too". If that's enough customers, you can judiciously expand out from there. The "fail honestly" method. I think the Apple II is one example of this.

reactordev 9mo ago
>”you can judiciously expand out from there” Which is where the bulk of the other 80% of features come from. It’s a cycle. You start as you describe, you expand, you end up with this enterprise monstrosity, everyone using a different 20%. New tool comes along, you start as you describe…
- nielsbot 9mo ago
  Assuming it's enterprise software.. then maybe? Hopefully you can afford to say "No" a lot.
dvt 9mo ago
This is the best way to build products imo. I'm like this, and I've been accused of being very "vibes-based." However, that's a way more tractable way of shipping stuff instead of "well Jim said he wants X, but Amy said she wants Y" so you end up just kind of half-assing features because you think they might get you users, instead of just being passionately all-in into a very defined product vision (which is a very Jobsian way of doing things). It's also easier to run a feedback loop. If you implement Y, but Amy doesn't give you $5 a month, what are you going to do? Knock on her door? Users have no idea what they want half the time, anyway. If you build a product and no one cares, it bruises the ego a bit more, sure, but if you self reflect, you can eek out your own bad assumptions, or bad implementation, or maybe a way to pivot that keeps your product ethos.
- linkregister 9mo ago
  In order for this to work, you have to possess good taste. Not everyone has it, and it often does not translate across domains.
  - nerdsniper 9mo ago
    Good taste is an incredibly powerful differentiator in competitive markets like software. Seems like there’s 3-5 decent choices for darn near anything I need, and usually 1 smaller team has the product that stands head and shoulders above the rest.
    - raw_anon_1111 9mo ago
      Unfortunately, good taste doesn’t matter for a successful software product. First let’s look at B2B, there the “user is not the buyer”. The buyer doesn’t care about “good taste” they care about a lot of other things. (“Where is my SSO support for multiple users, I’m not going to have my IT department worry about tracking down usernames when Bob leaves) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46919794 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46919794 Second, if you have the feature that people need or a service or network effect, they will suffer through a bad app - see every Electron app ever. That “smaller team” may not be around in a year and if you are lucky, you’ll get an “Our Amazing Journey” blog post. Does this product export to a format that my design team can import into Figma if this product goes tits up?
thfuran 9mo ago
If ten people make focused tools covering different 20% subsets of the giant ones, there's a good chance of having a choice that matches what any given customer wants. And for most customers, that's going to be a better match than a big tool that does tons of other stuff they didn't want.
- dotancohen 9mo ago
  How do the consumers find which of the dozen tools support the 20% they need?
  - Zopieux 9mo ago
    By, get this, trying out the products. Revolutionary.
    - crazygringo 9mo ago
      How about less snark? Especially when, who the heck has time for trying out a dozen products? That's at least a full day of work, which probably costs more than the software itself. No, you just read a few reviews to find the best full price option and best budget option and figure out if the budget does what you need or not. And often go for full price just because you don't even know what features you'll need in 6 months which you don't need now, so safer to just learn the option that is the most future-proof.
      - ctxc 9mo ago
        You're right. Even across stuff I _really_ use it's hard to bring myself to try. Anecdotally I haven't tried Codex and use Claude Code. The day I try Codex will be when I hear from my friends/communities that it's much better. Same for IDEs, STT tools, etc
        Aditya_Garg 9mo ago
        I tried codex on a whim when my Claude code rate limited me. Canceled my max subscription and stuck with codex

james2doyle 9mo ago

Makes me wish more apps had feature toggles

deleted 9mo ago
[deleted]
roberthahn 9mo ago
The testing that would be required to support toggles would be for 2^n. I’m not sure that’s a good solution.
- dlcarrier 9mo ago
  Makes me wish more apps followed the UNIX model of separating every feature into separate applications with well documented interfaces that only change when new features absolutely require it and otherwise are only updated for security patches.
  - roberthahn 9mo ago
    Yeah I like that idea too. Theres a lot of people who would have trouble with that approach though.
  - AlienRobot 9mo ago
    One common case I notice this is with FFMPEG. Everything that saves a video needs its own dialog with different settings. It would make a lot more sense if you had 1 single polished FFMPEG frontend that everyone just streamed data to. On the other hand, I'm afraid that if this did happen that FFMPEG frontend would look like a GNOME app and I would hate using it.
    - mylastattempt 9mo ago
      Me, on the other hand, love ffmpeg, because I notice my ytdlp using it and my vlc player sometimes using it and I have two homemade powrshell scripts using it to convert flac to mp3 and whatever. I don't want to open a program and figure out it's UI for those things. It has a job, it does it well, you can sort of pipe things to it and I'm very happy.

dlcarrier 9mo ago

I feel like HTML and CSS could remove 90% of the functionality and only affect 1% of developers, then we could get some actually good web browsers.

drob518 9mo ago
The issue here is backwards compatibility with web pages that will never be updated. Nobody wants a browser that works with “most of the web.”
- dotancohen 9mo ago
  For this was invented Quirks Mode.
  - crazygringo 9mo ago
    Oh god. I world have been happy if I'd never heard that term again... flashbacks. :P
- raw_anon_1111 9mo ago
  Well they did get rid of the blink tag https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Glossary/blink_element https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Glossary/blink_elem... And Gopher support…
  - rapnie 9mo ago
    And soon XSLT. https://xslt.rip/ https://xslt.rip/
  - drob518 9mo ago
    True. After two decades, though.

cosmic_cheese 9mo ago

> Joel Spolsky said (I'm paraphrasing) that everybody only uses 20% of a given program's features, but the problem is that everyone is using a different 20%, so you can't ship an "unbloated" version and expect it to still work for most people. To me this is an argument for more apps that do less extremely well instead of a handful of apps that do everything poorly. There's nothing wrong with a tool that's honed for very specific user. They'll never hyperscale, but that's also fine. Or then again maybe they can. Google Docs is plenty popular despite being closer to WordPad or TextEdit in terms of functionality than it is to MS Word.

Hammershaft 9mo ago
Then you'll need interoperability of development artifacts to work with teams.
- andrekandre 9mo ago
  opendoc remembers...
  - raw_anon_1111 9mo ago
    Nah it’s 2026, you have to have an MCP server.
  - alsetmusic 9mo ago
    "I'm a developer who hates your decision to kill that tech. Can you please talk about your shitty adventure before you became CEO of this company cause I want to embarrass you?" Then Steve Jobs gives one of his most memorable statements about building good products while ignoring the taunt.[0] I got your reference. Cyberdog! 0. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oeqPrUmVz-o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oeqPrUmVz-o
    - andrekandre 9mo ago
      yes, haha, steve really showed he was ceo material there fr for reference if anyone is interested in poor old cyberdog (and the meme reference): https://oldvcr.blogspot.com/2023/10/teaching-apple-cyberdog-10-new-tricks.html https://oldvcr.blogspot.com/2023/10/teaching-apple-cyberdog-...

PeterStuer 9mo ago

"everyone is using a different 20%" In my experience, what people use is very malleable to how easy/good the flows are they are presented with. Given 100 equal options, they might use 20, and nobody picks the same 20, but given 25 options, 20 of which present a very good experience, almost 90% will go with those 20 without complaints.

Alex63 9mo ago

A quick web search suggests that you are probably paraphrasing a newsletter [1] that Joel Spolsky published in 2001. He was talking about software like Excel (of which he was the Product Manager) and Word. Maybe a tool that is more focused on a narrower task (like UI design) can be less "bloated"? [1] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/03/23/strategy-letter-iv-bloatware-and-the-8020-myth/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/03/23/strategy-letter-iv...

conductr 9mo ago
Agree. This quote is being used out of context here. Niche software can and does succeed especially when it’s only supporting a single dev. This isn’t trying to dethrone an adobe product, or doesn’t need to.
- raw_anon_1111 9mo ago
  A tool focusing on design is not “niche software” - every company of any size has designers. It’s trying to get professionals to use their software instead of Figma. Why would I move my team from an industry standard that they know or would be willing to learn because they know it will be important at their n+1 job?
  - conductr 9mo ago
    Why did they move to figma from adobe? There’s tons of purpose built design software. I use a few different tools just for pixel art recently as I’m designing a game. I could use adobe or probably figma but this purpose built software made it super easy to focus on my one single design goal. What you’re saying is basically a majority of SaaS shouldn’t exist because it could just be an excel spreadsheet. Why would anyone pay for a subscription or something when they already pay for excel right? Problem is spreadsheets are a blank canvas and can be difficult for people to build. Just like a design software like adobes and figma. This product is trying to focus on one particular use case of design software and simplify it. It’s not a horrible idea and can exist in the market. I’m not sure it will succeed but conceptually it’s not destined to fail for the this reason. I think you need to also define what success means. For a single dev, could just be a thousand paying users. He’s not necessarily trying to be figma. My most successful company was a tool that focused on 10% of a ERP feature. One that I had used and implemented at corporates but knew ERP vendors were selling hard for having 100s of features of which I only cared about 20%. Not everyone cared about those same 20% but I found enough people that did and liked my opinionated take on the software. It would have never worked if I had this mindset.

vitaflo 9mo ago

Maybe the problem with software is feeling the need to satisfy 100% of users instead of being OK with "only" 20%. Not everything needs to be a min/max problem.

drob518 9mo ago
As long as the 20% is enough to sustain your company, sure. You might have to charge more, however. Luxury brands do this, for instance (fewer consumers is actually a strategic choice to make the product more exclusive). “Pro” products also do this (though often “pro” means more features, not fewer).
crazygringo 9mo ago
The point is that 20% of features doesn't satisfy even 20% of users. It's going to be only a tiny fraction of that because something like 99% of potential users are going to need at least one feature outside the 20%. And if a competitor has all the features they need, but you don't, then you lose the sale.

TheGRS 9mo ago

Every now and then I stumble on video game developers who have been chugging along for many years, even decades with a handful of dedicated fans. They make obscure niche games that play so well into that niche that they can sustain themselves. Honestly this is something I'd aspire to get to eventually, building a niche product that I love and that just enough people love that I could live sustainably on it, not trying to please anyone but a little collective of people who all agree on what the product should be.

moritonal 9mo ago
Creeper World, am I right?
- somenameforme 9mo ago
  This is a far bigger small world than some might expect. The number of devs and games he's referring to numbers well into the thousands. A quick search [1] shows more than 4 games are released per day on Steam which will go on to earn more than $50k in revenue, so about 1500 per year. It's wild - I'm a big gamer but I strongly doubt I could even list 1500 games across all systems and time. And that many games make $50k+ each year. [1] - https://gameworldobserver.com/2023/10/06/steam-stats-41k-games-last-3-years-half-made-500-or-less https://gameworldobserver.com/2023/10/06/steam-stats-41k-gam...
  - TheGRS 9mo ago
    It's crazy! I don't think anyone in my sphere is some hardcore fan of a niche game. But then I stumble on them in the marketplace or watching some GDC talk and it's like, wow this solo dev has been making this obscure series of games for 20 years and they live comfortably (but not extravagantly) with their family. Good on them! I'm really just describing the long tail at this point. Gives me hope that maybe I can find that product before getting to retirement age.

socalgal2 9mo ago

Could it be more people want Instagram instead of Photoshop? Take a picture, choose from one of 10 filters. Have a ~12 adjustable settings. Vs Photoshop's 1000s of options. Like lots of people prefer Trader Joes (limited selection) to a bigger super market

FridgeSeal 9mo ago

I for one, would certainly prefer a wider ecosystem of _more refined_, less bloated tools. The current system of a near-monoculture of garbage sucks.

gchamonlive 9mo ago

> what makes you think that the features that are personally important to you are the same features that other potential users need? I think this is a weird question. Sure he can't be the only soul in the world to need only those features. Those 20% people need gotta overlap. So I think a more generous way to read your question would be "what makes you think that the features that are personally important to you are the same features that the mass audience need?". If that's what you meant then I'd ask why appealing to the mass audience so important? Why maximize sales and risk making your product worse if the core of your product is to make things you care about?

esperent 9mo ago

> everybody only uses 20% of a given program's features, but the problem is that everyone is using a different 20% This is a phrase that gets repeated and it sounds clever. But it's completely at odds with statistics, specifically the normal distribution. We should say, people use 80-90% the same features, and then there's a tail of less common features that only some people use but are very important to them. This is why plugin systems for apps are so important. You can build an app that supports the 80% with a tightly designed set of core features, and if someone needs to go outside of those they can use/build a plugin.

Terretta 9mo ago

> what makes you think that the features that are personally important to you are the same features that other potential users need? Good question, what's the pitch: “Vecti is a browser-based UI design tool built from the ground up with one core belief, that creators deserve tools built specifically for them. Better performance, better privacy, and better alignment with their actual needs. A tool that just works, built by someone who genuinely cares about the people using it.” Hmm. Did founders of Balsamiq or Figma not care about the people using it? And who if not creators were they built for? “Share & Present - Set viewer and editor permissions at the team or project level. When it's time to present … let your work shine.” Oh, right, for the people who pay the creator.

zaidf 9mo ago

He was talking about Excel. Google Sheets with a tiny fraction of Excel features destroyed Excel except for a tiny minority of hardcore finance and Windows users.

phyzix5761 9mo ago

Assuming a big enough audience, that 20% can still be significant enough to build a business around.

Aldipower 9mo ago

"customer research and market validation". This is a provocative joke, isn't it? Could you elaborate a little bit more, how a sole developer should do these things in a meaningful way, if even larger companies and start-ups fail with this?

crazygringo 9mo ago
Not at all. The most basic way is to do a 30 min interview with 20 designers that cover a few each of freelance, small company, med company, large company. Find out which features they use and don't, and what their pain points are, and whether a tool with less features is something that would be majorly helpful or not very important. Then do a round of validation with AdWords, can you get designers to click on the ad for something advertised as simpler and bloat-free, go to a landing page that explains what it has and doesn't have, and then put it their email to find out when it launches. To me, that is the absolute bare minimum to make sure you're developing something that can be a business, rather than just a hobby for yourself. And these are not my ideas or anything. They're pretty standard stuff, and there's a lot more you can and should do as well.
- terwindt 9mo ago
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kkkqkqkqkqlqlql 9mo ago

bryanrasmussen 9mo ago

Assuming that users only use 20% of the program and that the usage is evenly distributed, which would be a really big assumption right there, then there is still a finite number of users before you will have used up every part of program functionality between your user base and that any users past that amount will be repeating an actual and specific percentage of program functionality already assigned to some other user, unless you want to argue that functionality can be reduced infinitesimally in a sort of Zeno-like process. If you agree however that functionality profiles will repeat among users given a large enough user base then it implies a particular limited feature set can still be totally adequate to support program development. And that is with assumptions stacked against you succeeding, if indeed, as would seem likely, that some user profiles are more widely distributed than others it would follow that a successful product can just focus on those.