Entrepreneurs are naturally creative and ideas can quickly explode. Allow these seeds to grow too far too fast and a project becomes massive and nothing will ever happen. The best providers can drill down to the most potent part of a business and strip it back to its core function. It’s far simpler to sell a single idea than a sprawling mass of ideas, no matter how good they are. The best material survives the cull and the remainder can be repurposed for either future versions or separate products.
Feature creep can be one of the biggest killers of simple projects so if you get the chance, go back and review your websites, businesses and blog posts and strip them back to the core.
Just look at twitter – back in the early days, it was pretty unstable and had a very limited set of features. Nobody really knew how it was going to turn out, who would use it and how. But twitter didn’t launch saying “look at us, we’re bigger and better than anyone else” – instead it started simply with the open messaging posting function and left it to the users to interpret and shape the future. The users chose how it was utilized and even invented new languages (twords) and syntax (like hashtags) to fulfill those needs.
The API enabled third party clients to spring up to help manage the stream, categorize tweets and organize the noise. Again this development was all offsite without the intervention of twitter. Entirely in the hands of the users. Pure democracy.
Twitter is now in a position to rollout it’s new features which have been introduced in the past 8 or 9 months and new additions are drip fed to the community… Slowly. And that’s the key – by allowing the functions to evolve outside of the main site, when changes are finally implemented, they are should be 100% functional and respond to the consumer. All the dross is selected out and the fittest survives. Nothing is superfluous, everything is dictated by the audience and nothing is wasted. Absolute simplicity.
It’s a great lesson to learn and apply to your business. Keep it simple and allow the user to lead the way.
Welcome back. You must like it here so SHARE THE MOJO by adding a comment and sharing this page.
michele carr
Andrew Stark
William Freeman