Keep Your Products Simple.

“Blockchain, Ethereum, Distributed Ledgers, Internet Of Things, Cloud Computing, Disruptive Technology, Cognitive Intelligence, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Making the world a better place” Sounds familiar?

Chances are if you have gone over any of the recent technology posts about new startups popping up around the scene on sites like TechCrunch, half of them are going to be using one of the buzzwords listed above to describe themselves.

Truth is, only a few of the startups are most likely using one of those technologies they are boasting about, the others, are just trying to use one of those words just to catch people’s eyes and boost their marketing efforts.

Customers usually care about what is done, not how.

Okay, so consider this, you buy a car, what do you see first, the company that’s making the car is an important choice, and then come the specifications of the car, what’s the price, what all it can do. How many of you have gone to a car showroom and asked how does the engine work inside? Well, engines have gotten much much more efficient in the past twenty years leading to better cars and a lower number of refuelling, but honestly, I care zero about how. Why? Because I will never understand it even if I wanted to, the technology is just so complex inside the engine that’s making it efficient.

Now, picture this, how many startups are “blockchain-based” but when they finish a presentation, no one has any idea what they do? There are quite a lot, these startups hide behind the buzz words to hide the fact that all they are doing is just improving software or processes that already exist, which is great, but customers never really understand what’s going on behind the scenes when you tell them you are a “Blockchain-based AI Startup that aims to revolutionize the way transactions are recorded and reconciled.” That makes no sense to the average consumer out there. Rephrase it as “We are making it easier to record and verify your transactions so the transfers that used to take a day or two to reach your account will now only take two minutes, in fact, with increased security and lower failure rates.” and the customer knows exactly WHAT you are doing, HOW you are doing it is the least of their concerns.

Breakthrough technologies don’t always translate breakthroughs immediately.

Remember when the internet was a sensation in the nineties, I certainly don’t because I wasn’t alive back then. But from all that I’ve heard, it was a, to say the least, crazy time. Investors throwing away money at any company that had a “.com” in its name, many companies seeing this gold rush even renamed themselves to include the “.com” in their name to secure that cash. All that resulted in a bubble so big, that when it burst, it resulted in an economic crash. More on that in another post.

When the bubble popped, the companies promising things that were over the top or downright crazy, perished, primarily because the consumers had no idea about what the companies did, the companies just hid behind the promises of the “Internet”, the magic it could unfold.

Today, the internet has changed the world anyway, it does matter to us a lot today. But in those years, it didn’t change the world a lot back then, because the possibilities were known, but people were too busy with HOW, not WHAT.

Today, most companies are doing the same thing, they are focusing on Buzz wordy technologies, just to remain in the minds of people, truth be told, not a lot of people would care anymore. Yes, Blockchain will change the world, Bitcoin will change the world, it will make a lot of processes easier, but not immediately. The effects of these technologies will be visible slowly in established industries like banking and retail that actual consumers are already aware of.

Buzzwords don’t take long to lose steam.

How many startups have come and gone promising to treat cancer, build spacecraft and build all other things that you can deem as belonging to the crazy-ideas territory without actually delivering any results in the end? A lot of them, chances are, you hear about one of these startups once, and then never hear about them again.

The reason is, that most of these startups are just trying to pitch ideas, they don’t have a solid ground or solid research to back them up. Sure, a space elevator with a fabric ten times stronger than steel sounds brilliant, but where is the working prototype if you ask them? Most likely, it’s just a video presentation of what would be done if they gain funding. Guess what? Even I can make those video renders if I wanted to.

Most of these startups are pitching ideas and just trying to see how much traction they get, if they don’t get a lot of traction in the next few weeks, they abandon the idea. Of course, progress is being made and that is why some time down the line, these ideas will become reality, but a space elevator to go to a restaurant in space, made out of the thinnest yet strongest fibre in all of existence sounds too bizarre and unnecessary for the daily consumer or business, where most of the money is to be made.

Beauty is in simplicity

While building products, it seems like adding more and more features, or marketing with more and more buzzwords is a good idea. To a certain extent, it is, if you are at the forefront of innovation, it makes no sense NOT to tell the world about it if no one can copy you and if it gives you a great marketing boost. But, making products convoluted, by trying to integrate features that are not required just because the feature seems trendy is a bad idea.

The prospect of adding revolutionary technology to a product could backfire if not implemented properly, given that if it’s new, the community would not be large so you would be the ones trying to fix issues for everyone else that comes after you.

Take, for example, blockchain in a medication records app, if that sounds off, that’s because it is, there is no need for something like Blockchain in a medication records app because the customer using it does not care where the data is stored, yes it might be stored in a blockchain, or it might be stored as a file in a remote server, or right in the customer’s device itself. All the customer cares about at the end of the day is that the storage of the medication record should be secure and the app should alert them when the medication is due. That’s all, the idea of the app is so simple, one doesn’t need to add unnecessary complexity just to stand out. The beauty of products is in their simplicity!

What is YouTube? It allows people to upload interesting videos to share with the world. There are millions of pieces that go behind YouTube, all the way from Compression to AI to ML and who knows how many other bits of technology, but no marketing for it will ever tell you that. The end-user only needs to know WHAT YouTube does and WHY it does it, not HOW.

Do something better than everyone else, if there’s innovation, don’t shy away from it, but don’t forget to test whether the customer even needs it.