Lenny Distilled
Strategy → Prioritization
20% of what you build drives 80% of the willingness to pay. But the irony is that that 20% is the easiest thing to build often.
And we made this trade-off, we're like, 'Look, we're easy to use, we're zero install, you don't have to ever deal with it, it's super convenient. Plus you get this one new feature that's really, really useful, which is collaborating with each other and not having to send attachments around the old file servers, but we're going to take away most of the features, because we don't care about them that much.'
It's better to do five things instead of the 15 things in a really, really great way with a high degree of polish with a, 'Oh, this really meets my need,' versus trying to do everything and just doing a little bit of everything.
We can cut down the product in terms of functionality to just most critical features, but we will never compromise on the quality and UX and the aesthetics.
Everything you think you need to do, you probably only need to do half of it. Try to kill things and whenever you're adding things, consider what you can replace. Consider what you can also remove.
As a rule, I never used rules as thumbs, but these two percenters, I would kill them. If I launched something and it was only 2% we'd, we called it scraping the barnacles, just get rid of it.
The more that you add, the harder it is to create something that's coherent. One plus one does not equal three, it sometimes equals one and a half. And the more that you add and the more that you continue to put in something, the more complex it gets and the worse it gets.