Rob FrascaAll ideas

Simplicity Always Trumps Persuasion.

A product that screams what it does needs almost no marketing.

PrincipleCreator's JourneyLeadershipPerformance

The Creator's Journey · Chapter V, What the Losses Taught

I am an engineer, and I love technology. That comes with a bias I have had to fight my whole career. I like to build complicated things. Lots of features. Lots of options. To an engineer, more capability feels like more value.

At Lycos we launched Lycos Clubs, online communities around shared interests, before Yahoo launched its version. We were early. We had the audience. And the product was very, very complicated. It did not get much traction. About six months later Yahoo launched Yahoo Clubs. It was simpler. It did less. It took off like wildfire. That was 1997 and 1998.

COMPLEXMORE PERSUASIONSIMPLESCREAMS WHAT IT DOESCUSTOMER
The simpler the product, the shorter the road to the customer.
From the book
A complicated product needs a lot of persuasion. A product that is simple, that screams what it does, needs almost none.
Rob FrascaThe Creator’s Journey (forthcoming)
From the research
Simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple.
Steve JobsBusinessWeek, 1998

The flight to simplicity

By persuasion I mean marketing. A complicated product has to be explained, sold and argued for. A simple one does its own explaining. When Steve Jobs returned to Apple in 1997, he cut a confusing product line down to four: a desktop and a portable for consumers, and a desktop and a portable for professionals. That was not a marketing decision. It was a product decision that made marketing easy.

I saw the lesson again at Vivox, where I was chief product officer. Our voice platform was powerful and monolithic. You took the whole system or nothing. Twilio broke similar functions into small building blocks a developer could pick up one at a time. Vivox was sold to Unity, a base hit, maybe a double. Twilio was a home run. The difference was the shape, not the technology.

Start from the job

Clayton Christensen and his co-authors gave this a practical frame in Harvard Business Review in 2016. Customers do not simply buy products. They hire them to get a job done in their lives. Innovation fails when teams design around customer profiles and data patterns instead of that job. If your picture of the customer is even slightly off, you will build the wrong thing beautifully.

Run a simplicity audit

  1. List every featureTake the product or offer you are building now. Write down everything it does.
  2. Circle the fundamental valueFind the one feature that does the job your customer needs.
  3. Ask if it could ship aloneCould you deliver that one thing so simply that it needs no persuasion?
  4. Write down what you would cutKeep the list where your team can see it. Simplicity is a product decision.

Quick answers

What does “simplicity trumps persuasion” mean?

Rob Frasca’s principle that a complicated product needs a lot of marketing to persuade people to use it, while a simple product that clearly shows what it does needs almost none.

Why did Yahoo Clubs beat Lycos Clubs?

Rob Frasca, who was at Lycos, says Lycos Clubs launched first with the audience but was very complicated. Yahoo Clubs launched about six months later, did less, and took off because it was simpler.

Sources

  1. Rob Frasca, The Creator’s Journey (forthcoming), Chapter V, What the Losses Taught.
  2. Steve Jobs, interview in BusinessWeek, May 1998, as reported by Six Colors. Source
  3. Clayton M. Christensen, Taddy Hall, Karen Dillon and David S. Duncan, “Know Your Customers’ ‘Jobs to Be Done’,” Harvard Business Review, September 2016. Source
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