1997 to 1998: Lycos Clubs and the Flight to Simplicity.

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. Bells and whistles. To an engineer, more capability feels like more value.

At Lycos, we launched a product called Lycos Clubs. It let people build online communities around shared interests. We launched it before Yahoo launched its own version. We were early. We had the audience. And our 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. And it took off like wildfire. This was 1997 and 1998, when online communities were just being invented.

What the loss taught

That loss gave me a principle I have used ever since. I call it the flight to simplicity. Simplicity always trumps persuasion. By persuasion I mean marketing: explaining, selling, convincing. When the product does the explaining, people see it and understand it, and the marketing gets easier.

There was a second lesson. Know your customer. If your picture of the customer is even slightly off, you will build the wrong thing beautifully. The question is never what features you can deliver. It is what fundamental value the customer needs, and how simply you can deliver it.

Research now explains why my bias was so stubborn. In a 2021 paper in Nature, Leidy Klotz and colleagues at the University of Virginia showed that people asked to improve something reach for additions and overlook subtraction, even when taking something away works better. Being first was not enough. Lycos Clubs had the timing and the audience. Yahoo Clubs had the simpler product.

Run a simplicity audit

1. List every featureOf the product or offer you are building now. All of them.
2. Circle the coreThe one feature that delivers the fundamental value your customer needs.
3. Test it aloneCould you ship that one feature so simply that it needs no persuasion?
4. Write down the cutsName what you would remove. Then ask what is stopping you.