Focused and Simple Software
A common trend I've noticed in the software industry is great software products losing their focus and simplicity by adding more features resulting in the product becoming overly complex and difficult to use. Companies feel the need to add more features for numerous reasons: Here are a few:
As companies get bigger and hire more employees, those employees feel they need to be productive, so they add features.
When a company gets venture money, they need to grow to be much larger than they are when they accept the money. One way to grow is to add new features, which are often catered towards enterprises because enterprises have more money to spend.
Competition emerges, or the landscape changes, and companies feel the need to counteract this by adding features.
Adding more features can make the original product more complicated, less focused, and more challenging to use. When companies get bloated, it's a perfect time for startups to emerge to offer a simple product that does one thing really well and has a great and intuitive design.
For example, the product management tool Jira has been around since 2002. It became the go-to tool for companies to use to track and manage the tasks and issues for their product. But over time, the product has gotten clunky and difficult to use. Now, the average person who uses Jira will tell you that it's a very subpar experience. This presented a great opportunity for startups. One strong company that started in 2019 is Linear. Linear is the antithesis to Jira - it's fast, super simple, and has an incredible design. Many companies, especially startups, are using Linear instead of Jira, and I expect that to continue.
I also saw this clearly when I recently discovered a new email service for developers called Plunk, which manages and automates your company's emails to customers. I used to use Sendgrid (now owned by Twilio), and comparing the two services is like night and day. Sendgrid is slow, complicated, and difficult to do anything that’s a little more advanced. In contrast, Plunk eliminated everything unnecessary and focused on the most important features like email workflows, templates, and campaigns. This has resulted in a developer experience that is 10x better than Sendgrid.
AWS is another interesting example. AWS started with relatively simple cloud compute. But now, AWS offers over 300 services, and many of them are quite difficult to use - their documentation is confusing, they don’t prioritize design, and because AWS is so big, each of their new services and many of their existing services are meant to cater to large enterprises. This presented opportunities for companies to build a more focused and simple service on top of AWS. Companies like Vercel, Netlify, Railway, and Render have all been created in this way. It's interesting to think about how many other AWS services can be spun out into their own focused, simple software.
On the consumer side, one current example is Instagram. Instagram used to be just a simple photo-sharing app, and now, it has videos, slideshows, messaging, shopping, and reels (short videos). Many of these features have been positive, but the bloat makes the app more complicated, harder to use, and more frustrating when you can't decide how to spend your time on it. Many of these features have been in response to competition that offers simpler software, like TikTok.
Some other examples of this trend:
Photoshop —> Figma, Canva
Wordpress Static Sites —> Wix, Squarespace
Wordpress e-commerce —> Shopify
Oracle MySQL Database —> Planetscale
Salesforce —> Hubspot
Gmail —> Superhuman
When evaluating startup ideas, a good framework can be to assess which successful companies have gotten so big and bloated that their service now lacks focus and simplicity. Some possible ideas: Stripe, Twilio, Adobe, Snowflake, and the entire insurance industry. In many cases, you can use these companies as the “pipes” to build your own software and just charge a little more.