Occam’s Razor
This post is dedicated to Joe Z
So I’m in the middle of partnering with a great entreprenuer and while poking around on him, I found the name of one of his companies, Occam’s razor LLC. Being the inquisitive mind that I am, I decided to look it up and found and found out the Occam’s Razor is a principle attributed to the 14th Century that states that one should not make more assumptions more than the bare minimum needed. What that means is - Simplicity is King. If you have 2 options, create complexity and delay or simplify and go to market - simplify. Why? People don’t really like choice, they like user experience.
An old story is the one where people are given the choice of 14 jams to try. Something like 11% of them bought the jam. Then, the test was done with only 4 options and something like 25% of them bought the a jam. Now, my numbers above are not the actual results of the test but the key is that the simpler the product, the easier to use. Remember the original version of facebook? It was a simple stupid one page directory listing, you had an option of 1 photo and no real functionality except for groups that themselves had no real functionality. Now facebook is a beast but it started as a flat stupid simple site. This happens to be why I have so much respect for facebook, they’ve rolled out their product in such an intelligent fashion that now it is ubiquitous but they do it in small little steps.
I’ve started to try to keep the simplicity first rule myself, I never knew the origin until recently or even heard of Occam’s Razor but I wholeheartedly agree with it. With that said - always plan deep ahead so you have an idea of the issues that could develop but when it comes to execution - go simple. Get to market, relax. Get feedback, collect cash. Repeat.
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