When building, it's tempting to think of a "one-stop shop" solution. One place to keep everything related to your finances, one place to keep all your todos, etc. Turns out it's exactly the wrong idea in consumer. ### Case Study: PhotoOrganizer vs SwipeWipe We build in photos space. To leave us impartial, I'll compare two apps that have nothing to do with us but I delved into deeply as part of my job. The first is PhotoOrganizer (photoorganizer.app), a "one-stop-shop" app that has every feature under the sun. It's everything we wanted to build in our "10-year roadmap": ![[Bottle Openers - PhotoOrganizer.png]] Compare this to SwipeWipe: ![[Bottle Openers - Swipewipe.png]] ### Starting with low Psych points If you're a consumer startup, your main challenge is not building something useful, it's [[Marketing is about penetrating attention filters|breaking through the noise]]. When the user lands on your app, they're trying to figure out "is this worth my time?". And their prior likelihood on it being so is lower than if the same product is launched by e.g. Google or Apple. So users are starting with a low [[Psych Points]] on your app. That means you have less margin for errors: if something's not super intuitive to the user you'll be abandoned immediately. ### Hit by Tesler's Law: every feature counts against you Making a product as simple and intuitive as possible is the fundamental UX principle. And so of course, your product should be as simple as possible. But [[Tesler’s Law]] states that there's a minimum amount of complexity for every feature set. So this means that no matter how you slice and dice it, the more features you have, the more complex it will be. You can use progressive disclosure, you can find good user interactions, tooltips, but no matter what you do, every feature that you add increases the floor of complexity and lowers the ceiling of usability. So PhotoOrganizer really couldn't have made a "simple app". This is exactly what happened to us. Initially we had a set a vision of one place to handle all your photo needs and we were a lot closer to PhotoOrganizer. We were dreaming big and building swiss army knives. ### Squeaky wheel gets the grease: how power-users can steer you the wrong way The YC adage is go ahead and talk to your users. The downside in consumer is that **there's a huge selection bias on who's willing to talk to you**. In consumer apps your job is not to get a [[1,000 True Fans]].