When building, it's tempting to think of a "one-stop shop" solution, a swiss-army knife. One place to keep everything related to your finances, one place to keep all your todos, etc. In consumer apps, it's the exact wrong idea. You want to be building a bottle opener, a blade, scissors, each separately. Below is why. ### Low Psych points: low patience for complexity 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 adds to complexity [[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. The solution is, especially to the extent you're marketing in the app store is that you need bottle openers. Build something in as few screens as possible. A flashlight. A todo app. Calorie-tracking device. If your pain point concept cannot be explained in three seconds, and the solution isn't obvious in ten, you're toast. #published 2025-04-04