The Innovation of Common Sense
I was having a conversation with my co-founder this afternoon discussing Sokanu. We were talking about how first time founders cannot possibly know all of the things needed to know to run a proper startup. I read voraciously, trying to learn everything possible about running a company with the highest probability of success. The issue I find is that the more I read, the more I feel like I am not doing.
Startup advice is abundant, and yet still 90% of businesses fail. I read about customer development, agile development, lean startup principles, iterations, continuous deployment, metrics, A/B split testing, financial forecasting, IPO's, M&A, pivot tables, j-curves, venture capital, dilution, preferred shares, business models, sales channels, funnels, marketing chambers, CPM's, optimizing landing pages, Adsense advertising, etc... Founders read all of these things every day, amazed that all of this information is available for our consumption. But is it really all positive?
My co-founder takes the opposite approach. She works hard on the company, doesn't get involved in the tech community and just keeps focused on product development, the current task at hand. She doesn't know whether a site is coded in PHP or Ruby, if they were featured on Techcrunch or whether the founder has three CS degrees from Stanford. If she runs across a site that is actually useful, and I mean actually useful, and easy to use, then guess what? She signs up. End of story, no questions asked.
I was getting frustrated today as I explained that I didn't know if we were taking the right steps in building this company. But what if I don't optimize our metrics at the correct time? How are we going to raise capital if we don't know what our business model is going to make in year three? My financial forecast has to be redone, I didn't do the correct formula for our cost per customer acquisition.
My main issue, after watching company after company launch and get funded was, are we being innovative enough for an alpha product?
She answered with the best answer anyone could give. What is innovation? What makes these other companies so innovative? No, our innovation is common sense.
After reading book after book, blog after blog, that is the most practical piece of advice I have ever been given. So many companies build products and forget about common sense. They get caught up in the details of web technology and what everyone else is doing. They forget about simply making a product that people want to use.
For me, common sense in the tech world boils down to two things.
1. Do people need/want your product
2. Does it make sense to use.
As un-revolutionary as these sound, that's all it comes down to. Let's look at each in more detail:
1. Do people need/want your product
Have you ever found a restaurant, whether it be in a big city or just the local town, that has terrible ambiance and average service, yet has amazing food? I'll give you an example of one near us. There is a Greek restaurant in a pretty ugly part of town (not a great location) about 15 minutes away from us that we continue to come back to. The decor has not been updated since the 50's, the glasses are tiny and we make sure not to ever get the water. (weird taste) Yet, as soon as we order the chicken souvlaki with salad, rice and tzitziki, all of those problems go away. We can just sit there and enjoy our meal.
Now what does this have to do with a high-technology product? Well, everything. The mainstream market will continue to use a product, regardless of look and feel, if the product is needed or wanted. An excellent example of this is Craigslist. Let me share with you a quote that I came across the other day.
“Craigslist gets more traffic than either eBay or Amazon.com. eBay has more than 16,000 employees. Amazon has more than 20,000. Craigslist has 30”
eBay and Amazon are both great products, and need the huge team in order to produce the revenues that make them multi-billion dollar companies. But Craigslist is the ugliest product I can think of on the internet, yet people still want to use the product. (lots of people, mind you)
This is an example of common sense innovation.
2. Does it make sense to use.
The second part of common sense innovation is simply if it makes sense to use. This is part interaction design, part product development. Google is the master of this principle. Back when they first started out, they were not even close to being first to market in the search space. Lycos and Yahoo were already huge companies, and Google was a drop in the bucket. They had a hard time raising any money at all.
What separated them? First part - interaction design. When you went to Google.com you would see a lot of white space, with a text box in the middle with a search button. That interaction design forces the user to search. What else are you supposed to do? There is no way to make a mistake. It makes sense to use.
The second part - product. What made Google unique from Lycos or Yahoo was their idea to rank search results by a combination of Google's Page Rank as well as their other unique algorithms. The end user doesn't care about the algorithms, but the end product makes more sense to the user. Google = better search results.
Google, through these two ideas, made sense to use. It is both easy and provides the information necessary for making the user happy.
Common sense innovation is so simple, yet rarely implemented successfully. And that is because our idea of innovation is becoming diluted.
Here is the Wikipedia definition: Innovation is a new way of doing something or "new stuff that is made useful".
We, as a society, believe that unless we invent something like the iPad, make public space flight available or make mass produced electric cars we are not being innovative. But unfortunately, innovation is relative. What seems innovative to people in the poorest 1/4 of the world (electricity 24 hours a day) seems archaic to us. What seems technologically innovative to someone living in Niagara Falls (social media) is drastically different than someone living in Silicon Valley. (location based software)
Innovation, as Wikipedia puts it, is a new way of doing something. If we invent a new way of making our product easier to use, we are being innovative. If we are building a useful product that is needed in the world, we are being innovative. If we simply are using applying common sense to a highly complex technological problem, we are being innovative. The innovation of common sense is a highly powerful product development idea, and applies to any market in the world.
The bottom line? Make things that make sense.
