Saturday, April 11, 2009

It all starts with KISS'ing...

I got splinters...

...sometimes you gotta paint the fence for an hour...gents ;)

To start, the term KISS stands for: Keep It Simple, Stupid. I sure as heck didn't mean the band. The term can also stand for Keep It Short and Simple...but that just sounds stupid. If it were up to me, I'd call it KISD - Keep It Simple, Dufus. The power of the word "Dufus" is so vastly underrated. Yes, I know it's also spelled with 2 o's, but that's for dufuses.

Anyways, I digress...

This principle of keeping it simple (dufus) is an essential principle to not only being a successful entrepreneur but as a person in general. That's not to say that anything you do should always appeal to the lowest common denominator. Otherwise you'd never have new and exciting innovations, and comedians would only do fart and dick jokes (which are always funny).

I talk to a lot of aspiring entrepreneurs. They're very ambitious, go-getters and great people in general. However, when they talk about their conceptual businesses with me, I sometimes feel my brain is about to hemorrhage. Heck, I've been guilty of this too in the past. It's natural. Entrepreneurs are people who want to change things, that's in their nature.

However, one must understand that change is incremental. We as human beings build upon an already existing foundation of knowledge and improve upon it. Some may argue, "Oh yeah? What about the internet? That was a revolution!" Not really. The internet has been in existence for DECADES, however, it was used primarily for military and - to a degree - academic purposes. It wasn't until it was commercialized and made much simpler that the masses began to adopt it.

Some of the greatest revolutions in history were YEARS in the making. It wasn't until things got much simpler and people realized "Oh, looks like I need to get outside and protest" or "Looks like I need to pick up my sword/gun and fight." that revolutions actually gained steam and created real change. Back before then, the seeds of those revolutions were complex. They'd start with a few intellectual treatises, debates, etc. Even the beginnings of the world's major monotheistic religions were seen as foreign and complicated concepts to people at first. One God? Heaven? Hell? Resurrection?

Change is similar to a volcano building up magma and pressure before that big eruption.

What can entrepreneurs learn from this? That if you really want your business to shine with flying colors, you need to make it simple and it needs to be an improvement over an existing concept, idea or technology. This doesn't necessarily ALWAYS have to be the case. The point is that you need to be able to serve an undermet need or create a need for your service or product. No matter how "revolutionary" a technology may seem, it is almost always an improvement over an existing technology. Don't be fooled. There are exceptions to everything, true, but we're not in the business of focusing on just exceptions.

Take, for example, the huge success of Twitter. 2 years ago, barely anyone heard of Twitter. Now it's all the rage. Why is Twitter successful? First of all, it's really mind-numbingly easy to use. You type in what you're doing (in 140 characters or less) in a nice little text box and press a nice big "UPDATE" button. Want to follow someone? No problem, just press the nice "Follow" button. Everything else is taken care of.

Twitter is just yet another manifestation of the ever growing social networking craze that was made popular by Friendster and then MySpace and Facebook. Twitter's an incremental change, they're not a revolution by any means. Many people STILL wonder, "Why the heck do people want to know what everyone's up to?" Well, because being connected is a social need, and Twitter's meeting that need. We're increasingly living in an age of instant gratification and an ever increasing fear of being lonely.

Lets take another example: Facebook. With MySpace so overwhelmingly popular at the time, how the heck did Facebook blind-side it and actually beat it at its own game? Facebook and MySpace are fundamentally the same. However, Facebook made a number of critical incremental improvements. Facebook kept user profiles very clean and simple. You have no idea how many MySpace profiles I've run into that have almost given me a seizure just by looking at them... Facebook also introduced very nifty features like a news feed, status updates, organized photo albums and other simple things. Facebook is clean, organized, and very easy to use. In fact, it is almost dufus-proof. Any schmuck can start a Facebook profile with ease without having to read the help section or ask someone for help. Same goes for Twitter, any schmuck can do it.

For a more classical example...Henry Ford was one of the pioneers of modern industry because of his invention of the assembly line. By giving each worker a very simple, dufus-proof task for each step of the manufacturing process, he was able to mass produce his cars and offer them to the masses. He kept it simple, real simple. His concepts are STILL used today. The core concept of "Lean Manufacturing" simply means making your manufacturing process dufus-proof and require a minimal amount of thought on the part of the workers. For all you uppity "experts" out there, KISS my ass, it's true ;)

As a current or aspiring entrepreneur, that's what you need to aim to do. You need to try and make all aspects of your product or service dufus-proof and require minimal thought on the part of your customer. People want things yesterday, and if they need to think hard, you've probably lost a good deal of them. If you got this "awesome" website, you better make sure people can use it without much trouble. If you have a great product...well...can someone use it with minimal guidance? Remember my previous blog post ("Size Doesn't Matter" - March) about the vegetable peeler guy? One of the reasons why he was so successful was because he showed people how SIMPLE it was to use his product. Boy, he wasn't kidding.

Before you launch something, take the time to let average joes try using your site/service/product. Then collect their feedback. You want to especially pay attention to their feedback on what they found difficult to understand or hard to use. You want to take that feedback, and make the needed improvements. In fact, KISS doesn't just apply to your customers, it also applies to you. Try to keep your own business as simple as possible to run. Automate where you can, and use COMMON SENSE. Keeping your own operations simple will also help keep your product/service simple for your customers.

Ok, time to press the big orange "Publish Post" button. Hehe, me so smart.

3 comments:

  1. loved the post! a bit on the long side (twitter ruined me, i cant read beyond 140 characters now u see XD) but i totally agree.. the simpler the better! one step at a time.. if only everyone thought this way!

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  2. I love this! So true. Just wish everyone 'got' it. I'm amazed when brainstorming about a 'fresh' idea, how often people will try to add things to it, frills, bells, whistles - when it just needs to be clean and simple.

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  3. Yep. Can't blame them for thinking big, but you CAN blame them for overcomplicating things ;) At the end of the day, you need to deliver value, not bells and whistles.

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