Aaron Gerdes

You can view simplicity two ways. Either way is focused on attaining the optimal balance between effectiveness and bulk. The first is the way we’ve talked about so far: cut away unnecessary bulk by targeting a narrower market. Example: Building a product/service that better anticipates users needs by narrowing your market to a more specific group of users.

But what about using simplicity to gain a wider appeal and increase your addressable market?

The number of people in a Fortune 500 company is huge. But add up all the participants in small and medium-sized business and they’d vastly outnumber the participants in the top 500 companies. When looking at this from the perspective of targeting a market, this concept is called the long tail. If you’re totally unfamiliar with marketing to the long tail of business, check out this post by 37signals.

With many small and medium-sized businesses finding a need for simpler software that caters to their style of building an organization, software companies are able to flourish providing a lower-cost elegant solution to a much larger audience. Often times the software has less built in formality and is designed around members of smaller organizations typically wearing multiple hats.

A common comparison to illustrate this point is Microsoft Project vs Basecamp. Basecamp makes collaboration with a small group of people in different locations very easy, but it can’t print out a 10-foot long Gantt chart. Most small project teams I know don’t need a 10ft Gantt chart, though. They do need a smooth way to share files, ideas, and responsibilities. Basecamp does that very well.

Take a simpler product to a wider market or take a specialized product to a narrower market—either way, keep the ratio of features to user success in the user’s favor.