The 37signals “less is more” school of product development has caught fire, and for good reason. It’s often better for users: there is less to learn, less to get tripped up on, and less to pay for. It’s often better for developers, too: teams with a narrow focus work faster, and their mistakes are exposed sooner.
When you sell to businesses, though, it can cut both ways. Enterprise buyers are accustomed to pitches with massive feature lists. Having a product with six screens instead of sixty might make you look diminutive, not lean.
The trick is in finding smart customers, customers who know that after they buy from you they’re going to have to sell to their colleagues. And that’s where your “small” product delivers big wins. How many companies spend $75k (or ten times that) on software they never use? Partly it’s because their needs change; partly it’s because the software doesn’t work; but most often it’s because whoever bought it never sold it—to the people who would become its users.
And that sale—the second-order sale—looks a lot like the scene you get when you ask a bunch of college students to teach each other a lecture they just sat through. They might have a handle on one or two key takeaways, the stuff written in all caps on the board and repeatedly emphasized, but just about everything else becomes an incoherent shambles of half-remembered haze.
So what at first glance looks to be a boardroom downside is actually a key advantage—because a product that’s easier to sell is easier to sell.