Keep it Simple Stupid, such an interesting saying, and in the tech world, such an oxymoron…

The Instagram founders had a more full featured product called Burbn, a somewhat foursquare clone, and as Mr. Systrom analyzed usage patterns with his little app, he realized by far the most popular feature was the photo sharing capability.

BINGO, the 2 founders took a step back at that point and decided to scrap EVERYTHING but the Photo aspect and create a new app that would be Dead Simple, with only a few carefully selected options.

As I observe good products and design, they seem to all strip away the clutter, and only have a few functions. Instagram hit the nail on the head, and the founders were smart enough to kill off any uneeded items.

Congrats Instagram, your product and story is a great inspiration in Keeping it Stupidly Simple.

Adam

The actual design and construction of the sales page is of the utmost importance for conversions, it is a place where you need to spend a great deal of time and resources once you are at the point where you have validated your startup idea.

Great design and a strong push towards a desired action = better sales.

I know I’ll be incorporating a lot of AppSumo’s clever tactics for all my sales pages.

Adam

If you want to maximise your chances of running a successful startup, where success is defined as achieving at least the “survival” level outlined in this article, and ideally the “comfort” level, it makes a lot more sense to invest your time in many ideas at the same time, test all of them (in parallel or one after the other) and then pursue the one or ones that are most promising.

I think we all should strive to be an ARMY OF ONE Entrepreneur and test multiple ideas in parrallel. Being a Solopreneur and being able to handle most every aspect of building a business yourself will greatly benefit you now and in the future.

Lets face it, the end goal is to get a business off the ground to cover your living expenses and save up enough to be financially independent. Testing several of your best ideas and seeing which ones have the most promise is better than trying pick just one that will make or break you.

Now if you want the startup to have a chance at being successful I recommend reading the lean Startup by Eric Reis. This book really pinpoints the essential steps you should take to test your startup idea.

Basically the Lean Startup can be “cliff-noted” as: take a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) = your idea as a bare bones product / site / app, then putting it in front of as many customers as you can, and then actually meeting face to face with them, document the feedback, make them pay for the product / service from day one, then iterate based on that feedback, to achieve product market fit. then scale. done. IPO, Billionaire..

There are some brilliant observers out there that have questioned who really benefits with a unilateral free trade policy like the U.S. has had for several decades now.

Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett’s business partner for 30+ years with Berkshire Hathaway brings up perhaps the best point of discussion regarding Free Trade that the typical short sighted “economist” might easily discard:

Everybody in economics understands that comparative advantage is a big deal, when one considers first-order advantages in trade from the Ricardo effect. But suppose you’ve got a very talented ethnic group, like the Chinese, and they’re very poor and backward, and you’re an advanced nation, and you create free trade with China, and it goes on for a long time.

Now let’s follow and second- and third-order consequences: You are more prosperous than you would have been if you hadn’t traded with China in terms of average well-being in the U.S., right? Ricardo proved it. But which nation is going to be growing faster in economic terms? It’s obviously China. They’re
absorbing all the modern technology of the world through this great facilitator in free trade and, like the Asian Tigers have proved, they will get ahead fast. Look at Hong Kong. Look at Taiwan. Look at early Japan. So, you start in a place where
you’ve got a weak nation of backward peasants, a billion and a quarter of them, and in the end they’re going to be a much bigger, stronger nation than you are, maybe even having more and better atomic bombs. Well, Ricardo did not prove
that that’s a wonderful outcome for the former leading nation. He didn’t try to determine second-order and higher-order effects.

If you try and talk like this to an economics professor, and I’ve done this three times, they shrink in horror and offense because they don’t like this kind of talk. It really gums up this nice discipline of theirs, which is so much simpler when you
ignore second- and third-order consequences.

Does America really benefit in the long run when we bring all the technology to a place such as Japan after World War II, or China in the last 2 decades?

Almost unanimously economists agree that a strong flourishing middle class is the secret to a stable, thriving nation. Yet it can easily be seen that Free Trade has been a major cause in a lot of jobs leaving America, thus more people unemployed, and thus wages stagnating and reaching a situation like America is dealing with now, Killing the Middle Class?

Are we really better off with a nation with 1.3 Billion People having far superior factory output and soon military strength as Munger eludes to above? Is free trade accelerating the decline of America’s Quality of life?

The old adage of everyone else in a society benefits by lower prices for goods, well tell that to the guy that lost his job due to overseas competition, with no job, how do they get these great savings?