The Power of Elegance in Design.
Story bySteven Carrol
Steven is a web applications developer, living in south of France, originally from London. His current project is Myplaylist.biz. In the nin(show all)Steven is a web applications developer, living in south of France, originally from London. His current project isMyplaylist.biz. In the nineties, he was a designer / director of a highly successful design, manufacturing and distribution company (Intimidation).
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A lesson from bookkeeping
Building an application that has traction should be the first priority for any startup. Everything else should wait until after the concept has been sold or is gaining traction within the niche that you’re targeting.
But is it possible to prove an application has merit before you waste a fortune on graphic designers and fancy user interface features? I think it is. But before I put my money where my mouth is, I want to talk about money a bit more.
There is a well known rule in bookkeeping. To balance the books to the nearest 5 $/€/£ is very quickly done. To balance the books to the last penny/cent takes considerably longer and is evidently much more costly. By far outweighing the cost of the bookkeeper. Therefore, elegant startups who have the right priorities generally round the books up to the nearest 5 $/€/£ and then call it a day.
But when it comes to building applications, in this frenzy most believe good looks are essential if they are going to be taken seriously. Thus they spend a fortune refining, tuning, styling and building unnecessary user interface features, which is equivalent to the bookkeeper balancing the last penny. Thus they need 20 people when really 1, 2 or 3 people would have been sufficient to prove the concept.
So is it possible to prove a concept with absolutely NO fancy graphics and only the minimum core features, with a team of 1-2 and bootstrap the concept through to proving it is capable of viral growth?
Put your money where your mouth is
There is no better way to prove a point than by conducting the experiment yourself and recording the results. Talk is cheap after all. My latest application adheres to the principles I have been espousing. In the beginning I wanted to have no graphics whatsoever, not even a logo but that was one step too far for some people.
In it’s current state the concept is proven, traffic growth is rapidly rising, it has been featured on TC and many other blogs, it has top positions in the SERPs for leading terms, and there are a handful of third parties interested in acquiring it. That’s sure seems like proof to me.
Yet there are still no more than a handful of images, the development team consisted of just me, it was about 1 years work with minimal investment and as a result the likelihood that it shall be a financial success is pretty high because it was designed with elegance in mind.
Self Indulgence
It seems to me that many startups in this latest round have their priorities all mixed up, rather than proving the concept, they are focused on impressing or wowing investors. But without traffic, without proof that the concept has legs, investors wont be impressed (I suspect), and you will likely run out of cash before you have got it anywhere near a beta let-alone proof of concept.
