The Simplicity of Success

Does anyone know why we are so crazy about sophistication and complexity? It is the single lesson that I wish I could travel back in time and teach my younger self. It is as though it is in our nature to want to build overly complicated things. It is like an innate inferiority complex that we choose to hide behind the things that we build. The one disease that I have almost always suffered from is this inclination to overdo things, to over-engineer, just overdo it all.

Let me explain.

When I look back at all the many things I have tried to build. The one thing that always seems to stick out is how simple the initial idea was and how intricately complicated the solution or the product turned out to be. Solving just a straightforward thing was never enough; it had to be solving five different problems that are faced by apparently everyone as well. I remember sitting in a room with my co-founders and looking at the one thing we had built that worked but was just too simple for us to take seriously. “If it is too easy, everyone else will do it.” We said to each other. While this plagued us all through these years, I do not think it was just our fault. Instead, it probably was the compounded result of several factors.

The downside of being young and in business.

 Deciding to get into a business as a young person always feels like this grand, bold move and the start of the rest of your perfect and progressive life. You dive deep into it with blazing passion and unrelenting belief. It is all really very sexy and makes for a heart-moving story. One thing that becomes apparent very quickly, however, is the sheer amount of doubt and disbelief that people around you will have. It’s like they judge you even before you talk to them, and I am sure (unfortunately) that it is even worse for female entrepreneurs.

The easiest way around this is to have your product speak for itself, for them to see what you have built first before they see the ingenious entrepreneur behind it all. It’s almost like Trojan horsing the societal prejudice that pulls young people down. That sounds like a really great plan, in principle. It all takes a wrong turn when, as a young person, you try to overdo the product. “It must represent the sheer scale of our vision; it must show just how talented we are, it has to show what it might be in 10 years’ time, today.” So off we go on a mission to overkill, and that, unfortunately, is where a host of great ideas go and die.

If it is not new then you just stole it.

 I do not know why we young people are so crazy about inventing new things. We judge innovation through this very narrow lens. If someone doesn’t build something entirely new, they are not innovative enough. We have forgotten that there is a huge difference between innovation and invention. While inventions are almost innovative by nature, that doesn’t disqualify everything else simply because it already exists somewhere else in the world.

Have we forgotten that there really is nothing new underneath the sun? So I see a whole host of innovators who have found a new way of doing something age-old, being castigated, ridiculed and set aside as being fake. So naturally, our entrepreneurs are forced to overdo things, to take something that already works and perfectly solves a real problem and try to build a tonne of unnecessary features on top of it, burying the real value all in the name of “invention.”

Make it so complicated that they cannot copy.

For some reason, we have become so afraid of idea theft that we find it easier to take our ideas to the grave than actually venturing out and doing something about them. We all get caught up in having a “defensible product.” Bill Gates talked about products, like castles, with moats that protect them from the competition. The truth is that not everything can have longevity built in. Some businesses are just for a time, and not all products can turn into highly scalable startups, but that is okay. We should build and push them out there and grow them whilst we can; everything will become obsolete at one point or another, and people will always try and replicate. So, let’s not get bogged down in trying to make “complexity” our moat.

It also isn’t as easy to “copy” an idea. In 2019, I ventured into the bio-diversity space and decided to build a fish hatchery for a startup that I launched, called Eden Research (Later pivoted into Restora Biocare.) What I thought would be a simple one-month process in fact, took me 9 months to bring to a point of stability. I watched all the YouTube videos and followed the tutorials, I built multiple prototypes of the tech. Ultimately, I had to modify things to work in my own way. So when people visited my hatchery and then decided to also start their own, I would smile at them and say… “sure, go ahead, but don’t say I didn’t warn you!” this stuff is just not easy.

Silly simple human beings.

At the end of the day, we must remember that the masses out there are not as intuitive as we would like to believe. People like simple things and are creatures of habit. The most successful companies focus on delivering value that meets the customer’s needs in the simplest way possible, meeting the customers where they are. They take a simple idea and execute it so efficiently and aggressively that they build an empire that becomes increasingly difficult to compete with.

The most successful and most played mobile games utilise straightforward mechanics to tell very engaging and unique stories. We need to get off our high horses and be honest for a second. We bury our success in a host of complications that need not be there. It is time to be daring and to go against what society has ingrained in us, that it has to be complicated, sophisticated and convoluted to be valuable.