Simple

Editor’s Note: We’re taking next week off for Black Friday, but if you miss hearing from us you can check out our BFCM tracker. 

The theme of simplicity has been beating me over the head lately.

Through conversations with customers and through conversations with Adam, I keep coming back to the fact that simplicity is actually the goal, not the starting point. And it can be a lot of work to achieve that goal of being simple.

In my own world, I’ve been hit with this across a few different “lessons” in simplicity:

• Lesson 1. I have been talking to a lot of Because customers this week, and one of them told me that they made their sales 15% more effective by making sure they always mentioned the sale on the banner bar and at the top of collection pages. Literally just by making sure people know that there is a sale.
  
  This was a pretty good reminder for me, because I do think we sometimes spend too much time thinking about the marginal dollars and the extra analysis and what have you. And while that stuff does matter, the first thing that matters is a lot simpler: if the offer is clear, the performance is better. Just reminding people of the offer makes it easier for them to buy.
  

• Lesson 2. Another Because customer told me that the product’s value wasn’t so much the impact on its business as it was how simple the product made doing things. “"If it works and it's easy to use then it's worth every penny." This sort of fits with the Taylor Holiday post that’s made its rounds the other week on SEANs (Software Enabled AgeNcies), a prediction that SaaS and agencies will sort of meld together to become some sort of automated outcome machine.
  
  In other words, do I, as someone as a brand need to do work to use this software or will it be effortless? The easier something is to use, the more you are likely to use it.
  

• Lesson 3. We used to have a two-sentence mission statement and a three-sentence vision. Adam and I have spent a lot of time thinking about where we’re heading and, as part of that, rewrote both. We now have a three-word mission statement (“Make Commerce Intelligent”) and one-sentence vision. It is a lot more powerful and a lot more clear.
  
  We think that clarity will help our team with direction and that simplicity will help the market understand us.

Simple, however, does not mean easy to build.

Our revisions to our mission statement and vision were incredibly hard work to make simple. Each word choice was loaded, and there were many rounds of distillation. SEANs will require a great deal of complexity—out of sight of the customer—to make simple to use (or perhaps manage). The examples could go on, where simplicity as the goal requires more effort at the onset.

It also requires fresh eyes—we all spend so much time looking at our businesses and websites, we become kind of numb and assume that others are aware of all the nuance, all the detail, all the complexity. And that can make it SO hard to boil down to the key insights, the simple truths, the easy stuff.

That, though, I think is the point: Simplicity is harder, but “harder” is often durable, since it’s a road that’s not as frequently chosen.