Simple is better

I listened to company of one late last year and am listening again right now. If you haven’t read it. I highly recommend.

One thing that has truly resonated with me from the book is that offering a simple (but useful) product with great customer service leads to success. Having a growth mindset will (generally) not help a solo bootstrapped founder.

I started rebranding SoccerCruit (no Productive Recruit) last year to size up my target audience. It’s still the niche of college athletic recruiting, but now with the potential to reach athletes/families/clubs/high schools of all sports and not just soccer.

One thing I’ve gotten way to excited about is having a hybrid app. I thought having a mobile app would be extremely beneficial. But it is adding a lot of scope to my work even though I’m using ionic and I’m planning on going back to using Laravel for both the api and front end. I’ll focus on making it a pwa and mobile first but there’s no reason why my future customers would need a mobile app (heck none of my competitors do). I think I just got too fixated on learning a new technology but for my business this is a bad choice.

I feel relieved just thinking of focusing on the Laravel app. While I wasted some time with the ionic front end , it was worth exploring to see if it was worth it.

What are you doing that you could hold off on to make your product/service more simple?