Make your product effortless. Or go bankrupt

I was reading through @harrydry post on Failory. It's about one of his failed products called 140 Canvas.

140 Canvas allowed you to create a custom (fake) tweet and print it out as a canvas.

They executed amazingly well and got featured on a few YouTube videos by various influencers. These efforts got them 17k visitors ... and 20 sales.

Why?

According to Harry, it was mainly because they required users to create their own Tweets:

If you on onto the landing page to try and purchase a tweet, you’ll see that you have to actually write the tweet yourself. There was no template’s you could buy.

From our analytics, we saw a lot of people click on the box but and never make purchases. I think the actual act of coming up with an original tweet was too much effort.

I confirmed my suspicions here when I saw Framed Tweets pop up. It’s a similar concept, but they allow you to just purchase default tweets. For example a funny Kanye West tweet. According to a Starter Story article they’re making> 300k / year.

I've been into digital marketing since 2006 and I KEEP seeing this. Products that do the SAME thing, but are much more effortless to use CRUSH their competitors.

Before WhatsApp, there was Skype. It was pretty popular on desktop. Then mobile appeared. Skype kinda ignored mobile. WhatsApp appeared and was hyper-optimized for mobile, and they crushed them.

Before Chrome, there was Mozilla. They were dog slow to open. Chrome came along and made things 30-40% faster. People (myself included) loved the fact they didn't have to wait 5 seconds for their browser to open. Now it took only 1 second.

BJ Fogg is one of the guys behind Instagram success. He also teaches at Standard and consults a bunch of startups.

One of the thing he says is if you want to change a behavior (this includes people signing up to your site or buying a canvas from Harry's website), you're much more likely to do it if you start with making things EASIER/effortless for users vs. increasing their motivation.

Many people start the opposite way. They try to motivate people first. Big mistake:

simplifying—making things easier to do—yields more desired outcomes (results) than attempting to convince your audience that they care or should care. When it comes to the behavior design equation, ability > motivation. - source

We over-estimate the influence we have over peoples' motivation and under-estimate the impact we'll have if we just make our product effortless to start using.