Beauty In Simplicity

simplicity

In the past, as a former engineer I have always tended to revel in the joy of complexity. How many bells and whistles can I add on providing everything that someone could want all in one place? That was then, this is now and gone are the days when I’m looking for more things to do, now I’m scaling back as I focus on one thing. The great thing about focus is simplicity, and I’m finding simplicity to be a beautiful thing.

This blog is undergoing a transformation, part of which is live today. You’ll notice my blog becoming a lot less busy, the blinking ads will soon be static and the distracting bright colors toned down a bit. My busy header with links to different articles about my blog is gone, replaced with a nice simple header and a brand new font I’ll be using for the brand. More and more time will be spent making sure there is less and less distractions on the site so that your focus can be the articles.

Of course I’m not starting a trend, in fact I think I’m a bit behind of a trend that has already been in full swing. Look at services like Twitter, or sites like Google, so simple, so focused. A famous CEO recently told me that he learned how to increase user interaction on their site, the answer was to take things away, that’s right, to simplify the site. With less options people actually clicked more and their profits went up, I guess this really is the definition of less is more right?

As a consumer I also notice that I’m craving less, or at least less busy options. My favorite iPad and iPhone apps are clean and organized, none of them does everything for me but each one does a specific thing very well. It’s a hard lesson to learn but one that I’ve definitely learned over the years, you can do ten things pretty well or one or two things really well. At this next stage in my life I’m focused on doing one or two things really well.

#1 is Fashion Metric and the adventure Daina and I are already in building a startup in the Fashion Tech space. It’s a new journey for us but the concept of beauty in simplicity is key here as well. We want our users to do as little work as possible for the maximum amount of enjoyment and utility. If you don’t like shopping for clothes period, how can we make it fun for your to shop for clothes online? Even more important for us is how can we recommend clothes that will delight you and make you excited to use the service?

The Lean Startup process has helped us a lot with staying focused on only building something that people want and continually learning from our users. Of course this same process applies to Domaining as well. So many Domainers own domain names with big dreams attached to them, the problem is few have taken the time to figure out what people really want. Too long people have tried to make money with domains by creating a huge content site or a blog, if this doesn’t work they give up. What happened to looking for the need, or taking the time it really takes to build a real business?

Sometimes in life, there is incredible beauty in simplicity, a certain sense of satisfaction when you’re doing more with less. There was a time when my plan was to sell one domain a day, now I try to sell one domain a month, but I do it for 100x what I sold domains for in the past. Doing less, being more focused, and truly enjoying the beauty in simplicity. If you feel like you’re doing too much, you might just need to find this for yourself because like I said above, you can do ten things, but only pretty well, if you want quality you’ll most likely need to do more with less.

(Photo Credit)

Morgan Linton

Morgan Linton