I spend a lot of my time trying to audit the points of friction for new products/services in our deal flow pipeline. What is the process currently like and what would it be like if [Company X] existed in its purest form? What I’m really trying to do is understand how much value can or will be attributed to the company. It seems obvious, but it’s my experience that very few founders obsess over removing as much friction as possible for their customers. Which in turn means we usually tell founders that they’re building a “nice to have” product or service as compared to a “can’t live without” product or service.
Some founders react poorly to this and ignore the comment or say, “yeah but it’s enough for people to pay for it”. There’s not much we can do at that point and so we move on from the company. Other founders however, perk up and want to know more.
For us, we like to say that companies that do this well are companies that “empower laziness”. In this situation, the ease with which a customer can complete a task is so satisfying that they completely set aside the analytical side of their brain that would normally perform a cost/benefit analysis and they just say “screw it” and use the service. They don’t even question whether there’s a competitor doing the same thing at a cheaper cost. It’s not enough to be merely convenient. Yes, there are thousands and thousands of businesses that are profitable off of being convenient, but you’re going to have a very difficult time finding a highly successful company that is just “meh”.
One of the best examples of this is Amazon’s one click service. Set an address, enter a CC #, and start buying with unlimited 2-day shipping. Who wouldn’t want that? I remember the days of having to go to multiple online retailers to compare price points and estimate shipping costs for a product…which was an ENORMOUS pita. I pass 5+ major retail stores on my way to and from the office EVERY DAY, and yet I’ll still purchase menial things from Amazon, instead of taking the 10 minutes to park, walk in, find what I want and be done. Instead, these stores act as reminders of what I need to buy, I get to the office or home, hop on the Amazons, buy what I want and two days later it’s at my door step. There’s no two ways around it, I’m LAZY when it comes to this shit and I’m willing to pay anyone a lot more than I normally would to empower that part of my brain. Now imagine if Amazon One Click had been Amazon Three Click…
You should, therefore, try to distill your service down to its simplest and most refined version of itself. Leave no room at the bottom. My business partner and I are always trying to figure out if there’s an easier (lazier) solution to what a service is trying to do. There’s a high probability that if we quickly find one, we aren’t going to be interested in investing. I like to think of it as the “6 minute Ab” problem (video below).
It’s at this point that I should take the time to explain that “lazy” for us isn’t a negative connotation. It’s basically just another way to say “efficient”. We look for companies that make humans far more efficient in their day-to-day lives. It’s a very simple equation, less wasted time = more time to do what you love = value.
I’ll give you an example of something on the opposite side of the spectrum of “empowering laziness”. Retail store self-check out. As a customer, every time I get to the self-check out lane I have an internal dialog that goes something like this. “I just spent 20 minutes walking around your store trying to find the items I need, by using a process that resembles a single player scavenger hunt, then I have to wait in line, to checkout your inventory, so that I can pay you. In case you aren’t aware, I’ve got a job, and I don’t need another one. There’s something grossly wrong with this picture”. Self-checkout lanes might be slightly faster for the average customer, and it certainly saves the retailer money in the form of deleted personnel, but it’s a gigantic frustration that most people loathe. I can’t imagine signing off on a new process that creates a negative final touch point for a large number of my customer base. And those same grocery stores were, and probably still are, amazed that people are willing to get their food delivered by Amazon, Green Chef, etc. As a customer, I’ll suffer the minor frustration of getting slightly less beautiful produce for not having to be treated like an early 1900s coal miner shopping at the company store.
“But what about Amazon Go?” Yep, just another example of Amazon empowering laziness to a T. They took the one thing that is attractive about self-checkout, no human-to-human interaction, and removed the biggest pain point, the work of checking out. Now I can grab what I need, and get back home so I can play Apex, all without having to do any real work or talk to any humans.