Even sliced bread sounded too simple

A cofounder once summed up what we were building in three words: websites from text.

It bothered me. It sounded too simple.

Then I thought about sliced bread.

There's a reason the saying is "the best thing since sliced bread." Bread in a loaf got sliced, and then it somehow took over the world and became the default. Nobody invented bread that day. Somebody made one small change to how it reached people, and that change was enough.

So even if building a website from text was all we did, to be honest, that's still a crazy idea. A person types what they need and gets working software back. Ten years ago that sentence would have sounded like a joke.

Simple is not the same as small

I've learned to stop flinching when an idea sounds simple. The ideas that spread are the ones people can repeat to a friend without getting them wrong.

I hold pitches to the same bar. A good one has the complexity of a 10th grade high school presentation, where anyone with no background could pick up the deck and see why it's impressive.

There's a lot of hidden complexity in what we build. Our job is to make it as simple as possible, and to keep the hard parts on our side of the screen.