Less is more? Or, is more better than less?

This just popped up in my feed:

Credit to Guillermo Flor & Jimmy Acton for reposting his original image.

Things always seem clearer with a meme right? But why is it so common that startups default to thinking everyone wants a Swiss Army Knife for everything? 

It comes from a result of ‘logical’ thinking to conclude that more is better than less. It seems obvious right? Surely a tool that does more things surely provides more value, it is therefore more saleable, has a bigger potential market, and must be the right way to go when specifying your product offering in your startup. 

Wrong. Those who have seen the whole lifecycle of many startups will know that ALL weight of evidence points in the opposite direction. For a startup, less is more. But why is this? 

Rory Sutherland, Vice Chairman of Ogilvy, a world-leading advertising and marketing agency explained this perfectly in his book Alchemy, where he described the origins of the Sony Walkman. 

“Perhaps Morita's (Sony co-founder) most profound contribution was the creation of the Sony Walkman—the ancestor of the iPod. For those born after 1975, it’s hard to imagine a time when seeing someone walking around wearing headphones was unusual. Yet in the late 1970s, this behaviour was considered odd, much like using a mobile phone in public in the late 1980s, which often attracted ridicule.

When market research for the Walkman began, responses were lukewarm at best. “Why would I want to walk around with music playing in my head?” was a common reaction. Despite this, the idea for the device originated from a unique request: a 70-year-old executive at Sony wanted a portable device to listen to opera during long flights between Tokyo and the United States. Engineers developed a stereo cassette player, proudly including a recording function. However, Morita instructed them to remove this feature before production.

At first glance, this decision seemed irrational. Removing the recording capability, which added minimal cost to production, defied conventional economic logic. But psychologically, it made sense. Including the recording function might have confused consumers about the product’s purpose. Was it for listening to music? Recording conversations? Capturing live performances? By reducing its functionality to a single purpose, the Walkman clarified its intended use and ultimately redefined personal music consumption.

This concept aligns with the design principle of "affordance," as described by Don Norman. An affordance refers to the perceived and actual properties of an object that suggest how it should be used. A well-designed object—like a plate for eating or a ball for throwing—does not require instructions. Similarly, by removing extraneous features, the Walkman provided an intuitive user experience.

Morita’s decision also leveraged the psychological "jack-of-all-trades" heuristic: people naturally assume that a product specialising in one function performs better than one trying to do many things. For instance, a sofa bed may be adequate as a sofa and functional as a bed, but it often excels at neither. By focusing on one purpose, the Walkman distinguished itself from other devices.

Sceptics may argue there’s no definitive proof that removing the recording function was the right decision. After all, there’s no parallel universe where a multifunctional Walkman was released and failed. However, historical trends show that significant innovations often arise from removing features rather than adding them. For example:

Google succeeded by eliminating clutter from its search page compared to Yahoo, who in turn had achieved their success by being AOL without their in-built internet access. 

Twitter gained popularity by restricting posts to 140 characters.

Low-cost airlines thrived by stripping away in-flight comforts.”

Fight this argument with logic if you will, and time will almost certainly prove your logic to be wrong. After all, how many of you will drive home this evening in your amphibious car, sit down on a folding walking-cane-stool to eat your dinner with a spork and then settle down to watch some TV and snuggle up for night’s kip on your sofa-bed?

I personally first learned this principle in one of the early startups I worked in many years ago. The technical team had specified an incredibly sophisticated protein analyser machine that would not only perform the analysis using a tiny fraction of the highly precious and scarce drug sample (when compared to incumbent machines), but it would also prepare a multiplicity of different formulations to carry the sample directly on a microfluidic ‘lab-on-a-chip’. The project ran many months late in development with the microfluidic formulation part lagging the furthest. Eventually, out of necessity of just releasing something to market the formulation aspect was dropped. I was responsible for commercialisation and braced myself for resistance to only being able to offer half the proposition to our early adopter customers that we had lined up. To my surprise, we found that the lack of the originally intended functionality did not hold back the commercial interest, or ultimate success of the product whatsoever. To our relevant customers, our product proposition was crystal clear and highly compelling. The outcome was a success.. but just don’t think about all the significant resources spent on the part that never made it, that never even needed to make it.

All credit for the above extract to marketing genius and alchemist Rory Sutherland. Buy his book, or at least listen on Spotify/Audible.