What makes you different

Something that's been on my mind lately: Why is a customer going to choose my product? There's tens to hundreds or even thousands (looking at you CRM's) of every app for every problem. Why would someone choose mine?

Price? I'm a firm believer in charging a price that works for the customer and for you. Competing on price is a race to the bottom. If this is where you are at, you've already lost.

Features? Maybe but that's a grind and a bit whack-a-mole. Having all the features someone could ever want waters down a product. Honestly, it makes products confusing. How do you build work flow and create value for the customer when the customer is anyone and the work flow is anything?

Something else? I'm becoming a bit obsessed with what makes you different. People remember different. And when someone gets out their card to buy something, you want them to remember you.

Our brains love to live on autopilot in a sea of sameness. This makes us hyper-sensitive to different. Even if that weren't true, different is great because it makes comparison difficult. Instead of granny smith verse golden delicious, it's apples and oranges.

The Hot Dog

In Unreasonable Hospitality, Will Guidara recounts the story of one particular table of diners at Eleven Madison. They were foodies in New York from overseas to enjoy the best restaurants.

They'd probably had several amazing experiences. But one of them mentioned they were bummed they didn't get a new york hot dog. This was their last night in the city, so Will ran to the nearest hot dog cart, got a dog and convinced his chef to serve it to them.

Of all the places they dined, who do you think they remembered? Which story do you think they told people over and over? The hot dog.

Different is remembered. Different is shared. It's better than being better. And that's why I can't stop thinking about what makes my products different.

An Example

Let's talk about Box Out for a moment as a practical example.

Our competition focuses on infinite customization. Move this logo wherever you want or make it bigger. Change the font or text size. Drag this. Drop that. All of them just re-create Photoshop in the browser with a bunch of stock templates to choose from. Heck, that is all canva is.

We do the opposite. We focus on speed (time to social timeline) and brand (delegate to students/interns but retain quality). How fast can we help you make a graphic to share with your followers (and then move on with your life).

Don't move things around, it's wasting time.
Lock down colors, fonts and templates.
Don't resize logos or text.

We're different. Those differences create constraints that actually guide us to build a better product. Sure, we've been tempted to build drag and drop, but that would be a disservice to our customers. Their time is better spent on other things.

Trade offs

Everything is trade offs. Things like the list below would be dramatically harder or impossible if we allowed that.

• Multi-format. Different platforms prefer different sized graphics. We handle that for you. X gets widescreen, IG 4:5 (or now 3:4), Story format. Fill out your data once and hit share. Don't duplicate and resize and move stuff around.
• Suggestions. Not sure what to say? Hit a button and get 5 options with different tones that smell quite similar to your previous shares. Of course they are based on the graphic you are attaching to the share.
• Built-ins. Need to crop an image or trim a video? No problem. Do it right in the browser, right from the graphic you are creating. No need to leave the browser. We'll even remove the background for a stunning PNG cut out on many graphics. Not ready to share yet? Schedule it for later.
• Autofill. We autofill fields for the graphic based on what you've previously used, upcoming events, your linked brand information, opponents linked brand information, live stats, etc. Autofill means fewer fields to fill out.
• Speed. We just spent months decreasing average graphic render time from 2.9 to 1.1 seconds. Rendering is so fast now that it feels live.

For Box Out, it's easy to define and see the value those differences create for us (and our customers). Now it's time to think what those differences are and will be for Fireside and Flipper...