Shoes and software | Hacker News Reader

Shoes and software

37signals.com

79 pointsAndrewWarner33 comments

The technology probably did matter, but people don't view it in those terms. What he describes is people testing the "technology", but they certainly don't think about the materials or the notches. Same's true for software. People don't care about AJAX and clouds. They do care about responsiveness and usable pages.

This is not about "back to the basics", this is about advertising. Apart from some "deviants", runners still use the high-tech shoes, not Converse Chucks. And the basic ads about shoes certainly don't focus on tiny tidbits of the technology. Maybe a large catch-phrase ("Torsion", "Pump" etc.), but the rest is aesthethics and athletes...

I think saying that customers tend to prefer "simple done well" is an oversimplification (pun unintended, but kept anyway). I've found the real issue is that people have a maximum rate of information absorption and when a salesperson starts rattling off a list of features, that rate is quickly surpassed. If you could make a potential customer in a shoe store understand that the rubber compound in a particular shoe would make it perform 30% better, it would likely have an impact on the sale. The problem is that it is nearly impossible to make someone quickly understand something outside of their frame-of-reference. Most people will just start ignoring you as soon as you say "rubber compound."

I think this post is a more valid commentary on how products should be sold than how products should be made. For example, I used to sell a fairly complex piece of engineering software. I found that the most effective way to demo the software was to find out about one of the customers problems and show the software solving that problem over and over. Often I would only end up showing 2 or 3 features of a program that had thousands. That doesn't mean that the customer wouldn't go on to find value in many other parts of our product once they started using it, it just means that in the context of a sales meeting, making one point well is often as good as you can do.

If you could make a potential customer in a shoe store understand that the rubber compound in a particular shoe would make it perform 30% better, it would likely have an impact on the sale.

No. I say this because I'm the kind of customer the article is about.

When I'm buying I'm looking for a shoe I am walking around in all day. I'm never going to race. I'm probably not going to play any sports in that shoe. (When I play sports it is usually barefoot at the beach.) I simply don't care about performance. As soon as you try to sell me on performance, I'm ignoring you because it is utterly irrelevant to my life.

I care about comfort, durability, price and aesthetics. Were I single I'd move aesthetics up the list because women do seem to care about how your shoes look. Were my feet easier to fit I might move comfort down the list. I won't believe anything the sales person says about durability, and my decisions on that are the repeat buys where I walk up, name the model, try on a couple of shoes, and walk out. The sales person will have no idea that durability was a factor for me in that decision because I relied on past experience, and not anything that was visible in the store.

The article is exactly right. I simply don't care about any of what the manufacturer is trying to get people to care about. And there is no way of delivering that message that will make me care. I only care about solving my problem, which is keeping my feet protected at relatively low cost per unit time without looking ridiculous.

I care about comfort, durability, price and aesthetics

With the exception of price, these are all metrics of the shoe's performance. I chose the word "performance" deliberately because it is very general and can be measured differently by different customers.

They are metrics of performance, yes. But they are not the type of performance that the shoe manufacturer generally tries hard to market.

Since 37s is so ruby, reading this title, I was briefly hopeful that _why had returned.

haha, that was the reason I clicked on it too!!

As an aside, Shoooes 3 is almost ready...

SaaS means much software has become a commodity product, like shoes. You can still hit one out of the park by selling 'shoes' however, literally and figuratively.

One of the reasons Zappos did so well was because they took commodity (shoes) + software (online store) + CS (where CS = customer service, not compsci) = purchase.

Most tech markets now are trading commodity products; even content is a commodity.

But you can still overcome the commoditization issues by finding something else to sell that's hyperspecialized - and some of the most interesting e-commerce marketplaces of the last decade scale precisely *because they commoditize long-tail items and create a barter platform that lets those locked out of the speciality markets participate in the trading.

Empowering individual sellers in a commodity market, aka 'normals' seems like it was a relatively efficient mechanism for growth in the last boom. Examples = information/ads (Google), long tail book purchasing (Amazon), and distributed social interactions (Facebook).

The more interesting question: are we seeing a return of selling to geeks, aka hyperspecialization?

Not everyone is buying a shoe for the same reason, not everyone is buying software for the same reason. When you are targeting certain markets, say sneakers, then yes the article applies. When you move to specialized footwear for a more demanding demographic things start to change. For example, climbing shoes or hiking boots for more challenging terrain then just going off the sidewalk will have other vectors of importance. (Durability, flexibility, friction, water/weather proofing)

Compare http://www.rei.com/category/4501296 to http://www.vibramfivefingers.com/

I think the real take away is people are looking for good enough for their situation. The more demanding their software needs, the more features/design/implementation will be, but if all they need is a todo list, then they'll end up at 37signals. :)

"... climbing shoes or hiking boots for more challenging terrain then just going off the sidewalk will have other vectors of importance."

Yes, but still, who are the majority of people who are buying those specialized shoes? Normal people who don't really need them. So it still applies, even there, even if the exact mix of people changes.

>The real lesson for me is this: People want the basics done well.

What "the basics" evolves at varying rates of complexity as technology changes. To the users this is mostly invisible except when it is directly related to the UI or when some new technology seems like magic.

"On paper these were strong selling points.."

I don't think this is a good example. Shoe "technology" is bullshit. The technology doesn't even look good on paper because everyone knows it's just stuff that's used to justify the bloated price of Nike runners. Aesthetics and build quality are all people want from shoes.

Now for technology - not just software - most people don't have a good way to judge all the stuff they don't understand. So features work as a selling point. Nobody wants to spend money on something that may turn out to be not good enough later. Feature lists tap into that fear/purchase hesitation.

for the end user, software technology is worth as much as for shoes. Do you think people would like Basecamp or X app less if it was build using Django instead of Rails? Or people would leave Facebook for MySpace if they'd integrate Cassandra?

No, but people did leave Friendster and Myspace for Facebook because the sites ran like crap and would try to put viruses on your computer.

They did run like crap, but most people left Myspace for Facebook for one of two reasons; 1) Facebook was cleaner, and 2) Facebook was used by high status people (started with Ivy League students).

I'll repost my comment here:

I think there’s also a huge disconnect between the people who are making the software and those who are using the software. We (as programmers) tend to evaluate things in an incredibly methodological way, and care about advanced features, and are willing to take the time to learn bad interfaces in return for “power features.”

But most people are not us.

It's true. It took me about a year to figure that out with my current project. I was building a sophisticated solution that I thought the market needed rather than focusing only on what the market wanted right now.

The solution was to focus on the simplest problem that the software solves. All the other features could still be valuable, but they will be released based on feedback from actual usage.

This is true, but perhaps not surprising. Its relatively new than we're trying to sell software to "normal" people more often than fellow geeks.

In my mind, AOL is the company that first crossed this divide. CompuServe was decidedly not for normal folks, AOL most definitely was.

With software like basecamp, the feature-rich vs easy is especially pronounced.

A project management system 9/10 of people are actually using but doesn't have feature X is more useful than a project management system that 8/10 people are using but does have it, often.

I'm interested to see what a 37signals bugtracker would look like. Every time I use Bugzilla or Mantis, I cringe.

I also wondering why this “People want the basics done well” cant be applied to the car industry. Manufactures are selling so advanced vehicles restyled every year(and you are paying for that!)All that advanced systems for auto-ething and so on. While I just need good car that i can comfortable use for years… I dont really care if it will give me 21 or 22 mpg or 300 or 301 hp!

Does anyone else want car produced by 37signals? )))

(Hope reposting my comment is ok, i am really interested what do HN audience think about that, sorry for bit offtopic)

Cars are a much larger signal of status to a wider group of people.

Not to say that there wouldn't be a market for a 37signals car, but it'd be much smaller, I'd think.

Hmm, to me shoes are signal of status for many ppl too, but still there is a huge group for whom car is a irreplaceable tool for transportation and delivery. I might be wrong, but my guess is that market of "budget cars" >> market of "status cars"

Even among those who for cars are irreplaceable, many make their decision entirely based on status.

I'm going to use your post as an excuse to talk about shoes some more.

Shoe shopping is a great example of pathological shopping behavior. Men will gladly drop $250 on a pair of Kenneth Coles, thinking the label means status and some kind of guarantee of quality. KCs are ugly and poorly made.

The irony is that, when they're on your feet, nobody will know they're KCs and you spent $250 on them. But some people are so programmed to care about labels that this thought will not occur to them. At least designer jeans have exclusive copyrighted designs sewn right onto the ass pockets.

I dunno: quite a few budget cars are still marketed as status cars. When was the last time you saw a car ad that emphasized "buy me, I'm cheap" over everything else?

Kia is the only one I can think of.

I'm dating myself, but the example I think of is Volkswagen's famous "Think Lemon" campaign back for the old Volkswagen beetle.

Both of these are examples of a bad signal to noise filter. People think they know what they want, but they don't.

Compound this with the fact that nobody trusts salespeople (with good reason; they very often aren't trustworthy). "Car salesman" is sometimes used as an epithet. The main difference is that people like to pretend they are clueful about cars--partly for status purposes, as someone else noted--and go for the advanced features. Whereas not too many people know or care about the composition of a tennis racket.

What particularly bothers me is the lack of attention paid to durability. This is the primary reason why things "ain't made like they used to be". Following the original article, using shoes as an example, there are really only two large makers of durable dress shoes left in the US, and only one of them makes shoes that aren't ugly (Alden).

+1 i also mostly have durability as one of the top reqs in mind when shop for a new car.

sadly you hardly can expect same quality from modern manufactures, while most of them pray you buying another product of theirs within 1-2 years

Actually, I think the car industry has this pretty well figured out. The restyling is because (most) people don't want to have the same car as everyone else. Any given model comes in a dozen colors for the same reason, and because there are people who literally won't buy a car unless it comes in their favorite color (and base their decision on almost nothing else).

"Auto-everything" is about "don't make me think" design. People just want to point their cars where they are going and be done. They don't want to worry about: did I lock all the doors? Did I dim my high-beams? When should I shift? Will I remember to pump the brakes in a skid?

Cars are probably the best example of this, because there's a lot of technology in cars and nobody cares about it. Cup holders are famously important. I'm reminded of something from this story about a guy who goes undercover as a car salesman to learn how the business really works:

"As I prepared to leave, my editor offered me this advice: "When you're interviewing, don't tell them you know a lot about cars. They don't care. If they ask why you want to work there, just tell them you want to make a lot of money."" (http://www.edmunds.com/advice/buying/articles/42962/page001....)

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