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Comment by hansvm | Hacker News Reader

At one SaaS I worked at, I spent a day or two on a foolhardy initiative to analyze our users based on the subset of features they actively used (hoping to reign in the complexity of the product to a few core archetypes we could design for, ideally eliminating some of the more annoying features on the way). The results weren't any better than a weighted random choice. Beyond the login page (and even that had a few customization options), every single person really did have a different 20% they cared about.

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> every single person really did have a different 20% they cared about.

I have always wondered what would happen if someone had to invent spreadsheets from scratch, today.

Would conditional formatting and pivot tables get removed, because only 1% of users use them?

Would they feel supporting column, bar, line, area, pie and X/Y charts was just too complicated? That being able to customise the chart styles and colour schemes was just going to confuse users?

Would they think obscure jargon like 'vlookup' was too confusing, and difficult to localise internationally? Would they think formulas were too complicated to ever be a mass-market feature, as well as too difficult to input on mobile?

Would they discover 80% of office suite users don't use the spreadsheet beyond shopping lists, and replace it with a shopping list tool?

My theory is the modern software industry couldn't produce such a product. I don't think I've seen the industry produce a mass market product that requires a comparable level of user expertise in 20 years.

> I have always wondered what would happen if someone had to invent spreadsheets from scratch, today.

This is exactly what Joel Spolsky did:

> What was I talking about? Oh yeah… most people just used Excel to make lists. Suddenly we understood why Lotus Improv, which was this fancy futuristic spreadsheet that was going to make Excel obsolete, had failed completely: because it was great at calculations, but terrible at creating tables, and everyone was using Excel for tables, not calculations.

... so he went on and created Trello.

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2012/01/06/how-trello-is-diff...

Excel probably got a decade of runway thanks to piracy. Businesses were happy to buy site licenses. Individuals were happy with a "free" copy from work. Who would try to develop a stripped down alternative in that market? You can't compete with free.

That’s why pushing back on features is important. It is super hard to remove them once they are in.

Most of the time it goes way that sales people promise something you build it „because that’s going to be great huge customer” - but after a year or 2 years that huge company moves away because people who originally wanted features moved to other jobs or departments and you are left supporting something some other customer started using by coincidence and is using it in totally wrong way but it somehow works good enough but still initial effort is not paid back and best would be to kill the feature.

The parent comment seems to imply that roughly 1/5 of their user base each used a different 1/5 of the product. This implies that every feature was genuinely valuable in driving revenue - or at least customer acquisition!

Wasn't this the same argument which Evernote made for its bloatedness.

Evernote’s 5% problem offers a cautionary lesson to tech companies

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10842679

That doesn’t mean feature paid itself off if you invest with idea that it will be useful for more than 1/5 of users and when feature brings single customer and is marginally useful for other customers.

Then also you have ongoing costs of maintaining the feature that no one usually accounts for. Even if customer participated financially into creating the feature when they leave you are left with maintenance.

Yeah, there's definitely something to be said about building a large feature for a single customer. It didn't sound like that was the situation here.

> It is super hard to remove them once they are in

Obligatory xkcd reference:

https://xkcd.com/1172/

Would you consider each 20% to almost be its own utility app (could possibly be a standalone app), or do you think each 20% were simply different workflows for the same app (each user prefers a particular workflow).

The latter thing. One user might use features 1,2,3,4,5, another 1,3,5,7,9, another 2,4,6,8, and a fourth 1,2,3,8,9. Those usages weren't meaningfully disentangleable.

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