It occurred to me today that running Schedulefly has many similarities to running a hot dog stand. Both have simple menus and a clear focus on who they want to serve. We want to serve restaurants. Not hospitals. Hot dog stands want to serve people who want hot dogs. Not salads. We’re alike quite a few other ways…

-We both have to try to entice people to give us a try, but we don’t want to spend a lot of money to do it. So we rely on word of mouth, and being easy to find when somebody has a craving.

-We both focus relentlessly on making our product awesome, so our customers want to keep coming back for more.

-We both want people to enjoy the experience of doing business with us, so they will tell other people about us.

-We both have a clear focus on doing just one thing. Which means we get really good at it.

-We both keep things simple, because we know there are more people fall in love with simple things than people who fall in love with complex things.

-We both know there are lots of others that do what we do. But we don’t bother worrying about them. We know that if we pour all of our focus into our product and our service, we’ll do just fine.

-We get tons of suggestions on what we should add to our menu, but most of the time we have to genuinely thank the people for making suggestions (which means they care about us enough to try to help make us better from their perspective), but politely decline their suggestion because it doesn’t make sense for what we are trying to accomplish.

You might laugh at the analogy, and think “That’s silly. It’s got to be more complicated to run a software business than to run a hot dog stand.” And that may be the case for lots of software companies that have complicated products and a lack of focus. But not for us. In fact, I think our business is easier to run than a hot dog stand. Our audience is not limited to people within a few blocks of our stand…

Keepin’ It Simple,
Wil