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Comment by UncleMeat | Hacker News Reader

But what are the features you don’t need? That is not the same set for all users.

Yep. The late 90's and early 2000's was littered with people trying to make "light" copies of MS Word. The problem is that journalists need the wordcount feature, and teachers need the wordart feature. Remove either, you lose a demographic.

That having been said, there are a lot of products out there that made their product intending it to be free, and then when they hit 1m users they started thinking "hmmm, if I could get a dollar out of every user, I could buy a house". They try to stuff a monetization model in sideways and damage their product in the process. Taking a moderately successful product that's crippled by attempting to shoehorn in monetization and redesigning it to have reasonable monetization from the beginning might be a better strategy.

> Remove either, you lose a demographic.

That's exactly the point of this approach. Don't try to solve everybody's use cases like Word. Target one specific group and make the product faster and easier to use by removing all unused features.

Word is a special case and I don't think the model works there - not least because users need an industry standard for content interchange, and it's very hard to build a 100% compatible Word clone.

But there are a lot of opportunities elsewhere to make products that are faster, simpler, cheaper, and more useful than the current industry standards.

Word is not a special case, it's just people getting used to it and that's all. If tomorrow Microsoft goes belly up and their office suite will be dropped by everybody due to always discovered vulnerabilities Libre Office will pick-up quite nicely. I have yet to find a feature of Word that I can't find its equivalent in Libre.

But Libre is a massive product was well, with a tremendous number of work hours put into it over decades. We're talking about alternatives that are nimble and have fewer features.

That's sort of Google Docs/Sheets/Slides TBH (in addition to being hosted/shared). I'm not really a "power user" of any of these tools anymore. I use them a lot but I don't do anything fancy. That said, if Docs didn't have, say, a word count feature, that would be a major annoyance.

I hate it when I have to use Word for something.

The whole point isn't to get all demographics when you make a stripepd down version.

Abiword was great, I used it extensively when I was a student.

A small fraction of users of a big service is often enough to run a small, non-VC funded business.

The moment your goal shifts from VC-backed acquisition or public offering bid to "I'd like to support myself and some employees comfortably" the things you can do profitably become almost endless.

Want to run a little webhosting business focused on small businesses? Tried and true. Want to offer custom software development for some little vertical? Easy enough. Want to just make a really nice and clean note app? That works too.

When your goal of success shifts from "mind boggingly rich" to "sufficient for the lifestyle I want", it's much easier to be successful.

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