Younger me had a habit of making everything needlessly complex.
I distinctly remember a time when I was in university, and they wanted a website for their popular annual event. I knew I should’ve stuck to the basics, but I really wanted to try Gatsby (a new framework to build React frontends.) It was just a marketing website, nothing more, and I remember being stuck on some esoteric framework related problem for 2 days (I had to submit it in 3 days).
One of my regrets is how I structured my product when going through YC. It worked for our customers, but the onboarding was painful. The premise was to help make it easier to build internal tools, but we made it overly complicated — a local starter kit, deploying that (and figuring out its hosting on our end), embedding that into an iframe on our main website — Why?
It was very clear what people wanted: exactly what Replit, Lovable or OpenAI Canvas is today.
I have noticed a pattern:
Everything starts off as a simple idea, but after a while, we tend to make exceptions. This could be because:
- You have to account for someone else’s idea, so you make a compromise,
- You fear missing out, so you try both variants, and
- You seek validation by (technical) challenge.
The best part truly is no part. You have to fight like hell to remove it.