Don't reinvent the wheel

It's easy to look at startups or innovation and think everything has to be "the next big thing", "revolutionary" and "10x better than existing alternatives''. And while there is a truth to it, it's also misleading advice, if taken in a literal sense.

When commercialising a new product or service, innovation does not have to happen on all levels. As a startup it's not your primary job to be different. It's your job to put existing wheels together in a new way and solve an unsolved problem.

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The guiding star of product and business development is the customer and her needs. It's all about the value of the solution for the customer or user. The "next big thing", "revolutionary" or "10x better than existing alternatives" is always meant from the customer perspective, not the product or business perspective - a very important difference.

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As a startup it's not your job to be different. It's your job to put existing wheels together in a new way to solve an unsolved problem. It's your job to understand the unsolved user need and then provide a solution to it in the most cost and time effective way.

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Especially as a startup, time and resources are scarce. It's important not to waste either. You have to take shortcuts. The best place to take these shortcuts is where no extra value is created for the user. Copy that "learned UI" which every user knows, apply those "industry best practices" and steal the ways that users are already used to navigating competitive products and services. Make it as easy as possible for new users to adapt your solution.

There is a ton of "common knowledge" that every user understands immediately, without explanation. For example, the burger menu in an app - every user knows that three lines on top of each other open a navigation menu. And there are many, many more of such examples.

Do not reinvent the wheel! Make use of such common practices and put them together in a new way to solve an unsolved problem. It's not your job to create everything from scratch. It's your job to understand the unsolved user need and then provide a solution to it in the most cost and time effective way possible.

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Early mistakes at Stagecast

While the above might sound simple in theory, it can get quite tricky to put into practice. Knowing what features can be substituted with a shortcut, requires knowing exactly what product features provide customer value and what features are just "nice to have" or "infrastructure" features. And it requires to also know what shortcut alternatives exist on the market.

The image below shows the user interface of the alpha version of the Stagecast app back in 2016. It's important to say that we never actually developed the user interface as seen below, but just looking at it gives me chills today. Rather than developing a user interface that could be understood immediately by a user, we created a user interface that looked catchy - we wanted everything to look "new" and "different". The result?  No-one was able to use this interface: The buttons were not understood as buttons, the timeline was unintuitive and the symbols (or pictograms) were misguiding. We should have "stolen" more best practices from other apps to make it easier for our users to navigate this interface (and we did in later builds)!

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Another great example is our redesign of Stagecast in Fall 2020. By then, we had a much more analytical approach to product development and were able to base our design decisions on quantitative data and AB testing. One major flaw in the old system was an inefficient sign-up and onboarding process. We did not stick to "industry practices" and instead developed our own signup screens and onboarding user experience. With Stagecast 3.0, we adopted common UI & UX designs throughout the onboarding journey and the results speak for themselves. We managed to lower the drop-off rate on the sign-up screen from 70% to 15% and the onboarding skip rate from 95% to 45%! 
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With Stagecast 3.0, we adopted common UI & UX designs throughout the onboarding journey and the results speak for themselves. We managed to lower the drop-off rate on the sign-up screen from 70% to 15% and the onboarding skip rate from 95% to 45%! 

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It's crucial that you design your product in a way that users find it easy and intuitive to use. And to do so, stick to best practices where there is no unique value added for the user. Do not reinvent the wheel! Rather, out existing solutions together in a new way.