Product depth

I can’t stop thinking about what 37signals CEO Jason Fried said in their most recent podcast episode Dare to Be Basic (September 11th, 2024):

Jason (18:01): Yeah, this is a real challenge for something that’s been around for a long time. The way I’ve been thinking about it lately is about depth versus surface area. Surface area is adding a big new thing that everyone can see and it seems to make the product bigger. Improving things at depth doesn’t make the thing bigger. It makes the thing better in very specific ways. So there might be a feature, I’m just going to make something up, automatic check-ins which is a feature in Basecamp. And we could probably add another feature, but we could also say, how can we make automatic check-ins better? Maybe we could add more recurrences, so it’s not just every other day or every day, but it could be twice a day or every three days or every other week. There could be depth. That’s like depth improvements. And you can make that announcement and go, hey, we’ve made this better.

As an all-in-one platform, Podia has always struggled with figuring out when we should go deeper on a particular feature (depth) versus building out new features (surface area), and Jason’s framing really resonated with me.

Our biggest product challenge over 10 years in business is that we are three products in one: website, email, and online store. Each of those features is a company in itself, yet we’re a team of 23 people balancing all three. Historically, we haven't been able to go as deep as we’d like.

It’s been a struggle for us to build out enough surface area across all three products to ensure our customers don’t feel they're missing out compared to dedicated solutions like Squarespace, Mailchimp, or Shopify.

But after 10 years, I think we’ve mostly done that. Podia now has 95% of the important features of any website builder, email service provider, or online store, but we lack the depth in certain areas.

Just over a month ago, we updated our roadmap to prioritize depth, focusing on improving our core features rather than adding new ones and expanding surface area.

We’re not only going deeper into all areas of the product, but also streamlining it by removing underused features, reducing surface area to make Podia easier-to-use and maintain.

The first feature we’ve cut is being able to embed your Podia checkout on any website, e.g. if you’re hosting your website on Wordpress and not at Podia. It wasn’t that this feature wasn’t being used, but it didn’t make sense for us to continue to support a feature that we built over 7 years ago when our website builder wasn’t mature enough, and people preferred their existing website builder over ours.

Seven years later, most of our customers now prefer the simplicity of our website builder, and the convenience of running their entire business on Podia. As a result, continuing to support embedded checkout no longer made sense, even though it will impact a few hundred users.

If you’re fortunate enough to be around as long as we have, you’ll eventually find features like this that need to be cut to reduce your surface area.

For years, I’ve been saying that "next year" would be the time to focus on depth. I’m thrilled to say it’s no longer about next year — we’re diving in right now.