Building is easy; knowing what not to build is much harder!
Complexity isn’t just extra code -- it’s a tax on your team’s time, attention, and user trust.
At Ignyte (DIFC Innovation Hub), I challenge founders to show a paying customer generating revenue within days. This forces focus. And users love friction-less experience.
I often tell engineers: write it in a single file or keep it as low-key as possible. If your prototype lives in one script, you’ll understand every line.
A payments startup I advised at Ignyte a couple of weeks ago, the team first wrote a bash script to poll transactions and trigger emails. Only after it worked flawlessly for weeks did they translate it into micro-services.
Instead of dreaming up features, set a date and treat it like hardware launch. Give yourself sixteen days to demo version one. Constraints force creativity.
At another portfolio company, a two‑week sprint yielded a AI messenger bot that answered user questions - far more impactful than the six‑month roadmap they originally planned.
Have a “prune day”. Pick one feature nobody's touching and remove it. No debates. Cleaning the clutter allows to see code as trees in a forest: every branch you lop off frees sunlight for the rest.
A simple product demands simple messaging. At one accelerator cohort, I told founders: if your tagline needs a semicolon, rewrite it. Clarity in language signals clarity in design. Users trust what they understand.
Simplicity is a mindset. Originality. Which is getting scarce in this day and age of AI-plagiarism.
It’s choosing the hardest question. Like, "what do we refuse to build?" over “what else can we add?”. It means designing for removal, not addition. And in that space between complexity and clarity, real innovation happens.
