Designers make better (boutique) products
In 2002, Mike Cannon-Brookes, an undergrad student at the University of New South Wales, sent out a mail to all his classmates asking for help to launch a new tech startup. Sharing the same love for computers, Scott Farquhar responded to the email and the duo kickstarted a tech support company called Atlassian.
Running tech support, the founders saw what gaps are present in the product development space, and after a year of tinkering launched JIRA — a new paradigm in product management tools. Although the start was relatively slow, today JIRA is one of the most recommended tool for agile project management.
This was 20 years ago. Today the ecosystem of home-brewed tools and services is being led by small product design teams who are making innovative apps and pushing the boundaries by thinking differently.
How the development landscape has changed in the past two decades
Atlassian, the venture behind JIRA, took about 3 years to reach a milestone of 1000 customers. All of this was done without any VC funding. Today, however, this crunch has been made easier both in terms of time and reach. This is possible because of a myriad of things lining up together.
Design and dev have been inching closer to each other for the past few years. We are now at a point where the boundaries are blurred. The expansion of no-code development platforms and tools has enabled people to create, build and deploy apps all by themselves. Alternative payment options like Buy Me a Coffee or Github sponsors have also made these apps a worthwhile venture and in some cases a profitable opportunity. Indie development is going through a renaissance and it is changing what products we build and how we build them.
What makes boutique products so different?
Going back to the JIRA story again, the duo was in a unique position to develop such a piece of software. Running a tech support, they were familiar with most of the issues prevalent in companies. They designed a product to solve for these issues effectively. This is the basis of design thinking principles. Indie app makers have been groomed to solve problems with this paradigm.
Armed with all the toolsets that come with design thinking, these creators have made really interesting design decisions that set their products apart from the herd. Let’s look at a few interesting examples from this space and how they are disrupting the product ecosystem.
Nodes.io
Marcin Ignac has put together an all star team at Variable studio. Their team is at the fore front of generative art and its implementation into products. Nodes.io is their attempt to create and work with design in a programmatic way. Traditionally, design and coding have always been kept in different silos. But in recent years the debate “Should designers know how to code” has become irrelevant as more and more creators have become tool agnostic and in turn process agnostic.
Nodes.io picks up a lot of modules from different products and repackages it with a minimal visual style. Individual modules like having nodes to represent flow control have been present for some time, but it’s the unique recipe of modules that the Variable team uses that makes the product stand out.
The visual language is often kept minimal for keeping things simple now while also allowing for scalability in feature set further down the line. Apart from being clean, most modern apps have realised that in order to scale a feature set it is better to outsource it to the community. Nodes.io also provides an API for users to create tools and workflows and also share it with others. Opening the functionality through APIs is a great way to not only make the product more useful but also create a flourishing micro-community.
Mymind
Like nodes.io, mymind is another minimal product developed by a design centric team. However, unlike nodes.io which is a potpourri of existing features combined to form a product, mymind ditches the status quo all together.
Mymind created by HOVS (House of Van Schneider) is a bookmarking and note taking tool leveraging the power of computer vision and AI to automatically categorise your saved internet. The tools that came before it gave user the power to categorise, tag, label every inch of your digital collection. Mymind on the other hand went with a more calm philosophy and delegated the organising to technology through AI and computer vision, thus eliminating most of the cognitive load.
It’s also interesting to see the aggressive push on privacy by these products. Product leaders not only know how products influence business but also how business affects product. It’s easy to see that business models have consistently overlooked data privacy concerns for ulterior motives. Mymind’s solution is to not be dependant on VCs for funding but rather create an app valuable enough that it can self sustain. Unfortunately the cost of privacy has to be borne by the user as mymind subscriptions can cost more than a few cups of coffee a month.
Closing Thoughts
The product landscape is thriving with new and innovative apps released everyday. It is exciting to see the effects of democratising software technology and letting people play with it. Small product companies like Notion is influencing giants like Microsoft to act. They are not just increasing the competition but also bringing in their philosophies into the mix; creating more open apps focused around users and what matters to them the most. They are cutting through the fluff and focussing on solving problems rather than selling solutions.
These products do however have their own problems. They are generally pricey and less robust compared to legacy enterprise products. It is also hard to gauge whether the product will be actively maintained or not as a lot of them are abandoned due to various reasons. However the ones that do manage to solve these problems are the ones truly disrupting the space.
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