Why surprisingly simple℠?
I’ve been getting a lot of questions lately on how we came up with our tagline, so here goes:
I was fortunate to be part of the third cohort to graduate from a college at the University of Washington which I think laid the foundation for how I think about technology in many ways. The Informatics program focused almost solely on how to design and build technology that makes sense to human beings (they even called the two strands of our program the technology track and human track). Funny enough, I went through the curriculum without hearing the word “simple”.
Little did I realize that the passion that I developed in my years both in class and doing research at the UW would be so in sync with a passion that was brewing in someone I didn’t even know at the time. As a technologist, Chris was passionate about getting rid of messy code and never creating products that would not work for the end user. When the two of us first started talking about creating a company late in 2006, we got very excited about the possibility that we had everything we needed to create enterprise software that didn’t have to, for lack of a better term, suck. We found this pain point to be especially true with customers we talked to in the Fortune 500, though marketing tools at companies of all sizes seemed to be especially true or non-existent.
Luckily we have an excellent agency partner that helped us realize our passion for usable software could be described in two words: surprisingly simple℠.
At the end of the day, making the technology simple is the only thing that matters when talking about meeting the needs of business users, especially those in marketing. I want my marketing people thinking about strategy, the right hooks, new markets, gaining market share, positioning – not writing SQL statements or doing pivot tables in Excel. It’s like asking Heidi Klum to make chocolate éclairs and Emeril to strut down the runway in a size 2 black cocktail dress at New York Fashion Week. It just makes no sense, and the end result would be a disaster.
It’s a sad reality in many cases, and what’s worse, is that if it’s not simple people just won’t use it. And in the case of our product, if marketers aren’t using it they are tying up other resources, spending more than is necessary, or worse forcing to take action and make decisions on limited information.
Those two words are more than a mantra or a tagline, they’ve become like a religion around here. What’s funny is how incredibly difficult and complex it is to actually make something simple, especially streamlining sophisticated marketing needs or trying to answer the question “Who are my customers?” in a surprisingly simple℠ way.
This approach is in the DNA of our product group, and they spend countless hours and sleepless nights focused on doing everything humanly possible to make it all just work. It’s truly a journey, and not a destination and our process and roadmap are reflective of that. The level of usability and design these things go through is unbelievable – especially given the technical complexity that a lot of changes require before we ship a new feature.
What I love is that the passion is so strong, that is has extended to how we do business. We want it to be surprisingly simple℠ to do business with us – from contract signing to on-going support. We’ll let our customers be the judge of that.
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