Link: http://gettingreal.37signals.com/ch02_Build_Less.php

Underdo your competition

Conventional wisdom says that to beat your competitors you need to one-up them. If they have four features, you need five (or 15, or 25). If they're spending x, you need to spend xx. If they have 20, you need 30.

This sort of one-upping Cold War mentality is a dead-end. It's an expensive, defensive, and paranoid way of building products. Defensive, paranoid companies can't think ahead, they can only think behind. They don't lead, they follow.

If you want to build a company that follows, you might as well put down this book now.

So what to do then? The answer is less. Do less than your competitors to beat them. Solve the simple problems and leave the hairy, difficult, nasty problems to everyone else. Instead of oneupping, try one-downing. Instead of outdoing, try underdoing.

We'll cover the concept of less throughout this book, but for starters, less means:

Less features
Less options/preferences
Less people and corporate structure
Less meetings and abstractions
Less promises

Something else that might be worthy of adding to 37Signals essay...

One of the suggestions I would add to the essay is:

?Keep less data?

Keeping a lot of data is a pain. Indexing, partitioning, tuning, backup and recovery ? everything is more painful when you have terabytes instead of gigabytes. And when it comes to cleaning data out, it always causes endless debates on how long to keep the data (3 month? 7 years?) and different life-cycle options (move to ?old data? system? archiving? how to purge? What is the process?).
What?s more, a lot of the time customers would really prefer we won?t keep the data. Maybe its privacy concerns (when we keep a lot of search history) or difficulty in generating meaningful reports or just plain confusion caused by all those old projects floating around.
Google taught us that all the data should be stored forever. But perhaps your business can win by keeping less data.

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