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Aaron Levie: Start With Something So Simple It Looks Stupid

By Aaron Levie · Founder Stories · 1 min read

Box's first product just uploaded a file and let you access it. Enterprise execs thought it was a toy. That simplicity was exactly why it was so disruptive.

Key Points

Start with something insanely simple and expand over time
All those vendors thought the answer was jamming in as many features as possible — Box did the opposite
Nail one use case. That becomes the wedge to expand into everything else

Start with something insanely simple and then focus on expanding it over time.

The Stupidest Thing They'd Ever Seen

Levie: When we got started, you would have looked at our technology and thought — that is the stupidest thing I've ever seen. All it does is you upload a file and then you access the file.

It was that simplicity that was actually why it was so disruptive. All those vendors thought the problem was jamming in as many features as humanly possible into one piece of software. We said actually, the fewer features and simpler set of functionality is going to be our value proposition.

If you were in classic enterprise software, you would have thought it was a toy. That is never going to serve enterprises, regulated businesses, complex workflows. What they didn't recognize was that was just the start. That was just our day one use case.

It was that simplicity that was actually why it was so disruptive.

Nail One Use Case

Levie: The instinct is to brainstorm lots and lots of features. But that's not actually how you're going to be successful. You're going to be successful by nailing one use case that everybody has a massive problem with.

If you can nail that one use case, that becomes the wedge to expand out to all the other use cases you want to solve. You have to resist the natural instinct that more functionality and more powerful software is better.

Nail one use case that everybody has a massive problem with. That becomes the wedge to expand into everything else.

12 Years Later, Still Removing Features

Levie: 12 years in, we're still having to relearn this over and over again. The amount of product meetings where we have to say — we have to remove that feature, we have to hide that thing, we have to make that simpler. It never goes away.

Having less functionality gives people way more opportunity to use your service. It's counterintuitive, but the more functionality you have, the more you narrow the set of customers that are going to make sense of your product and want to use it.

Having less functionality gives people way more opportunity to use your service. It's counterintuitive.