Lucian Marin
The frictionless product
The products aren’t created to satisfy the needs of the few or the needs of the one. They are entities that satisfy the needs of the many. We now have the power and the ability to create digital products that satisfy the needs of every people connected to the Internet. If you give water to someone for the first time, he or she will turn you down because it has no taste, it has no color and it gives you no short-time satisfaction. Water is a frictionless product.
Sublevel is not an iOS app, an Android app, a Windows Phone app, a BlackBerry app. It’s a web site or a web app that works on every device, from smartwatches to big screen TVs. It has built-in notifications, discovery, communication features, search abilities, even a rudimentary HTML API since every page generated by Sublevel is a list of UTC timestamped items. On Sublevel everything is interconnected. Replies are connected to other replies, mentions are connected to people and replies, likes are connected to replies and people, people are connected to other people. Sublevel is a web open and connected to the world wide web — remember WWW?
Someone very close to me said that if I don’t bring Sublevel on the App Store he won’t talk to me anymore. But he’s wrong, like many other people who requested me hundreds of features. The moment you add a feature to your product, that moment you add friction to the system. By accumulating friction, your system will become useless in time. Sublevel isn’t created only for you as an individual, but for everyone as a whole. Sublevel is satisfying the needs of the many by satisfying the needs of the one (you) and the needs of the few (people close to you).
Sublevel is a system of systems, after all. We all hear about these ecosystems, but no one tells you how they work, why they exists or why we need them. That’s because they have no theory to sustain these. They keep adding feature after feature, product lines after products lines, buy startups after startups, create apps after apps. All these things add friction, they don’t take friction away.
I received zero negative feedback from the people on Sublevel. That’s a first.