If you have used Monday.com or Asana, you probably have experienced a certain level of pain in navigating those tools. At the very least, there is a steep learning curve in trying to understand and lessen the overwhelm of so many buttons on your screen. This story looks at that struggle from a human perspective, with no marketing or downplaying of characters.
Let’s take Monday.com as an example. I’m an entrepreneur, trying to manage my medium-sized project. I create a free account, sign in, and there I am. Sinking in a sea of buttons, templates, dashboards, widgets, and views, and I’m pretty sure they’ve added more since I’ve last used them.
At that point, my brain begins to wander around seeking to create a simple task just to escape the other tens of things I don’t need. So I go ahead and try to create a task, and lo and behold, I get introduced to tens of fields to fill out, put down the pen, Adam, we’re defeated. That’s how I felt at the time, even tho I was given unlimited access trial.
Asana, and the tens of other clones pretty much and objectively speaking (after testing at least 12–16 alternative tools) have given me a close to exact feeling of overwhelm trying to create and manage a medium-sized project/venture. If you’re a fan of the game of thrones, consider them playing a new show: game of clones. I don’t have a problem with idea replication, I do have a big problem with cloning and repeating the pain and overwhelm of the cloned platform.
See, after spending over 15 years crafting software and running three entrepreneurial ventures, I truly realized and honed in on a very subtle, yet common phenomenon in the market. That is: creating software to make money. Often by money people or those who aren’t interested in creating a user-centric platform, but are more into the “let’s make money” type of mentality. The biggest loser here is the consumer. They reel you in with pricing and marketing techniques but you’d still end up utilizing a money-centric platform that has very limited interest in your user experience and learning curve.
So what’s the takeaway here, Adam? The takeaway here is that those platforms have lost touch and focus on consumers and started playing the cloning and more money game. Although that might work for them in the short term, soon consumers will realize and experience that same overwhelm and complexity, and guess what? Come knocking on a different platform in hopes in simplify their daily lives.
Thanks for reading.
Adam Solomon, Ph.D. — CoFounder Vervo LLC https://vervoapp.com
