In my last couple of emails, I’ve explored how consistent outcomes form the foundation of successful products, while meaningful advantages help them overcome market resistance.

Today, I’m discussing perhaps the most underrated success factor from Chapter 15 of I Need That: Ease.

The importance of being easy to use, adopt, and integrate into daily life is consistently underestimated by even the most experienced product makers.

Because as the creator, you’re blind to your product’s complexity.

You’ve spent years thinking about how your product works.

You profoundly understand the logic behind every feature, the reasoning for each design choice, and the workarounds for any limitations.

Your familiarity has rendered any complexity INVISIBLE to you.

But your customers experience none of that context.

They encounter your product as a black box of mystery that either delivers value immediately or promises frustration. No middle ground.

This is why so many technically superior products fail in the marketplace. They might have perfect outcomes and meaningful advantages, but if they require significant learning curves, behavior changes, or cognitive effort, most people simply won’t bother.

And when it comes to your ideal buyers, you NEED most to bother.

The greatest product success stories share this quality: they reduce complexity rather than adding it.

They slip effortlessly into existing routines, require minimal training, and deliver value from the very first use.

Maximum is deceptively hard to achieve.

And THAT is exactly why it offers you such a huge opportunity by getting it right.

Product Payoff: Stripe became the leader in online payments not through better rates or features, but through radical simplification. While competitors required lengthy applications, technical integration documents, and weeks of setup, Stripe offered a solution that could be implemented with just seven lines of code. This extraordinary ease of adoption helped them grow from startup to $95 billion valuation in just over a decade, despite entering an already crowded market dominated by established players.

Action for today: Find the most technically inexperienced person you know and ask them to use your product while you observe silently (no helping!). Note every moment of confusion, hesitation, or frustration. These friction points—invisible to you but blindingly obvious to new users—are your product’s greatest barriers to adoption. Addressing them will do more for your growth than adding any new feature.

In my final email of this series tomorrow, I’ll explore the fourth critical success factor: Economics. Because even the easiest, most advantageous product with perfect outcomes will fail if the business model doesn’t make good sense.

Tap that elegantly simplified reply arrow, and let’s talk about reducing friction in your product experience. Or reach out to my team of product marketing specialists at Graphos Product.