“Simple” Vertical Applications
There was a lot of talk on the TED stage last week about technology. Elon is building electric cars and taking us to Mars. Larry & Sergey are putting A.I.s in those cars to drive us around. In a few years , I’m pretty sure my iPhone will be replaced with some kind of wearable watch/eyeglass couplet. Technology is incredible, and while it has already drastically changed the world in my lifetime, I feel it will continue to surprise me for the next 60 years -- or the next 100 years if some of this bio/nanotech comes to fruition ;)
But there is still a lot of room for the growth of the “simple” vertical application. When I say "simple", I put it in quotes because it only appears simple. The builders worked hard to make it that way. When I say vertical, I mean specialized for a specific use case. To give contrast, a “horizontal” app would be a text editor or a spreadsheet or Trello[1]. When I say application, I’m primarily referring to some kind of web application. It might have a website. It might be an iPhone app. It might have both. It might be a service you sign up for and never login to again. It might be a service you use daily.
I started college as a Physics major believe it or not. I’ve been fascinated by the Einstein-Planck duality since I was 14. But in my first year of college, I took an introduction to Electrical Engineering, learned what this is, and was equally fascinated:
This diagram shows two high-pass filters. You put some RF energy into where it says J1, and what you see coming out of J2 will have all the low frequency energy removed. The Cs and the Ls are capacitors and inductors. By changing the value of those capacitors and inductors, you can fine tune the “cutoff” frequency under which the signal will attenuate. You know how small headphones never have good bass response? That’s because they are high-pass filters (not on purpose, but as a result of how they are built). The low frequencies (the bass) don’t make it through. Then I learned about high-pass filters, which are equally simple. Then I learned you could chain the two together to get a band-pass filter. This is how old car radios work.
What fascinated me about all this was that there was no “technology”. There was no computer. It’s just a few passive[2] analog components. Behind the scenes, there an absurd amount of mathematical theory, but on the surface, that was it. Just a couple components on a circuit board and suddenly you were able to isolate signals out of the RF spectrum.
“Simple” vertical applications are the band-pass filters of the internet technology world. They seem simple on the surface, but there can be a surprising amount of thought (theory) that goes on behind the scenes to figure out exactly how to build them. Their job may only be to gather & filter data in a certain way, but that doesn’t make the information coming out of those systems any less important.
I’ve been working on this thing called Ramen lately. Ramen is a fundraising platform for software startups, but instead of just allowing projects to crowdfund, we provide a robust toolbox of collaboration features that the project owners can use to work with their backers (who are really customers) to ensure they are building something the customers want.
VelocityKick is a project currently funding on Ramen. VK is solving a problem that all teams running crowdfunding campaigns run into: you want to email your friends, but your team of 4 people has some of the same friends in common. Your contacts are spread out over different areas. They have different levels of expertise. Some are potential users, others are just friends. Some are your buddies that you just need a favor from, and some are business connections that require a more formal ask. VK helps teams merge their contact lists, filter the contacts based on these various criteria, and then exports lists to be emailed.
It recently dawned on me that it is the quintessential “simple”[3] vertical application
VK has a straightforward input phase (The J1 on the diagram):
A user creates a team by sending them invitation emails
Team members upload their contacts to VK
Team members also give VK access to their social networks
VK then sucks in all those data and gives the Team Owner a consolidated view of all the contacts reachable by the team
VK has a straightforward filter phase (The Cs and Ls on the diagram):
The team owner can filter the contacts based on a bunch of criteria (# of FB friends, total social reach of the contact, location, # of team members connected to the contact, etc...)
VK has a straightforward output phase (J2):
Click export and download a list of email addresses
It may seem "simple", but this application will save project teams tens of hours and allow them to be more effective running their campaigns.
“Simple” vertical applications are the band-pass filters of the internet technology world. They may not be self-driving cars or rockets to Mars, but they have the ability to pull the signal out of the noise. And in todays world of ever-increasing noise, we need them more than ever. Don’t trivialize them. Respect them. Use them. Build them.
Note: Velocity Kick is currently funding on Ramen and has one week to go. If you’ve ever ran a funding campaign (actually if you’ve ever launched anything), then you probably have experienced the pain they are solving. Go throw them some cash to help make the product a reality.
[1] Joel Spolsky gives a great write-up of Trello, a horizontal app for managing lists of lists here: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2012/01/06.html
[2] Passive means we don’t supply any power to them. There are no batteries in the circuit diagram above.
[3] Yes, I will continue to put “simple” in quotes for this entire post, because these apps are never truly “simple” ;)
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