The Elimination Strategy – Why More Makes Your SaaS Worth Less

I don't know about you but I dread looking for products on AMZN. If I know exactly what I am looking for it is not too bad but it seems AMZN has been overwhelmed with "AI Slop" quality product listings since before there was Generative AI.

One step on my quitting Prime journey was contacting AMZN about an obviously fraudulent product listing and them telling me they didn't want to hear any complaints about a product listing unless I'd bought the product.

> The most valuable companies in the world aren’t built by adding. They’re built by eliminating. Not by giving customers more options, but by systematically removing every friction between them and what they want.

> Amazon eliminated:

> Store visits (shop from home)

> Product hunting (search + recommendations)

> Price research (automatic price matching)

> Return trips (free home pickup)

> Shipping decisions (Prime = 2-day default)

I don't think any of this is true about amazon in 2024 except maybe "store visits". Product hunting on amazon is hard, there are always variations of the same product at different prices, they don't have free home pickup for at least most returns, and they often have options for same day shipping which aren't free unless you hit a minimum.

Also amazon shopping isn't Saas in the first place, and reducing friction compared to what a user would have to put up with without a service and adding features aren't mutually exclusive so the idea that amazon succeeded by reducing friction doesn't mean that less is more or anything, and I'm not sure there is actually a meaningful difference between what this article is proposing and how people would normally set out to build a SaaS except in that you should probably be sure that any features you add are reducing friction for your users, which is probably reasonable but fairly obvious.

This 1000%. The number of fly-by-night Chinese “brands” with inscrutable names selling garbage-tier products makes Amazon’s search almost useless without a ton of extra filtering.

More often than not, I end up on Amazon product pages by way of The Wirecutter or other product review sites.

I want the check box that says, “Show only brands that GenX would recognize”