Side Effects of Simple
Doing something simple is a pretty well-worn piece of startup advice. I won’t repeat stuff better said elsewhere, but here are two unexpected side effects we ran into by keeping Ninite simple.
The first is that you can go international almost by mistake. This happens when you make something so simple that users don’t have to know how to read (like IKEA’s instructions). We don’t even do a great job installing apps in other languages right now (this is our next big improvement to Ninite) but people outside the US still use Ninite a lot:
The second is unforeseen uses. Shortly after launching we got an email from a blind user describing how much easier it was to set up a computer with Ninite. I hadn’t considered Ninite as an accessibility tool. Complicated products often do one thing, simple ones are versatile.
