Month: September 2020

Ten years ago, a slick new chat app called Slack was announced. It was exactly what my startup needed at the time — a chat tool that didn’t suck. 

Fast forward to today. Slack has essentially the same features. You send messages. You search channels. You communicate with your team. But not everything is like it used to be.

Sometimes, notifications don’t work. Other times, I’ll get stale indicators of unread messages. Occasionally, messages disappear when I use Slack on my phone.

What happened? It doesn’t do anything differently, but now it works like shit.

Building a software company and scaling it is… hard. It’s a struggle to keep your product working like it used to, especially if it gets bloated with complex features.

Make something scalable that solves a big problem. It should be simple, but it won’t be easy.

Water flows downhill. We all know this, and we all (implicitly) understand the idea. Water is flexible and subject to the forces of gravity. Terrain has high points and low points. Water follows the path of least resistance to reach its destination.

Water isn’t the only thing that behaves in this way. I think people behave in an identical fashion. Once the destination is determined and “terrain” is clearly visible, the path of least resistance becomes obvious. Unlike water, though, humans have to define the final resting point as precisely as possible. If you don’t define it, it may define you: you will find yourself moving towards a destination you didn’t expect, and may not want.

You will flow along a path of least resistance. The key question is where do you want to end up? If multiple paths seem equally appealing, you may have not defined the destination with enough clarity.