Stop Building B- Products

80/20, more properly called the Pareto principle, comes from Vilfredo Pareto’s Cours d’économie politique (1906). His observation was that 80% of Italy is owned by 20% of the population, which sounds about right for a post-feudal nation.

Somehow we’ve gotten from there to “you can achieve 80% quality with 20% of the work”, which is pretty dominant across software development, especially in the startup space. I can see why; holy wow that is appealing. If speed is a priority how could it not be?

I have certainly endorsed it during my consulting work. Stakeholders with limited spend and tight deadlines love to hear it. But lately I’ve been thinking about how it scales, and that has given me pause.

I was a good student through the beginning of college (the less said about my academic career after that the better). Back then I would often think of myself as the ‘King of the A-’. To me that felt like the sweet spot of doing really well on your work without having to put out maximum effort to do so. I had a pretty big load of extracurricular activities (running, drama, and the school newspaper) and a lot of video games to get through. It got me at least waitlisted at every college I applied to.

Since that time we’ve seen the rise of enshittification. Everyone has experienced it whether they know what to call it or not: the quality of technology products getting lower and lower as they become more entrenched and investor-led. Thinking of 80/20 and enshittification together has made me realize something: we’re all out here making B- products for people.

Don’t get me wrong, a B- is a perfectly fine grade. But in a competitive market customers should have access to better. When both the enterprise players and the ‘disruptive’ startups are both investor-led and 80/20’ing as hard as they can, the customer winds up choosing between the lessor of three evils, unhappy, and making that decision solely based on low price. This exacerbates the race to the bottom, products continue to get worse, customers get less happy, until eventually they’ve dropped all their SaaS subscriptions and are living off-grid making cheese.

It seems to me that there is a way forward here: 90/30. No, they do not need to add up to 100 to be theoretically sound. And for companies that are in competitive spaces that is most likely the sweet spot. If a customer is choosing between options where most of the competition is at 80% of ideal and one is at 90%, they’re going to take the 90 assuming that it doesn’t have an ancillary disadvantage like marketing or customer service.

And besides, on a more flim-flam level: wouldn’t it feel good to make a better product than your competitors? To make one that you’re really proud of, rather than a compromise that just barely moves the needle? To be a part of the A- Royalty?