Travis Kalanick and Garrett Camp commissioned the creation of a simple app that enabled users to hail a black car on demand. To validate, they asked friends and colleagues to install the app. They hired a driver & watched what happened. After a few months of hustle, the app hit 10 rides in one day.

Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia bought a few airbeds and put up a static site called “Air Bed and Breakfast”. They expanded the concept so that other people could offer airbeds in their homes and make money too. Then they expanded the idea to rooms, then to entire apartments. Their journey was a hustle from hell, but they made it happen.

Sergey Brin and Larry Page built a web search engine. It was one page with a search box and submit button. The backend was a simple database search returning ranked results based on the number of backlinks. It did a really good job at providing search results, and it took off.

Stewart Butterfield worked with his Tiny Speck group to build a better team messaging app. Slack makes it really easy for people to signup and start chatting as a team. At its core, Slack is a simple IM client.

AT&T, Dollar Shave Club, Buffer, Shazam, DropBox

• Very simple idea with a single facet
• Extremely low product surface area (frontend and backend)
• Can generally be prototyped and brought to market in months
• Is instantly useful and quickly gains early-adopter traction

Just about every part of growing a business becomes easier if the foundational idea is to do one thing well. I’ve been part of a number of startups where it was almost impossible to explain what we did in a single sentence. This wreaks havoc during sales meetings and investor pitches.

However, when a startup is a single-cell organism, customers and investors are not confused about what the startup does. Word of mouth and viral loop growth become significantly easier to achieve. Founders can focus on growing the business, rather than trying to understand what the business is.

This is a huge, almost unfair advantage. Dollar Shave Club is the ultimate example. An idea that can be built and launched in a weekend. Then, from Monday forward, all time, effort and money can be spent on marketing and learning about customers.

The sooner we can get to market, the sooner we can validate and start learning about how customers make purchase or adoption decisions.

Often times we can quickly validate a business by taking very manual steps that don’t scale. For example, if we wanted to validate the business hypothesis “People will order coffee from a delivery app,” we could get 250-500 business cards printed out saying “We deliver coffee. Call us on 123-123-1234,” then hand them out at the mall at breakfast time.

The very next day, we would have some great information about the basic hypothesis.

The final little snowball component is to make sure the core idea is something people actually want. Without that je ne sais quoi, there's no point in moving forward. Think about the coffee delivery app again. It might be a cool idea, but if no one wants it, don’t build it!