Hi—

I hate just emailing you like this, but I picked you (and a few dozen others, not hundreds or thousands) to get this email because I thought you might like to hear from me and see what I’m thinking about.

Simple Focus turns 17 today. Jeez, time has flown by. And that makes sense, because moving fast and saying yes is how I built Simple Focus. But seventeen years in, Part 2 deserves something simpler and more—wait for it—focused.

What I mean is this: for seventeen years, we chased every cool project that came along but never fully settled on who we are and who we should do work for. Some attempts that never put a real stake in the ground, pulled from our past website iterations:

For the last eight years:
“We design experiences, products and websites that people love.”

For eight years before that:
“Simple Focus is a happy team of digital product and interface design specialists.”

And from way back in the day:
“Simple Focus helps local and national brands take on the Internet with simple ideas, design and technology.”

In many ways, the oldest one was the most complete.

Seventeen years in, I’m still experimenting with a new way of saying it. Here’s the current draft:
“Simple Focus helps established organizations move digital products forward—without losing what already works for them.”

If that resonates with you (or doesn’t), tell me. I mean it: it’s a draft, and you’re exactly who I’m writing it for.

But underneath whatever the words end up being, I’ve also been searching for the thread that holds all of these statements together. There’s a sense of connectedness between people: our team, our clients and their users. But a question this raises: what is it that connects us? That is what I have been thinking about.

And I think I have it. That’s why I’m starting the newsletter, and it’s why I picked you to get it.

It’s that we all exist to share (because sharing is good and worth doing). Simple as that.

The longer I’ve been in business (said more plainly: the older I get), the more I realize that we all get better when we share. You are working on really important digital products, and so are we. We are both trying to figure it all out and act like we have it all figured out.

I want to share what I’m seeing and learning. And I hope you will write me back. This isn’t meant as a big marketing email blast—it’s meant to be a back-and-forth exchange between peers.

I am naming it Getting Kinetic, because I have always believed that getting kinetic is the best and only way to move anything forward (more on that below). It’s an occasional hand-written note about cutting through complexity to find the right next move and carry the work through to what customers actually use.

At Simple Focus, we just kicked off a project to modernize Pulse Cashflow, a software business I’ve owned since 2012 with years of justifiable compromises and technical debt.

Pulse is the incumbent in small business cash flow management software, and it shows its age just like anything you have worked on. I imagine you know like I do how the tempting first move is to kick off a modernization by making the product look and feel more modern. But a fresh interface on the wrong experience only makes the wrong experience feel more current.

Instead, we’re starting with the whole path to value: who Pulse is for, how its value is positioned, whether the website earns the right trial users and how quickly the product delivers on its promise.

That’s a lot of open questions. What keeps them from becoming a season of meetings is a phrase we used at Simple Focus last week:

It doesn’t mean rushing into interface design. It means we don’t wait for every question to be answered before giving the team something to respond to.

The first concept might be wrong. That’s part of its job. This is what I mean by getting kinetic.

It’s also the idea behind the question I’ll leave you with. A question I hope you see as a reminder in your own work:

I’ll share the Pulse work as it develops—what the evidence tells us, what we change, what we preserve and where AI creates real leverage (or where it creates false confidence).

If this gave you something to respond to, hit reply.

— JD and the Simple Focus Team