Technology can sometimes make you look cool. Some tools in my startup software stack that do this for me: 

1. Notion – Sure, we could use Google Docs..but it’s not as fun to work with, the design isn’t as clean, and the linking structures and templates make me want to take more notes.

2. Loom – easy to use, easy to update people async and give them a video they can watch at their leisure.

3. Zapier – beats writing API requests to connect Stripe to Slack to get a notification. Less code = less technical debt. Write a zap instead.

In the world of tech, software needs two things to result in “cool-points”: useful, but also a pleasant experience through and through. The type of person who built the software took care of focusing on details to an extreme level. This ultimately builds trust with the software as well.

Most financial software looks like the website hasn't been updated in decades. I’ve come to the conclusion that: (1) Either most finance software might intentionally look like it was designed last century? Or (2) the people building these products are finance people building in the domain they know best, but who lack product experience. They outsource the work to a dev shop, and you end up with shoddy design? I have to leave question marks, because I really don't know how things ended up this way.

When I was in investment banking, the one piece of software that I used that most others didn’t was called Q-Dir. Unfortunately now that I’m on Mac it’s no longer an option for me. The reality is that I only knew about this software because someone training me had it and I said “that’s cool - where do I get it?” Turns out, you get it on a website that looks like this: 

Here’s the actual product:

Source: https://www.softwareok.com/?seite=Freeware/Q-Dir/Screenshot-2

Believe it or not, this software is really useful. Q-dir takes the simple concept of your file navigation system and creates four windows bundled into one. You can navigate with shortcuts as well. 

The problem it’s solving? At work you’re constantly jumping around switching modes through various different folders to find files you need. Why not give you one app that lets you navigate more easily through the different folders? It does the trick. 

The other thing you’ll commonly see with software used by finance professionals: it hasn’t changed in 10 years. It turns out the product looks identical to when I used it years ago. Anyways, Q-Dir proves that usefulness matters more than design. It also is a great example of how doing a simple thing really well can provide a lot of utility. 

It proves that – regardless of how the landing page looks – if the product does a job extremely well, people will find a way to use it.