Tim Ferriss loves to ask his guests about their favorite purchase under $100. It's an interesting question, and I thought it would be fun to answer for myself.
My two favorite purchases in 2017 were my paperwhite kindle (it was on sale for $80 at the time) and this hand crank coffee grinder.
When I think about both of these products, they are incredibly simple. The Kindle is for reading ebooks. That's it. You can't listen to the book, you can't browse the internet, you can't check Facebook. The coffee grinder grinds coffee. There's one knob to adjust the fineness of the grind.
In the world of smartphones and multi-use devices, doing one thing really well oftentimes still prevails. Minimalism is often a feature rather than a bug. I love my kindle because I can't be interrupted by notifications. I don't need my coffee grinder to be a "smart" coffee grinder that I can set to run every morning.
As technology becomes increasingly present in our lives, I suspect more and more people will seek feature minimalism with their devices. I love the internet...but I don't want to 24/7. We are already seeing this with products like the light phone. I can imagine a more modular phone where pieces could be added or removed depending on the capabilities you want or need for a given day. Even if we don't see this, Apple has recently announced that it will be building tools to help users limit the use of certain features.
You don't need to create a product that does it all. You just need to do one thing really well.
