Day 13: Don't optimize what shouldn't exist

A few weeks ago, I founded a new company called skillution. We are focused on developing an app for coaches and academies that allows them to market their courses online. Currently, I'm working on implementing a booking process that enables customers to subscribe to our skillution portal through our website.

I faced a challenge in this process: Customers should either be able to create an account directly on our website and then be directed to the booking process or have our support team create an account for them and subsequently provide the login details. So, we needed to integrate two fundamentally different processes for the same goal.

This was time-consuming and required the integration of various branching paths. For example, a customer had to select a product on our platform first to access the booking process. It proved to be quite complex.

But was it really necessary to implement two separate processes? Couldn't we simplify this with a single process? Yes, we could! We used Stripe as our payment provider, including Stripe's checkout process. Instead of guiding customers through our portal, we directed them straight to the Stripe checkout page and simultaneously, in the background, automated the creation of an account for our skillution system. Problem solved.

The lesson we learn from this:

Whenever you consider optimizing something, first ask yourself if it's even necessary to keep it in the first place.