Hello!

Back when web development was a new thing in the mid 1990s, the websites we built were limited to a palette of 240 so called “web-safe” colours. And we had to make sure they worked well on a resolution of 640 by 480 pixels. At the time, that was the best on offer from many monitors.

These were terribly tight constraints, but they made the job much easier. When you have tight constraints your choices are limited. And those limited choices make decisions easier. In many cases there is no decision to be made - the constraints are so tight, there is only one path on offer.

There’s something to be said for constraints, even artificial ones we impose on ourselves. “This post must be written by the end of the day; it must be less than 500 words; it can contain at most one link.” These are all artificial, sure, but it makes decisions simple.

Why all this talk of constraints? Because I have a new chapter for you to read in the beta version of Kill the HiPPO, our book on feature prioritisation for bootstrapped software founders, and it’s called “The Power of Constraints”.

You can read the beta version of Kill the HiPPO here.

To prevent a case of wrong-link embarrassment, I’m not sending you the link directly to the new chapter. Go to the link above, and in the side navigation select “The Power of Constraints”.

(Last time I sent out a newsletter and tried to link to a specific chapter, things went wrong, and I had to send out a follow-up email. It turns out that it is quite hard to reliably link to a specific chapter in the beta reading platform we are using.)

Until next time,

Steve