Fixing the “Simple” Problem

There’s an old folk legend about a cannery that somehow got stuck with a load of “white salmon.” Faced with a seemingly insurmountable problem, some brilliant marketer, as the legend goes, came up with a slogan: “Guaranteed not to turn pink in the can.” The marketing principle in evidence, here, has become an adage for modern day practitioners: If you can’t fix it, feature it.

So it goes with a litany of document automation companies faced with a harsh reality: Their products don’t have a lot of features. They’re neither powerful nor flexible.Put another way, they’re “simple.”

Now fixing “simple” is not easy. That’s why they feature it. Long ago, we were in the same predicament. When HotDocs 1.0 was released in the mid-1990s, it didn’t do very much. Consequently, we didn’t have much choice but to beat our chests about the product being easy to learn and simple to use. Almost two decades of evolution later, we’ve fixed the “simple” problem, having shaped HotDocs into a powerful, flexible platform having more than a million usersin every size of law firm, corporation, and government agency imaginable.

Make no mistake– HotDocs is still easy to learn and use for simple documents. But not all documents are simple, and it’s HotDocs’ ability to handle the complex ones that makes it great. I guess you could buy a “simple” tool for simple documents and then get HotDocs for all the stuff that the simple tool can’t handle . . .