DHH’s shortest, sharpest essay on why the market rewards complexity over simplicity. It is not an accident: it is a deeply human pattern.
Summary
Everyone says they want simple, but buying behaviour says otherwise. “Simple looks easy, and who wants to pay for that?” The merchants of complexity figured this out long ago: if you can make a problem feel sophisticated and scary, people will pay a premium for a sophisticated solution. The real product is the feeling of being special, not the solution itself. On the flip side, selling simple means low margins, so the industry shifted to subscriptions - rent a complicated thing forever instead of buying a simple thing once. The cure is courage: deciding that the complexity is a spell you can break.
Key points
- Simple is hard to sell because it looks easy; people pay for what looks clever and special.
- Merchants of complexity weaponise fear, vanity, sloth, and pride to make basic problems feel insurmountable.
- Subscriptions are the business model of complexity - owning nothing and renting “sophistication” forever.
- The spell only binds as long as you believe in it. Ditching complexity (microservices, Slack, over-engineered stacks) is always within reach.
- Final line: “Dare to be basic, babe.”
Related
- Purple Cow - Seth Godin on why ordinary doesn’t sell; same root problem from the marketing side
- Boring Business, Exciting Life - embracing the boring/basic as a strategy
- Freakonomics - incentives behind why people buy the way they do
Sources
- world.hey.com/dhh
- Full text: merchants-of-complexity