Building the Perfect App - Part 1
Why Are We Still Swinging a Bazooka at Every Fly?
1. Right Tool For The Right Job
Picture this: you are trying to julienne carrots with a Swiss-Army knife while Gordon Ramsay yells in the background. That is what most “super app” roadmaps look like. Too many blades, not enough edge.
2. The Stakes Spectrum
• Ordering midnight snacks: low stakes, low risk, any grocery app will do.
• Hailing a cab at 2 a.m.: moderate stakes, moderate risk, the ride-hailing app must never crash.
• Scheduling heart surgery: existential stakes, zero tolerance for failure, you demand a world-class specialist.
Precision beats power when the downside is fatal. You would never assemble a particle collider in your garage, so why cram unrelated features into a single binary blob?
3. The Getir Paradox
Getir started by promising chips in fifteen minutes. Blink twice and it lets you rent a car, finance the purchase, and probably adopt a cactus. Cross-sell feels magical until every new vertical multiplies regulation, logistics, and brand dilution.
4. East vs West, Same Race Different Rails
• In Jakarta most people tap Grab or Gojek for twenty plus services under one icon. Convenience wins.
• In San Francisco your home screen hosts thirty different apps. Best of breed still rules, then bundles return as subscription suites like Microsoft 365.
Both sides chase the same prize: time saved and friction removed.
5. Hidden Costs of One-App-to-Rule-Them-All
Latency tax: every extra feature slows first paint and tanks retention.
Focus drift: teams rotate between giant projects and mastery evaporates.
Compliance chaos: each new vertical brings a fresh regulator and another potential lawsuit.
6. When to Grab the Laser Instead of the Bazooka
Choose a dedicated app for life-and-death workflows, network-critical functions, or any experience where craft is the moat. Keep multipurpose solutions for snack runs and other shrug-worthy errands.
7. So, What Should We Do Then?
• Build a Goldilocks stack. One core job done flawlessly, two adjacent jobs offered contextually, everything else handled via partners.
• Treat new verticals like downloadable content, not preloaded bloat.
• Track every moment users bail to the “Neanderthal option” such as driving to the store, then erase that friction first.
