When 2 + 2 equals 5

Synergy is achieved when the whole is greater than the sum of it’s parts. It’s similar difference as between a group of people and a team. While each team is a group of people the opposite isn’t true. In order the group of individuals to became a team they need to pursue a common goal, share values, establish a trust relationship. The difference is in psychological safety. Team can achieve more than a group of individuals.

This is how I like to think of naffy. Our vision is to provide a single solution that provides all the necessary tools to successfully run an online business as an individual expert or consultant. As an expert you shouldn’t need to combine and glue together several different solutions, where for each you only need a fraction of it’s functionality. Not even mentioning paying several subscriptions for different tools. Wouldn’t be better if you just use one solution that provides all you need to run your business and you could set it up in several minutes? That’s naffy. From zero to running online business in less than few minutes. No need to search for best booking solution, best e-commerce/shop, wordpress plugins, best payment provider, best video communicator, etc. Just create an account and you’re ready to go and do what you really need to do.

That exactly what ClickUp’s premise is. One app to replace them all.

But there’s more. Tools composing a single solution may achieve much more than individual tools integrated via the API’s. Our tools form a team and therefore they share a common goals and values which is to enable you to run your business more effectively and sell more. Our communicator is aware that you’re a solopreneur and what products you offer therefore it can provide a form to book another meeting or to buy your ebook during a call without a need to leave a communicator so that you could assist in the client’s purchase. Our checkout form can suggest your other products. The cross and up sell capabilities of naffy are beyond individually integrated tools can offer. It’s the synergy that otherwise cannot be achieved.

One can argue that such an opinionated solution like naffy is limiting the choice and freedom to pick whatever tool we feel is the best for the job whether it is a booking system, payment provider, video communicator. However the freedom of choice is paradoxical and seems to not benefit us in a way we think it is. The amount of choices we need to make may lead to a decision fatigue. People tends to be paralyzed with the amount of options and at some point not being able to compare them together.

I see that in IT industry whenever a new, green field project is about to start and the development team has to pick a tools to use. Less experienced developers prefer to cherry-pick libraries to have a full control and craft their own framework eventually ending up with something one of its kind which may or may not work. More experienced developers tends to pick opinionated frameworks, which are proven to work and thus be productive earlier and cheaper. It’s less risky. They intentionally limit the amount of decisions they need to make to focus on more important and critical tasks instead of reinventing the wheel. I see this pattern over and over in many development teams.

With naffy you’re getting all the nuts and bolts necessary to run an online business. Not everything we have in our vision is ready yet but eventually we’ll get where we want to be.