Frictionless

Why the Future of Everything Will Be Fast, Fluid, and Made Just for You

Christiane Lemieux, Duff McDonald

• Publisher: Harper Business
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780062893680
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Corporate Finance
• Index: Business

Serial entrepreneur Christiane Lemieux describes the new rules of entrepreneurship and business, arguing that visionary startups leverage the concept of "frictionless" to beat their competitors. Based on interviews with dozens of startup founders, experts and scholars on entrepreneurship, Frictionless provides readers with a wide-ranging education in starting companies that thrive in the world of frictionless commerce—made possible by new technologies, a new mindset, and new demands from Millennial consumers. Working with bestselling author and journalist Duff McDonald, Lemieux also shares her own story—lessons learned, failures absorbed—at the helm of DwellStudio (which was acquired by Wayfair) and her latest venture, The Inside.

Some founders profiled in the book are reducing friction in their own business models, others reduce friction through improved customer experiences, and still others are revolutionizing their operations to create frictionless organizations. Readers will glean lessons from the founders of well-known companies such as Instant Pot, Bonobos, Hims, and Halo Top—as well as upstarts Billie, Dame Products, and Convene.

Frictionless outlines the groundwork necessary for getting a company up-and-running and explains how companies make and market products and services while meeting the demands of their customers and employees today. Frictionless is the essential handbook for creating tomorrow's mind set and competitive advantage.

Chapter 1
What Do We Mean by Frictionless?

The more I have thought about frictionlessness and talked about it with other people, the more I have realized that it’s not just a choice that entrepreneurs can make. It’s an imperative.

Of course, the forces of frictionlessness are not confined to the land of startups. Incumbent businesses must strive for frictionlessness as well to have any hope of survival. All businesses need to reduce friction if they’re going to compete.

The same goes for each and every one of us, whether that’s in how we, as individuals, react to the changing business landscape or how we strive to eliminate friction in the hopes of living more fruitful, healthy, and ultimately happy lives.

We’re talking about an ontological change here, folks: we have entered a new era, and frictionlessness is the state of being that we’re all aiming for, whether it’s as individuals, as groups of people working together, or in the institutions in which we put our collective faith.

Every single one of the people in the pages that follow understands that a tectonic shift has taken place in the digital era, and it has to do with time.

Before the Internet came along, before it seeped into pretty much every aspect of our lives, we used to have to dedicate a set amount of time to all the various activities of any given day. This was particularly true for women, because of the domestic bondage that most mothers (including working mothers) found themselves in. Whether it was grocery shopping, bill paying, banking, or scheduling, there was no way around giving up a certain amount of time.

But the new citizen of the world is able to remove increasing amounts of the mundane from their daily existence using technology. It has changed the time equation in more ways than we can count. In doing so, it has given us a renewed understanding of the value of time—the most precious nonrenewable commodity that exists.

By eliminating friction from almost every task imaginable, we have been given back time, and we have reallocated it elsewhere. We are using that “found time” to do the things that really matter—like spending time with family or expanding our minds.

The main lesson of this book: If you hope to do business with anyone today, you best not be trying to claim some of that time back again. Because you can’t have it. If there are too many pages on your website, if you ask customers for too much information, if the interface seems too jenky or the user experience unintuitive . . . they are gone.

So the move toward frictionless experiences isn’t just a preference. It’s a mandate. It’s nothing short of a philosophical revolution that’s been facilitated by that reallocation of time.

To those of us who were already adults by the time the Internet came along, many Internet-driven time-saving opportunities still seem a little novel—take, for example, the idea that it’s possible to file an auto insurance claim without having to talk to a single person. But we’re the last generation that’s going to feel that way. For digital natives—that is, those born after the widespread adoption of digital technology—the idea of frictionlessness is part of their decision set. They don’t know a world without it.

What do I mean by that? I mean that they will only buy from companies that give them the most optimal combination of best price, fastest service, and the least friction. If the experience has friction anywhere along the way, the digital human will drop off, abandon that cart, bounce from your home page.

They won’t just bounce either. They will be gone forever—period, end of sentence. When there is friction involved, there is no second chance. That’s partly because of the belief (whether or not it’s true is another matter) that the Internet has brought us infinite choice. You are not the only option. And it’s also because a frictionless experience is what we, as a society, have come to demand. We want seamless interactions, no matter what or where they are. If you can’t deliver that, then you will eventually interact with no one.

Or you might not even get a chance at them in the first place. Consider what happened to The Inside in June 2019: for nearly six weeks, our traffic and conversion plummeted, and we couldn’t understand why it was happening. It turned out that our inbound links from Google had broken, because our JavaScript was newer than the one Google was indexing. It was a pretty simple fix at the end of the day, but before we figured that out, it was as if . . . we didn’t exist. If you are not on Google, you do not exist. If you don’t provide a frictionless path to your digital storefront, you do not exist.

I’m not just talking about e-commerce, either. Those same digital natives will only work for companies that understand one of the most fundamental changes in the employer-employee relationship since the introduction of the forty-hour workweek. The trade-off used to be money for time—you pay them money, they give you their time. But those days are long gone. Today, you pay them money, and they give you their work. Their time is their own, and you best not come asking for it.

Time looks a lot different to people who don’t know anything but Internet time. Those generations, more than their predecessors, have realized its true value, and they’re not giving it away for free anymore. Those of us over forty have a unique vantage point about the tectonic transformation that’s happened during our lives. It’s why the whole idea of self-care struck so many of us as somewhat absurd—Who talks like that? Who has time for that? Well, it turns out that everybody does, because they’re taking back their time from the people who have been taking it away from the rest of us our whole lives.

That’s why at The Inside we are all about being frictionless, all the time. That includes how we work together, the customer experience, the growth (hopefully!) of the company, and the lives we all lead (yours, mine, everybody’s). There’s only one go-around on this ride, and nobody wants to get to the end and feel like they didn’t make the right choices along the way.

Why should you decorate—or redecorate—your home? Because it’s the place where you spend the most time. Because doing so makes you feel better. Human interaction with and within an incredible space is a remarkable thing. But many of us don’t even bother with decorating because the experience is too overwhelming. It’s laborious and time consuming. There are too many points of friction. When we say we are trying to digitize decorating at The Inside, what we really mean is that we’re trying to strip the friction out of the decorating journey. That’s it, in a nutshell: we are trying to remove friction and not ask for any more time than is on offer. We want to be part of the solution to the scarcity of time, not part of the problem.

We also strive for frictionlessness in the way we work: we moved our offices for The Inside in July 2018 into a shared space in New York’s SoHo district. But even though the experience of moving in was quite frictionless, it turned out that our landlord hadn’t gotten rid of all the friction: they played too much music, there weren’t enough conference rooms, and we only had one window. My employees are vocal about what they want. It’s no longer, “You’re lucky to have a paycheck, now get to work!” but rather, “How much do you, my employer, make it easy for me to maintain the allocation of time that I demand if I am going to work for you?” And so we moved again in August 2019. Sure, part of the reason was that we were growing. We could have managed in the old space. The main reason that we moved was that there was too much friction in our workplace.

I can’t stress enough, though, that the move toward frictionlessness isn’t a temporary thing. While millennials didn’t invent the time-saving technologies and systems that decimated the old way of doing so many things, they definitely internalized the profound implications of those changes before their elders did. The concept of being a slave to the clock, in which someone arguably owns your time, is over. Those shackles are being thrown off by the forces of frictionlessness, and only the foolish among us think they stand a chance of putting them back on. Practically everyone, from the CEO down to the janitor, has realized that their time is as valuable to them as yours is to you. So do what you want with your own time, but don’t you dare waste mine.

By removing friction from the day to day of our lives, we can theoretically get time for the things we want. Harnessed properly, technology can provide a renovated architecture for our lives. Friction is what eats up time, whether it’s in health care, education, leisure, or otherwise. Remove it, and we can get that time back. We may never get to the one-click life, but we can try.

Some people are already a step ahead of the rest of us. Every single person we have included in this book has figured out the interaction between time and frictionlessness before most of us did, and their stories hold lessons for us all:

• Don’t you wish you could have that time you spent in line at the pharmacy back? Well, the folks at Capsule are ready to give it to you.
• Don’t have time to put a full meal together for the entire family? Robert Wang’s Instant Pot has solved that problem for millions already, with a big assist from Amazon.
• Want to live forever, but don’t think you’re going to? Gil Blander has been working toward that goal his whole life, and his company InsideTracker will help you do the same.
• Do you...

Table of contents

• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: What Do We Mean by Frictionless?
• Chapter 2: My Journey Toward Frictionlessness
• Chapter 3: The Frictionless Elephants
• Chapter 4: A Frictionless Experience
• The End of the Line
• The One-Click Move
• Project Body Hair
• The Most Comfortable Pair of Sweatpants Ever Made
• Getting Personal
• Men Have Skin and Feelings Too
• When Your Best Customers Are “Potheads”
• We’ve Got You Covered
• Schooled by the Machine
• Chapter 5: Frictionless Competition
• Everybody Wins, Including Your Dog
• The Four Seasons of Coworking
• Start Your Startup Here
• Disrupting Insurance the Artist’s Way
• Decadent and Healthy
• How to Ace “the Walgreens Test”
• Chapter 6: Frictionless Organizations
• The Organization Is the Product
• What Office?
• The Power of the Pivot
• The Frictionless Fit
• Chapter 7: The Frictionless YOU
• The Courage to Learn
• The CEO of Living Forever
• Go with Your Gut
• The Business of Orgasm
• One Penny at a Time
• Chapter 8: Frictionless Systems
• Can I Put It on My Spaceship?
• Eating Our Way Out of This Mess
• Trillion-Dollar Triage
• Changing the World from the Bottom Up
• Designing a Community
• Kicking People in the Wallet
• We’re All Technologists Now
• Conclusion
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• About the Authors
• Card Page
• Copyright
• About the Publisher