Tobias Van Schneider in his blog talks about a new way to think about building modern software—
The majority of content and material things is not made to last anymore.
The same is true for online tools.
Startups aim to capitalize on trends and our desire for convenience, launching new apps and services every day to solve the same problems.
We are so accustomed to something new and seemingly better around the corner, we don’t commit to anything anymore. Not to clothes, to music, to online tools or physical products. Companies and publishers recognize this and see a shortcut. If you don’t care about the quality, they have no reason to either.
But the blame is on us as consumers as well. We are insatiable, easily bored, easily distracted. If your app isn’t delivering new features a mile a minute, we’re out. If a new app springs up that offers the same thing in a shiny new package (and it will), we’ll abandon your app and jump to the next one.
We’ve lost our sense of pride as producers and consumers.
The heirlooms you receive from your grandparents are treasured, passed down generation to generation. A silk scarf, beautiful in its worn softness. A piece of furniture, as solid and stately as the day it was built. A physical toolbox, carefully polished and organized after decades of use. Today, we’re satisfied with the item that will arrive soonest to us from Amazon. Where has our pride and care gone?
This is what inspired our vision for mymind. Everyday we ask ourselves: How can we take the beauty and care of a physical product that lasts generations, and apply it to a digital product?
Similar to an Eames chair, designed with love, purchased after careful consideration, placed in a prominent spot in the home, passed from family member to family member. We’ve always worked in the digital world, but we seek to build digital products similar to quality physical products of past times.
Consider a leather journal. You can touch it, smell it, hold it, feel the texture. It gets worn with use and that makes it more beautiful. You can hand it down. It’s cherished by those who inherit it.
Consider your vintage Ray-Ban glasses. You don’t throw them in your bag where they’ll be scratched, or leave them lying around where they’ll easily break or be stolen. You wear them, carefully clean the lenses and put them back in their case. You might have another cheap pair of throwaway glasses you use now and then. But you’ll always have your Ray-Bans. They were designed to last, to be loved.
While it may not be as rewarding in the short-term, we want mymind to be that kind of product.
We don’t want to stress about keeping up with other tools (many of them here today, gone tomorrow) and shipping new features to satisfy “users” who demand it. We don’t want to try to meet every need and create a monster of a product, dinging bells and tooting whistles until we spontaneously combust. We want to achieve the purest form of our tool and let it continue to be that. We want to be here 10 years from now. We want to create, if possible, the digital equivalent to the iconic chair, sunglasses or notebook. Something you proudly care for, polish, return to, count on year after year. Something you own for a long, long time.
The desperation for newness is a sickness of technology.
It’s a disease perpetuated by algorithms, desire for immediate satisfaction and the craving of dopamine unfulfilled by unhealthy lifestyles.
Refusing to succumb to that illness requires saying no. As creators and business owners, it requires forgoing the temporary rush of users riding one tool to the next. It requires coming back to our original mission, over and over again, every time we make a decision about our tool.
And we hope it leads to something meaningful. A tool built to last.
How to arrive at on-brand colours?
Designing for color psychology is tricky
While creating a brand, one of the hardest things to do is to arrive at the right set of colors. Colors are a tricky subject—when done incorrectly, the emotions get mismatched, and in the worst of situations, the brand might just seem all over the place.
Think of the last time you went to a fast food joint. What was the color of the brand? Most probably, it might be a combination of red and yellow. And that’s definitely not a coincidence — research suggests that red or pink occupies 41% of the food industry when it comes to branding.
Red triggers appetite, hunger and stimulation. And when red is combined with yellow, it’s used to convey a sense of quickness (fast food is served fast, expecting the customers to also leave the restaurant fast).
As color plays such a big role in influencing emotions (and sometimes even our appetite), it would be silly to ignore the color palette when it comes to brand design. Having launched multiple products, brands and experiments in the past, this is my current process of arriving at the right set of ‘on-brand’ colors—
- Finalise the brand DNA
- Finalise the emotion
- Finalise the color palette
Finalise the brand DNA
Brand is not just a name, a pallet, and a logo. It’s the emotional response in the minds of the customer. In fact, the word “brand” comes from ranchers identifying their cattle using an unique logo that was branded onto their skin. A brand is not just a mark, it’s a “relationship”.
Under this context, brand DNA, to be simply put, is not a design system, it’s the genome. To understand this further, we could use some handy frameworks that help us think deeply of this “relationship”.
The easiest way to capture this, is through a thought experiment — If the brand were a person, what would the person be? Would it be a friendly person? Shy? Sophisticated? Playful? If the person had a voice, how would that sound like? What would be the style of communication?
Now that we have a rudimentary understanding of the brand persona, we then start describing the persona of the target customer.
Finalise the emotion
For this purpose, understanding the psychographic profile comes in handy—What are the customer’s styles, preferences, brands they love and care about. You want to dig deeper into their motivations, needs and aspirations. (it could even be the cars they aspire to drive)
An important point to note here: psychographic profile is very different from the demographic profile. You are not as keen on understanding the age, country of origin, activities etc, but on a deeper front taking a peak into their psyche: their motivations, needs and aspirations.
Both Ozzy Osbourne and Prince Charles were born in the same year, both stay in castles and are wealthy and famous. That doesn’t make them similar customers. This is a famous meme circulating on the internet illustrating the key issue when only the demographic profile is considered.
Based on the psychographic profile of the customer, and the DNA of the brand, we move to the next step: selecting a color palette.
However, for the sake of restricting the scope of this essay, I will cover the color palette.
Finalise the colors
I first start by collecting inspiration. Dribbble is a handy tool for this purpose as it lets you search by color. It’s easier to find out, however, it lies hidden within the search filter options. 🌈
I then start dropping pieces that resonate well with the brand DNA, and customer psychographic profile, and put the pieces together. I do this in the form of a moodboard. There are also specific tools that could make your job easier when it comes to a moodboard — Milanote is nice, but the billing is slightly expensive. Pureref is one of the best I could find, but sometimes it’s an overkill. I stick to plain old Figma to quickly conjure up a moodboard.
You can also start looking for colour palettes in isolation, but you might miss out on the context in which the palette was formulated. To get a sense of the context while ALSO exploring the colors, I use Happy Hues for this purpose.
Typicality and Novelty
Before I get into the selection of colors in the color palette, I want to take a slight detour into the gestalt theory of aesthetics.
Remember when we were young, and were asked to describe nature and landscapes using crayons. I, like other children of my age, we all did the same thing: we drew two mountains, there was a river flowing right in between the two mountains. There was also the sun rising exactly in between the mountains, and there was a flock of five birds flying together on the right.
This, my friend is too too typical. Everyone has seen this, and is too cliched to call it anything. Quite boring, isn’t it?
Now, if you compare this with the Mona lisa, it’s unique and innovative. Da Vinci experimented with a novel type of painting technique termed sfumato, subtly blending colors and tones to create soft transitions and hazy, smoky effect leading to the enigmatic expression of Mona Lisa—the mysterious smile.
It’s quite novel isn’t it? It however, need not be a Mona Lisa to be called ‘novel’. It could be an innovative painting technique, or even a modification of an existing piece. It just has to be something new—for instance, using a hexagon to represent a futuristic structure or an irregular polygon to symbolize abstract concepts.
Most of the compositions everywhere — be it landscapes, artworks, or even websites come under this axes. It’s either typical or novel, or somewhere in between the two.
Unity and Variety
Now, take an example of your toddler son given a piece of paper for the first time and starts scribbling random things with his crayons and asks you how it is. You would probably say, “great piece of work, son!”, but you might be squirming inside.
It’s too chaotic to call it a drawing. This then comes under the other axes of gestalt theory. ‘Variety’. Anything with too much chaos has a lot of variety.
Now, take three square boxes and place them alongside each other. What do you make of this composition? Isn’t this too plain, simple, cliched and boring? As the shapes of the boxes are also identical, there is a lot of ‘unity’ in this composition.
Unity and Variety come under the other axes of differentiation.
Any composition you can put them in this two-by-two grid. Unity and Variety. Typicality and Novelty.
If it’s too novel, it would be dismissed as avant-garde and too early for the society/culture to accept it. It’s an extreme outlier and sometimes be lucky enough to gain popularity when the society is matured enough to embrace it. The prison escape drama, Shawshank Redemption (1994) and Blade Runner (1982) are some examples of films that achieved cult classic status long after their release. For anything to be a hit, there has to be the right balance of typical and novel, what Paul Hekkert calls as the Most Advanced Yet Acceptable model.
Similarly, if we just use two colors across the whole UI, it has too much of ‘unity’. You need a balanced color palette to spice things up. Here’s how everything adds up:
- Unity: Choose a boring, dull color for 70% of the product, which will be used for backgrounds. This color should provide a sense of consistency and cohesion throughout the UI.1
- Variety: Select a slightly interesting color for 30% of the product, which will be used for headers. This color should add some visual interest and differentiation to the UI.
- Typicality: Opt for a super loud, shiny color for 10% of the product, which will be used for buttons. This color should grab attention and create a focal point for important actions.
Now, for the next step, let’s compare the moodboard created and analyse them in terms of the gestalt principles. How much of unity, variety and typicality is consisting in this piece?
Now that we have the theory in place, let’s come back to how we are translating brand into color. Brand is broken down further into action, verb and emotion to then pair up with the appropriate colors.
Come up with the emotive words — bright, warm, fuzzy, cozy, nostagic? For Tesla it would be — sexy, sustainable. And for Microsoft, the emotive words could be — friendly, faithful etc.
Come up with verbs that make up the company, the noun.
I use this tool to arrive at the appropriate color for the emotion.
One thing to keep in mind while choosing the palette is the context and culture. Color means one thing in one culture, and it could be mean something else in another culture. As a quick example, in the Western world white is more commonly seen as a pure color worn at weddings and festive events, while in China it’s perceived as a mourning color.
- In the Western and Japanese culture, red symbolizes anger while in Hindu anger is represented by black
- In Japanese and Hindu culture purple represents wisdom, while for Native Americans you would use brown and for Eastern Europe you’d use the color blue.
- Love takes on different colors in different cultures too: red for Western and Japanese, green for Hindu, Yellow for Native American and blue for African
Importance of Why
He who has a why, can endure any how
When it comes to task management, a fundamental principle stands tall: explain the reason before the details of what and how.
By letting others know the why behind a task, it facilitates faster completion.
Recently, I had a pressing deadline for an urgent activity that needed immediate attention. I had to convince my designer teammate to create a quick mockup in less than a day, even though he had other high-priority tasks on his plate. It was a P3 task in a sea of P0s.
To make it work, I simply shared the reason behind the task before diving into the specifics. It motivated my teammate to prioritize the assignment without any micromanagement.
In the end, it all boils down to focusing on the reason, and the tasks will naturally follow suit.
As Nietzsche once said: He who has a why can endure any how.
Quality Ideas Trump Execution
What creativity faucet can teach us about generating quality ideas
‘’What might seem to be merely the initial step — deciding what to work on — is in a sense the key to the whole game’’ — Paul Graham
A good start when it comes to product building is half the work done.
While running the Build program as a Program Director, a four-week program for folks to go from a fleeting idea to a full-fledged product, we ran it in a building cycle that went from (a) ideation, to (b) validation, and then (c) building the product.
We consciously skipped a lot of processes which involved defining the customer, problem statement, conducting user interviews and all that jazz. Primarily because the aim was to build a side project that could be built within a weekend, which made the cost of building quite less. (We didn’t actually tell them to skip all these steps, only to do that after having built the product they were imagining)
Now with the advent of no-code tools and ChatGPT (of course), it has become easier to build a great software on the internet.
Which makes it even more important to: have a quality idea.
People may have heard me use statements like ‘’the idea is everything’’ and while hyperbolic, there is a huge amount of truth to this. A weak idea on something your audience find un-interesting will perform badly regardless of other ways you bring ‘’quality’’.
So how do we bring extra quality to idea selection?
- Allocate more ‘’thinking time’’ to ideas
- Allocate more research time to ideas
- Truly look for something unique and innovative
- Brainstorm a greater volume of ideas
- Have an elimination criteria for your ideas
I use my 100-10-1 framework. I will typically brainstorm 100 ideas, whittle them down to my best 10, and make the one I am most confident in. Julian Shapiro talks about the Creativity Faucet, a process of arriving at good ideas merely by the method of elimination.
I call their approach the Creativity Faucet:
Visualize your creativity as a backed-up pipe of water. The first mile is packed with wastewater. This wastewater must be emptied before the clear water arrives.
Because your pipe only has one faucet, there’s no shortcut to achieving clarity other than first emptying the wastewater.
Let’s apply this to creativity: At the beginning of a creative session, see through every bad idea that comes to mind. Instead of being self-critical and resisting bad ideas, recognize that you must see them to completion.
Bad ideas, by the way, are often the clichés your brain has been overexposed to.
Once bad ideas are emptied, a surprising thing happens: better ideas begin to arrive. Here’s my guess as to why: Once you’ve generated enough bad output, your mind reflexively identifies which elements caused the badness. Then it becomes better at avoiding them. You start pattern-matching interesting ideas with greater intuition.
This works because it is easier to look at something bad and intuit how to make it better than to make something good from scratch. The human brain isn’t wired for spontaneous ingenuity, but it is wired to detect what’s wrong with the world. Is the song too high-pitched? Lower the pitch. Does the story have too many lead characters? Remove a few.
Spending more time thinking of ideas. Even talking about these ideas with your pals. As you have more and more good quality of insights, you start thinking from a position of abundance instead of being in a position of scarcity.
The greatest consumer software tools that exist out there are built by hobbyists and indie makers.
I prefer to write my notes on Obsidian. For scheduling tweets, I use Zlappo and Typefully. For creating AI interior renders, I use interior.ai.
One thing which is common among all these examples is that they are all built by hobbyists. I would like to call them “indie softwares”. These are businesses that are profitable from the very beginning, instead of optimising for “shareholder value”.
Most of them are used by handful of nerds, and have not peaked on the popularity index of SaaS startups yet. They are obscure. You can see them getting mentioned somewhere on X, and the demand keeps coming in through positive word of mouth.
The reasons why I prefer indie softwares over unicorns are a plenty. In the Substack essay aptly as the Tyranny of the Marginal User, Ivan Vendrov talks about how for startups after reaching a definite scale, the product becomes satisfying for the new user, and gradually become terrible for the existing user.
Take the example of OKcupid which later on got acquired by Match, only to have a steady decline in the usage to the point that it became unusable!
I’m now quite skeptical of quantification of romance and the idea that similarity makes for good relationships. I was somewhat skeptical then, too. What I did not expect, what would have absolutely boggled young naive techno-optimist Ivan, was that 2016-era OKCupid was the best that online dating would ever get. That the tools that people use to find the most important relationship in their lives would get worse, and worse, and worse. OKCupid, like the other acquisitions of Match.com, is now just another Tinder clone - see face, swipe left, see face, swipe right. A digital nightclub. And I just don’t expect to meet my wife in a nightclub.
This isn’t just dating apps. Nearly all popular consumer software has been trending towards minimal user agency, infinitely scrolling feeds, and garbage content. Even that crown jewel of the Internet, Google Search itself, has decayed to the point of being unusable for complicated queries. Reddit and Craigslist remain incredibly useful and valuable precisely because their software remains frozen in time. Like old Victorian mansions in San Francisco they stand, shielded by a quirk of fate from the winds of capital, reminders of a more humane age.
But why does this phenomenon occur? Shouldn’t software get better over time? Why is it getting worse despite billions of dollars in R&D and multiple version updates?
The logic goes like this —
If a software already has a billion users, optimising for revenue means optimising for DAU (Daily Active Users). If you’re optimising for DAU, and if your software products charge zero or a flat per-user fee, in order to operate on a margin, you optimise the product NOT for the billion existing users, but for the billion-plus-first user. If the billion-plus-first user is incentivised to not stop using the app, then it’s a success.
Wouldn’t neglecting the user experience of the existing users cause a loss?
Not necessarily, as the milk has already been churned through the one-time user fee. And by the time the loyal users leave, everyone in the team is already promoted, so who cares? The only thing worth caring about is the attention of the new user.
An A/B test on the DAU performance with an addition of a new feature might be heavily influenced by the choices, the “billion-plus-first” user takes. Stickiness takes a priority over Loyalty.
Although there are some exceptions such as reddit, craigslist etc. which have kept their “core” intact, these are very rare.
Optimising for the “average user” leads to average products.
Most of the VC-funded SaaS businesses have succumbed to optimising their product for the “average” user to keep up the hockey stick growth. Monetising low value users through ad-spends becomes a priority for them.
Optimising for the “extreme” user lead to high-value products (which might not be as profitable for the shareholders).
Indie softwares are opinionated and highly niche.
The makers have skin-in-the-game while building these indie softwares.
If there is a fault or a bug, I can directly contact the indie maker on X. As the indie makers have a shared risk when the indie software fails, they take swift action. Compare this to a “faceless” customer support AI agent to whom bugs are shared.
The trust is more when you know the creator who has made it. It’s not just skin, there is soul in the game.
It is that simple.
I can assume that there might be counters, attacks and pushpacks to this heavy statement. Bear with me on this. Before we address the house on fire, let me take you on a quick detour.
This was my first day of a new semester while doing my Master’s in design studies at the Delft University of Technology. My professor at that time started the semester with the Pressure Cooker Test.
What was it about? As a team, we had to compress six months of product building and development into one day. It was, literally, a pressure cooker!
We wrapped up the day having made a very quick-prototypyish demo, presenting it to the mentors who had facilitated this event.
A year after this happened, I started doing my Masters’s thesis, where I underwent the conventional product-building process. I did roughly two months of design research, including planning, landscaping, feasibility studies and all that jazz, before building the product.
Throughout this phase, my mind wandered back to the Pressure Cooker Test.
Was there a faster, quicker, more rapid way to do the same?
The only issue was that most of the insights were gained after the product was in the hands of the users. During my weekly check-ins with my design professor, I often asked him, “Why does design research take so much time? Even after months of user testing, it doesn’t seem as close to reality as expected..”.
This was when my professor mentioned the story of another fellow graduate who was working with a prosthetics company to design use cases for an improved hip replacement surgery. The student had extended her design research, not by one week or month, but by a whole year. At the end of the design research, she had become an expert on hips. After one year of investigation, she was able to grab onto that 1% deep insight which led her to formulate the product vision and further development.
Now, who has time for all this?
You might not be having time to do such extensive research investigations. Oftentimes, it’s a luxury. Especially in startup environments where a week or two can make or break a company, we might need contrarian and unconventional systems for product building.
The bigger problem with research can be done for one day, one month, or even a year. The depth might change, but it wouldn’t necessarily guarantee that the product is better. You might increase the chances of it succeeding and still failing.
Most of the products don’t survive a day out in the open.
This led me to hypothesize that the best product insights are gained by putting the product out in the open as fast as possible. Even if they are not perfect or the best working solution available now.
If a wrong decision can make or break a startup, putting the MVPs out as quickly as possible is better. It’s similar to how we shoot bullets with a shotgun and attempt multiple hits expecting one of them to hit the bull’s eye.
Now, you might ask, how is this even connected to the discussion we have been having between code and no-code?
With no code, you could build startups for breakfast.
The times have changed.
From Learn, Test and Launch, it has now come to — To Launch, Test and then Learn.
The first time I used a no-code app was to build a COVID Wiki app during the second wave of the pandemic in India. As we wanted to intervene as soon as possible, we completed the process in 1-2 days, from ideating, brainstorming, building and launching. When I pressed this app’s launch button, it felt eerie and weird. The app was nothing fancy but — How could this be built so fast?
I launch, test and learn. All the time. No code had rewired my brain.
It has changed the way I think about building products.
So, umm, what is no-code?
If you’re with me so far, but still confused as to what no-code means, let me give you a quick primer.
No code is nothing but code. Except that all the syntax and programming language jazz are stripped out. In no-code apps, you find everything to be more visual. All those WYSIWYG-style drag-and-drop interfaces replace lengthy lines of code.
The no-code landscape is picking up quite fast. Now, you have a no-code alternative for most of the code-based products you find in the market.
This approach is a part of my product philosophy now. This thinking has penetrated deeper into the work I do.
For Noora Health, I’ve been building various mini-apps using these tools to solve specific problems in our workflow. I’ve also got quite fast at building landing pages using a no-code website builder, Framer. Recently, for developing a landing page for a client, a lot of cross-functional alignment was needed to bring all the marketing/comms pieces together. Using Framer, we could quickly collaborate and make version changes rapidly before going live. In a conventional setup, there would have been a lot of back and forth, which this avoids.
And there are other tools too. Creating finance, budget and subscription trackers on Notion. Or complex automation on Integromat and Zapier. And it’s happening everywhere. All without code. Even in some startups.
Julia created HelloPrenup (a prenup management portal) after getting frustrated by hiring various overseas developers who didn’t consider the sustainability of the product they were building. She decided to do it all independently with her co-founder using Bubble, a no-code application platform. The startup ended up raising $150K for 30% on SharkTank. (After all, the customer doesn’t care if the product is built using code or no code. They just care if the job is done.)
Gartner predicted that 65 per cent of app development will happen on low-code platforms by 2024. It’s no surprise to see the rise in no-code developer profile jobs.
The beauty of no-code is apart from the fact that it helps us to think with a higher level of abstraction.
From 30 ft vantage point to 30,000 ft above sea level.
Writing code and its syntax makes you look at it from a 30 ft view which might not always be required. Even though the coding languages are still some form of abstraction (programmers use various pre-packaged libraries and ready-made components in the building process), it is still very difficult for product managers, marketers and founders to read and understand.
For example, almost 90% of the time, people’s problems in business are usually SOLVED problems.
And there is a high chance that these might be reduced in abstraction to a template and made easy to build using existing no-code tools.
No code is like driving a car in first gear. You have enough tools and services available to get your MVP launch ready. If you want anything more, you will run into problems.
You seek code if you want to drive your car in fourth gear with much more control and precision.
Instead, the developer’s time could be best utilised to solve unsolved problems that have NOT been abstracted yet. Or in other words,
Use code only if no-code fails!
In the world of Indie hacker and makers, Participating is greater than marketing.
Take this example of Dagobert Renouf who used to reply to 500 tweets a day, scaling his growth to more than 700K Followers. Here’s an excerpt from Indiehackers blog:
Their launch flopped because they didn’t have an audience. They were expecting traction and didn’t get it, which brought about that cold-sweat moment that many of us have faced… that “oh damn, I actually need to do marketing” moment
Of course, as a developer, he didn’t want to do that. More to the point, he didn’t know how to do that. But he did know his target market: founders.
So after struggling to get customers for a year, he took a very small step. He started contributing to founder communities: IH, Reddit, Slack channels, and (you guessed it) Twitter. The sentiment being:
Participating > Marketing
But “participating” wasn’t just lollygagging with friends online. He made himself spend hours a day replying to people, which we’ll dive deeper into later. And after a few weeks, one of his replies went mini-viral and brought traffic in the thousands. It even brought in a couple of sales.
He stayed consistent.
Research keywords: Use AHREFS or a similar tool to check the keywords you want to rank for, e.g. “case study.” Type in “case study” first and then try to find more keywords. You should aim for the ones with the good ratio difficulty to volume (more volume, less difficulty). Long-tail keywords (i.e. consisting of a few words) are your friends usually.
Carry out on-page optimisations:
- H1 with your main keyword, like “case study.” There can be only one H1 on page.
- H2, H3 mentioning keywords.
- meta description and title tags with keywords and good catchy descriptions — they’ll appear in Google search and affect your click-through-rate. Unleash the best copywriter in you. With keywords and decent descriptions.
- Mention keywords you dug up in your KW research phase generously throughout your texts, but with no implications for the text readability or quality.
- Using slugs in the URL usually helps, i.e. sitename[.]com/case-study-with-gorgeous-mockups
- Overall, you can check your on-page SEO at https://pagespeed[.]web[.]dev
Use Google Search Console to monitor whether you’re ranking, how you’re ranking, & for what queries. It’s free. You can submit a sitemap there, too. It’s useful if you have multiple pages — helps Google index your site faster.
Now, go out & try to get backlinks to your page. Mentioning your keywords in the anchor tags helps. You’re on a hunt for do-follow links.
<a href="yoursite[.]com" rel="follow"> is amazing, <a href="yoursite[.]com" rel="nofollow"> ain't bad, but it won't affect your domain rating that much.
Backlinks can be toxic, if pointing from a garbage site. Strive for those from reputable sources that have a good domain rating (DR).
Rule of thumb: Google understands whether you’re reputable and should be shown to people by a myriad of factors, one of which is whether other reputable source point their fingers at you (in a good way). Kind of like in academia.
The most important thing personal website holders/content creators should look into is this: Intent Based SEO
For example, if someone is looking to buy marathon running shoes, they will look for: Keywords use specific intent modifiers - “buy”, “how to”, “best”, “cheap”. High CPC, low volume ones are less competitive.
How to find right long-tail keywords?
More specific, the better. From “t-shirts”, to “blue t-shirts” to “blue american apparel t-shirts”. Long tail keywords also make up the majority of the searches.
With short-tail keywords, we don’t really know what they’re looking for. So the intent is a bit obscure. This would not be a great keyword to target.