What Happens When Your Startup Over-Promises on Product Features
It’s January 18th, 2016. 3 in the morning. I haven’t slept a full night in 4 days.
I’m still at work, trying to convince a contract manufacturer in Hsinchu, Taiwan, of our current need. The Butterfleye cameras needed quality improvements…and they needed them yesterday.
I wasn’t stressed over this. No, I was way past the point of stress. Now I’m on the brink of losing all hope. I’m alone. Scared. Failing.
The Cruel Reality of Over-Promising
Let’s back up a few months. In September of 2015, we launched Butterfleye cameras on the Indiegogo crowdfunding platform. Over a 30-day period we raised $650,000 in funding. An amazing milestone.
We promised our customers that we would ship their Butterfleyes by the end of that same year.
Return to January 2016. We have missed our shipping date. Broken that promise. Worse…I still didn’t have a clear idea when we’d ship the product our customers paid for!
The office’s state at the time was equally dismal. We had a handful of Butterfleye prototypes lying around, meant for displays, testing, and refinement. But we just didn’t have the resources to make the product as promised during the crowdfunding campaign. Basically, our prototypes did not work as specced.
We had promised a full-featured, technologically-advanced camera no one else had at the time. Even the large companies in our space, with all sorts of time and resources at their disposal, didn’t have a camera as advanced as our design.
But we had a fatal flaw. At the time, our team didn’t have some of the key skill sets required to finish the camera’s full development. Oh, we did everything we could to build up those skill sets…and kept making mistake after mistake in the process.
Here’s what we had promised our customers the Butterfleye would have:
- Long battery life. Security cameras in those days didn’t have any batteries.
- Built-in artificial intelligence/AI tech like facial recognition. In a 2015 camera, facial recognition technology would cost a few thousand dollars. Butterfleye was only $199.
- GoPro-esque video quality.
- A whole bunch of other advanced features. Bells and whistles to make it sexy, in other words.
A long list of features, yes. None of them worked 100%.
Validation is Glorious. Don’t Kill Yourself to Get It.
Oh, I can’t forget competition. Our competitors tripled from 2016 to 2017. Many new startups, as well as established, well-funded companies, got into our space. On the one hand, this told us that the market was big. Consumers really did need our products. That’s exciting. It’s validating for all the long hours and 3 AM calls to Taiwan.
On the other hand, it made standing out that much harder. It was more expensive to advertise, harder to make our voice heard above the noise.
We finally shipped Butterfleye at the beginning of 2017. One year later. One year past what we promised everyone. My team worked incredibly hard to get there. I was, and still am, extremely happy that we finally delivered the product we had promised.
So were our customers. We received all sorts of emails/calls/messages on how they use their Butterfleye to improve their lives. Each one brought joy to my workday.
I wish I got those emails earlier…they would have made 2016 bearable! Without them, the whole of 2016 was incredibly stressful. Every day, it felt like we were 2–3 months away from shipping. Imagine that sort of stress, every day, for an entire year.
It always felt like we were one release away on the software…just one more prototype run on the production floor…and then we’d be at full mass-production. None of us took a day off in 2016. On the 4th of July, my teammates and I sat in the office, sweating like crazy, working feverishly on a software patch for one of Butterfleye’s core features. Instead of going out with friends and celebrating.
Aim for “Good Enough” First
This is how entrepreneurship goes. One day you raise $650,000 on Indiegogo. Validation! Time to celebrate! The next day a catastrophe erupts within the office. Only that day lasts a whole year.
I told myself, “Welcome to Hardware. Remember to breathe.”
I often reflect on everything that happened, all the mistakes I made, and the lessons I learned from the experience. One thing that always stands out is this: We wanted to make a ‘great’ product. We thought a ‘great’ product meant it had many differentiating features, some of the most advanced technology available, etc. It should shine like a diamond. Blow everyone’s minds.
That’s just not practical for an early-stage startup. It hurt, but I learned that ‘great’ is the enemy of ‘good enough.’ I learned we should build a ‘good enough’ product…and not a hair above that.
Now, let me clarify what I mean by ‘good enough.’ ‘Good Enough’ does NOT mean “one step above terrible.” It means the product does exactly what you promised it would. Nothing more.
You said it would have Features A, B, and C? Then it must have Features A, B, and C. Leave Features D and E for Version 2.
A ‘Good Enough’ product will contain one (or two, but no more) differentiating features that your target customer needs. One is really all you need…but it must be a big enough differentiator that your target customers will pay for it.
Finally, the product must — MUST — be on time to market.
A Realistic Time-to-Market Plan
Time-to-market is incredibly important. If I had the chance to do it all over again, I’d have taken this course:
- Develop Butterfleye Version 0.25 first. Basically, one-quarter of the current features, but the product would ship on time & garner initial sales.
- Collect the initial customers’ feedback. Work it into a Version 0.5 (half of the current features).
- Following Version 0.5 sales, collect feedback again. Develop Butterfleye 0.75.
- Repeat. Then you have Butterfleye 1.0, a full-featured camera, built on a foundation of priceless customer feedback, actual revenue, and a fraction of the stress!
On this plan, the hardest part would be figuring out which differentiating feature should go inside the Butterfleye 0.25…and then saying no to everything else.
Don’t Aim for “Great” Right Away. Make a “Good Enough” Product First.
These days when someone tells me they are building a ‘great’ product, I know what will happen. Their product will be late to market, by at least 6 months. It will cost them double, if not triple, what they initially thought. They won’t get all the features they wanted up front.
Of course, you can’t ship a bad product either. A slight delay to avoid bad products is OK. But again, the lessons from Butterfleye say it clear: The key to startup success is to build a ‘good enough’ product and not a hair above that.
