How To Not Get High On Your Own Supply
Feature Rush
If you’re a first-time entrepreneur, then chances are you’re not communicating your vision accurately to investors, your deck is mangled and probably don’t have a clear business model or go-to-market strategy. You’ve done all the wrong things up to this point with launching a tech startup. Now, after pivoting several times, you’ve found yourself out of runway and basically having to start from the beginning with more features than you know what to do with. Here’s one piece of advice — build a product that fits your runway.
Elizabeth Yin, Partner at 500 Startups, said it best in her recent article:
One of the biggest mistakes I see entrepreneurs make is that they spend too much time on product development. Part of the reason is that the scope of products are often far too complex for the first iteration. It is much better to take just one seemingly feature and blow that out of the water. Make it super simple and easy to use. And do this within just a fraction of your runway.
Pitching your product vision while trying to steal market share from incumbents in a crowded space can be really challenging. You want to truly solve early customers' problems from day one, but also minimize their opportunity cost. Too often, startups find themselves pivoting until there’s nearly no runway left. One of the biggest inhibitors for realizing product-market fit and building a product positioned for the runway is feature rush.
Much like a sugar high, feature rush is the belief that the overabundance of features in a product can lead to hyperactivity. Feature rush occurs when founders fall in love with the features. You become consumed and inundated with the idea that people aren’t buying your product because there aren’t enough features. Or you want to provide every feature imaginable so they’ll never choose another competitor again. In result, you never develop a single feature that anyone loves. A minimum viable product (MVP) solves real-world, urgent customer problems. It’s not about the smallest collection of features. It’s about doing one thing really well. Adding reqs and building features do not make a product.
Below are a few questions to ask yourself when building a product for a fraction of your runway:
- What is the minimal thing that a customer will pay for?
- Does an additional feature help the business?
- Will people pay/want/embrace what you build?
- Will this resonate?
- How will you iterate based on data while continuing to drive value?
- How do you put customers' problems, not your solution, squarely at the center?
- Is this something customers can use?
- Can you answer the value to customer, unique feature (competition), the uniqueness of your product?
- What do customers want?
- What’s your addressable market and your distinctive advantage?
- Who doesn’t want to buy?
- What can be changed, do you have time and budget to react?
Base your product around your runway by avoiding the feature rush. Put everything else (other features) in the backlog after collecting the maximum amount of validated learning about customers with the least effort. Your product can very well be just one feature, but with incremental improvements, you can materialize what you set out to do in the beginning.
