Features Don’t Make a Company
I assume you’re expecting a pep talk about cutting down your feature list. Well, you are absolutely right. This is that kind of an article. This is an article about lean startups. It’s an article about being agile. This is an article about doing 80% and leaving the other 20% for later. This is an article about laser beam focus.
Two weeks ago, my colleague Karl Clement wrote an article about knowing when to scale and our null to 0 concept. Following this trend, I wanted to take a brief moment to speak to you about our lord and savior Product Market Fit.
At CoVenture, we work with many early-stage portfolio companies looking to test their thesis in the real world and we do this most effectively with the help of an alpha release.
What is an Alpha you ask?
During a software product’s lifecycle, it goes through many phases and an alpha is its first.
You’ve got the perfect idea with the perfect value proposition for the perfect customers and now all that’s left to do is to build a laundry list of features that’ll keep us occupied for the next two years.
Is that really the correct Approach?
I think not. While working with several companies for the past one year and half, I’ve seen many examples of founders getting lost in features and of those, the most extreme example has to be my own.
Over the span of 2 years, we rebuilt our product twice to meet the ever-growing requirements list established by my co-founding team and potential customers alike.
Now having been through the process numerous times, I would have done many of those things differently.
Features (seriously) don’t make a Company
During the validation phase of your startup, the most important thing is to find your product market fit and in most cases that isn’t really affected much by slideshows on your front page.
I’m sure you knew that already but where I can maybe provide a unique point of view is on the technical implications of such decisions. Lets talk about my own startup for an example.
The alpha release of our product was beautifully designed by our in-house designer and accompanied by a full dashboard for both sides of the two-sided marketplace. This was the dream, it had everything our customers ever asked for.
BUT. There was only one small problem, we forgot to find our product market fit. Two years and two full iterations later, we realized that the path we had been all working towards had led us down the rabbit hole of just one more feature.
Having learned this lesson the hard way, I am now a big believer in Reid Hoffman’s quote “If You’re Not Embarrassed By The First Version Of Your Product, You’ve Launched Too Late”.
What CoVenture does Differently
At CoVenture, we break down our development into two separate builds to first allow our founders to quickly validate their idea and find their product market fit before we move onto the next build that then allows them to further expand onto their product with input from their customers.
This helps to mitigate risk and more importantly, it helps to save time, money, and effort both for you and your engineering team.
Lesson Learned (Focus)
As a founder, it’s easy to get lost in all the little features that enhance your value proposition, but you also must beaware of the fact that the 80/20 rule applies to your engineering team as well. It’s your responsibility to look past all the noise and help your team establish that laser beam focus on your unique value proposition and not the stupid slideshow.
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