Top 5 Most Common Startup Mistakes: Let’s Build 1746 Features in the First Alpha, They’ll Be Hooked
If there will be a frequency based top of the most common startup mistakes, this would be the third one, after the it will work out well, because I just know it will and nobody did this before, so I must be a genius.
But this one is a bit special.
Most of the time, in this case, the entrepreneur's attitude is ok. They also have a relatively good understanding of the market, sometimes playing on the field for years, like employees or managers. So none of the two mistakes are made. They are usually people who know how to do stuff and also know the market.
What they don't know yet, though, it's how much they should do.
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The more features you have in your first prototype, the harder will be for the customer to change his behavior later on.
The more features you have in the first iteration, the harder will be to measure how each of them is performing, because too many choices will paralyze the user's activity.
This "let's build a ton of features" approach usually stems from overconfidence (we know better what's good for the client) but also from a certain fear of rejection (we'll build so much stuff into it, they'll simply have to stick with us).
It doesn't work like that. You don't ask your future wife after the first date. You slowly build a relationship first, go through a few more dates, spend some time together, learn each other strengths and weaknesses and only after you have a deeper understanding of what you can and you cannot do together, move the needle forward. If you try to compress this entire back and forth play into a single date, you won't stand a chance.
In a startup, a much better approach is to give just enough for your users to understand what you're selling, what's the problem you solve and then let them suggest what they need. This is obviously a very delicate choice. And there's no "one size fits all" manual for this.
At this stage of the journey you need a lot more "esoteric" skills than business skills. You need to apply intuition, to learn psychology and behavioral strategies. Of course, many of these activities can be calibrated by carefully crafted processes, but usually these are very expensive, both in terms of money and time. If you're just starting and money is tight (which is the case in 99% of the startups) you just have to be extra careful and give just enough to catch their attention.
A very interesting pastime for me is to browse through the archive.org website (some of you may recall this as waybackmachine). It's a site where you can see snapshots of almost any internet page, taken at various times in the past. It's like a time machine. But beyond nostalgia, you can learn a lot about how to launch and grow your own website (if your startup is relaying on a website, of course). For instance, have a look at Google Beta, from 1999:
A bit different from today's Google, right? But not too much.
A much more interesting set of data is provided by a snapshot from 2000 of the cnn.com website:
I find this exercise fascinating and I do it whenever I have some free time. Unfortunately, this concept of free time is becoming almost extinct in my world, so this is happening less and less frequently.
That's why I usually resort to a much simpler approach when an entrepreneur wants to show me his "state of the art" website with a "complete user experience".
I just ask them to show me a page with one feature. One single feature on a single page. And build from there.
image source - Pixabay
I'm a serial entrepreneur, blogger and ultrarunner. You can find me mainly on my blog at Dragos Roua where I write about productivity, business, relationships and running. Here on Steemit you may stay updated by following me @dragosroua.
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