A Close Look at Software Goals
Posted by Ray in Startups on Jun 18th, 2010 | 4 commentsJustin Rouch and I have been hard at work on a new platform called Guild Press.
Over the past few months we have been hard at work on establishing goals, creating the business, developing our plans, developing the software and figuring out our feature list. This isn’t an easy undertaking by any means. Especially as I’m looking over our original feature list.
When we first started brainstorming all of the features we wanted to see in Guild Press it became clear that the platform was going to be rather large. The worry wasn’t that we’d over complicate everything but rather that we couldn’t do it all or that we weren’t adding enough value to compete with some of the big players in guild site hosting.
My initial thoughts were that we needed to match feature-for-feature the competition and that we further needed to out-due them.
Here we are a few weeks later and I’m looking at the original feature list we compiled. We’ve added even more items to it and I’m starting to realize today that I am making a mistake that I think many other entrepreneurs are as well. Justin Rouch had some interesting thoughts when we spoke recently that we didn’t want to go all in right at the front of the product.
We are now able to focus on the biggest issue that our customers have told us they want us to tackle and later focus on the other features. This allows us to reduce our initial workload as well as build a new customer loyalty.
By not putting everything in the beginning of our product we are giving ourselves a chance to collect feedback, giving ourselves new features to develop in later revisions and keeping the novelty of what we’ve developed.
When Apple releases a new iPhone they release with a few new features that have been asked for in the past. I owned the iPhone, iPhone 3G and the 3GS. Each time a new iPhone is released a few incremental updates are made. These updates typically produce an applause from the crowd. The iPhone becomes novel again.
Apple likely can and does develop several new features for the iPhone each year but only rolls a few of them out at a time. This keeps the line fresh. This keeps it novel.
This creates loyalty and when you are buying an iPhone you are typically buying in to the promise that it will improve with each version and not just for the particular model you picked up.
This idea of creating the minimum feature set seems so simple yet can be so easily overlooked.
While we know that Guild Press in the early stages won’t meet the needs of every person who stumbles upon it we do know that we will be creating a group of very loyal first users. These are the people who are going to help lead the development cycle we decide to take.
This group of early users will help shape the product, will understand the development cycle and will also understand that many more great things are coming in the future of the product.
It seems risky. It is. We are essentially culling a group of users for the purpose of developing the product. We are allowing them to be in on the ground floor. They will be with us for the first minimum feature set but if we do things correctly and make them aware of what the Guild Press goals are early we understand they will be loyal and that they will help us develop the product.
What are your thoughts on this idea of developing for a small early group?
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