Week Three - Stay focused especially with a release
The Calcinus laevimanus (Zebra Dwarf Hermit crab) in my reef tank gets blown around quite a bit. I have flow that amounts to about 7500 gallons per hour flow through the tank, so as soon as the hermits lose grip on a rock, they go flying. This little guy tumbled quite far, but was able to get back up after a little rocking back and forth. Determination and focus to survive is as simple as getting your house upright again. Well, maybe simple for a hermit.
Week three of my startup company has been pretty exciting. We met up with one of our board of advisors, who provided really good feedback and information. It's always great to have people who really make the effort to share their knowledge and insight. It's not like you rely on that for direction, but it's good to keep your head out of any echo chambers you might be in, and really listen to other experts out there to see how other people and groups think in the same industries. That is one of the most important things to learn in a startup: how everyone else is thinking about the same problems.
The worst that could happen to a company is for all the founders to put their heads down, bury themselves in code and business details, talk amongst themselves, and in essence, persuade each other that what they are doing is exactly right. Echo chamber. Everything really comes down to the same way of thinking for startups: release fast, often. This will get you the most feedback from real life people, and with what they say you can easily determine what to build next as a feature. There's no need for you and your founders to be geniuses, knowing exactly how people will want the app to behave, knowing the perfect UI flows. There's also no need for countless hours discussing how exactly the best way to present information is. Just present it as best you see it, and let the people tell you.
And of course there's simplifying. If you find yourself needing more resources and hires to build stuff, you are definitely NOT focused on the one goal. If you need to branch out to maintain some completely separate product to give your core product some value, you have just created two startups. Whenever you are faced with tons of features that aren't maintainable, you've probably gone too far. Focusing on one strong goal, either it be 140 character status updates (or face it, 140 characters of bragging), or it be checking into sports games with your friends, will keep you from biting more than you can chew.
Our next release will not be a ton of more features that 1 to 5% of our users wanted to see, but it's going to be polishing up and making the core functionality that 100% of the users have used, even better. Of course making it even better doesn't mean just making buttons shiny, or fixing a few bugs, but it can definitely include features that all go towards the same goal of making the core functionality that much more appealing.
It all comes down to a fine balance of not building non-core functionality features, and giving people enough things to be excited about for the next release.
This will be our next biggest challenge! Utilizing user feedback to determine what's next on the list. I'm not going to lie, we do already want to do about 100 different things, but we're going to try our best to keep it simple.
Thanks to all the feedback so far on FanPulse! Those beta testing are really the ones behind exactly what this product will become.
