A recent conversation with a founder:
His company developed a B2B SaaS product. They showed some initial promise but ultimately couldn’t achieve meaningful growth. They didn’t reach product/market fit.
Then they kept developing more features. And some more features. All of a sudden, they had a product with 12 different main features, none of which was a killer differentiator. The product surface area was so large that the engineering team was always busy just maintaining the codebase.
As founders, we all know this isn’t the best way to go. But avoiding this trap is easier said than done — it’s just how human psychology works. We get backed into a corner, and our instinct is to work harder and do more things. Occasionally, in the history of products, there have been those that were stuck but finally achieved breakthrough growth with that one key feature. We feel we have to keep the team busy; we can’t have them idle. The list goes on.
That’s why, when stuck, sometimes the team needs to slow down at least a little bit and use their brains more than their bodies (i.e., building more features). Startups don’t have abundant resources, so the only edge they can have is to do one thing (which will turn out to be the game changer) really well. It’s about finding that one game-changing thing, not doing more things.