The one slide your startup should never have in its deck. | Hacker News Reader

The one slide your startup should never have in its deck.

poorbuthappy.com

84 pointspetervandijck29 comments

I disagree. This type of slide can be useful for explaining where the startup fits.

Especially for the people in the audience asking themselves "is this like X, but with i and j?" ... "Ahhh, it IS like X with i, j AND k. Now I get it."

Which you hope to lead on to "Now why can't X just add these features? What makes /this/ company better than X?"

Or, "Now why do I need i, j, and k?," which is sort of where you were going there ;)

Considering that slide could be used verbatim in a Turntable.fm deck (which, btw, is an absolutely amazing product) I'd argue that this is post is doing it wrong.

EDIT: After looking at the actual presentation, http://www.slideshare.net/vgvikas/musicwalla-business-pitch-..., this literally mirrors the idea behind Turntable.fm. It provides all those features (plus others not included in the slide) and is both awesome and innovative. I get the general gist of the advice being given, but the example is horrendous.

Unless you're selling to enterprise or the government.

Or, in general, selling to someone who won't personally be using your product or service, but will make someone else use it.

Most enterprises and governments don't work with startups.

unless you're a startup that sells to the government (e.g. Palantir)

The problem here is not that they have "more features". The problem is that this slide is focused on features. Users do not care about features.

Users care about what those features allow them to do. Use-cases. Frame it as as "You can do this thing (that you actually want to do) with us, and not with our competitors". That's a completely different beast than "We have X, Y, Z capabilities."

I agree completely. A "feature" for a user should just be part of the experience, not some bolt-on, selling feature.

I disagree. First, it's one slide.

Second. Users do care about features. Apple routinely, as in virtually every Jobs keynote, lists off features. They then demo them, but the slides list off actual capabilities.

Now you may say that Apple isn't a startup so they don't have to present things this way. Possibly, but well done features are still often the key differentiating factor between products.

I almost bought a new Nook -- know why I didn't? It lacked a key feature. The reason I don't use Pandora, but do use Grooveshark -- a key feature is missing in Pandora.

I know ppl love these grandiose -- "Everything you know is wrong" posts, but usually they spew poor advice.

With that said, the problem with these sorts of slides is more basic. They generally don't list the check boxes for all the features the competition has that you don't. I find these more useful when presented by a 3rd party. The nice thing about features is that a 3rd party can typically do a decent job of putting a list together, w/o input from any of the parties.

"Users do not care about features."

This is as bad as the "ideas are worthless" meme, which is taken too literally by some. Sure, there are some products where you should push the benefits, but that doesn't mean that you should ignore the features. The more knowledgeable a market is, the more they want to know about features.

It'd be nice if startup advice wasn't so absolute and instead presented "rules" or suggestions as being situational. "If you’re doing a startup, you should have less features than your competitors" may very well be good advice for certain startups (or Musicwalla in this case) but it should not be considered gospel for all startups.

Agreed. I also feel like that blog post was incomplete and not constructive enough. I think it's also important to highlight your core strengths and the extra features is icing on the cake kind of thing.

Agreed, but the style of post appears to be characteristic of many on the site -- slightly longer than a tweet.

I disagree. If the entire point of your product is that it adds a new but differentiating layer of functionality to well known products already in the marketplace this is a PHB friendly way of expressing that concept.

Not just PHBs. In a crowded space, where users essentially choose you semi-randomly, charts like that provide the user with some self-justification ("I picked them because, err, they have more features!").

And anyway these kind of slides are always a bit of a sleight of hand. Every software system has some features others don't, just because, and those are the ones cherry picked for this kind of slide. It doesn't necessarily mean they are feverishly working on additional features.

I misread that as "The One Slide Startup" and thought it was a new lean startup idea. Couldn't decide if it was a good or a bad thing.

The advice is essentially "'your startup should have less features than the competition, because you're a startup". That would work well with being a one-slide startup.

Probably a better distinction is that features are a short-term competitive advantage, which should not be mistaken for structural, long-term advantages that aren't easily copied. Investor's are much more interested in the latter.

They should have fewer features, not less ... Grammar Nazi strikes!

I completely agree. In fact, as I read the title, my thought was "big list of features" and was glad to see that was, in fact, what the article was espousing.

You should never focus on features (even in a big company focusing on enterprise sales). Focus on what customer pains you solve and how you solve them. Features are a tertiary concern after that (and that includes both presentations and product development/planning).

The advice is more apt for B2C services where the users don't care about the features - for example I don't care if Grooveshark lets me write a 140 character review for an album or not as long as it lets me listen to my playlist; but for B2B, features are the core, aren't they! - for example if there are two invoicing solutions, one which supports time tracking and one which doesn't, I will definitely go for the former.

"listening to my playlist" is a feature.

I suppose one could argue this... but it's a pretty shallow rule of thumb. Perhaps your competitors' offerings truly are incomplete, or you've manage to pull off a product that includes more, effortlessly? Perhaps the items in the list aren't that major?

I think the idea behind the slide is to answer the question "Why would someone use your service instead of another?" I think there are several approaches you can take to answer such a question.

Maybe a solid approach is:

Take the list of features your competitors have. Subtract the features people don't want Add the features that people are looking for that no one has.

If you implement more features, you don't necessarily have to implement them poorly. Maybe you need a larger team or more time.

"Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler." - Albert Einstein

everything simple as possible, no simpler. - Albert (he used too many words)

I disagree, the features werent unreasonable, or minor splitting hair features either.....

having said that.....their proposed business sounds crappy and will probably fail, doesnt make peter right though :)

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