Ask HN: How do you build a real startup, and not a feature? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How do you build a real startup, and not a feature?

33 pointsmoomoo1123 comments

A few times, I've eagerly shown something I've put together to people and they respond with enthusiasm. Then, as soon as I show it to some "seasoned" people (I don't know them too well, just strictly professionally) they tell me that I'm just building a feature.

This always stings me, because I end up shelving the project. I've done this a few times in the past, and years later I still don't see the type of product I'd put together in the wild.

Can someone with startup experience tell me what people actually mean by "don't build a feature"? Thanks

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I have stopped dismissing anyone's ideas as features or won't work. I haven't had a big exit but have gone through many failures and very few tiny exits.

A feature Startup would have been something I used to call a "button" or a "switch" someone can turn on (build quickly) by another incumbent. So, I was skeptical of anything built on top of other Startups APIs -- Twitter, Facebook, or even Stripe (even though lots are surviving on the last one).

Whatever term someone labels your Startup, do a sanity check for yourself by calculating the addressable market[1], which is a simple multiplication of how many users you could get by how much money you could make per user.

Once comfortable with that, see how big this can get in the next few years. Most successful Startups start pretty small and uncanny.

But then, nothing is certain, even with the best mathematical formulas, market forces, or money. I have been part of enormous and grander ideas, massive money, and brilliant execution by the best teams and still failed. I have also missed quite a few "small ideas" that didn't seem so but then went on to grow big and succeed.

1. https://visible.vc/blog/modeling-total-addressable-market/

I hate all the comments here so adding my own take (I have a different perspective than many here as I sell software - I don't build it).

A feature or features is what your software does literally. A company is an ideology around what your company's vision is.

Docusign's features were about e-signing documents. Their vision was/is "to accelerate business and simplify life for companies and people around the world."

Sounds like fluff. But it's actually pretty important to have a vision because it gives your customers/investors/employees direction on the types of products that you can build. Docusign could build and monetize any product that accelerates business or simplifies life. They have e-sign now - but later they can have other stuff. People who purchase Docusign hope/expect they'll roll new features around their company vision and is why they choose Docusign vs. others.

Seems related to the vitamins and painkillers analogy. Is the product a vitamin or painkiller? The latter people have a need and will pay for. The former is nice but not nice enough to pay for. That said that kind of comment seems a bit dismissive. If these are "features", share what you'd envision the full product to be.

Maybe share some things you've shelved, are they tackling thing that are adjacent to core business problems?

That's a manifestly bad analogy and reasoning from it is very unlikely to lead to any sort of helpful conclusions. People very obviously do pay for both vitamins and painkillers.

people do pay for vitamins, but very few buy a vitamin because they NEED it. They buy it because it sounds like a good idea to get healthy. People buy pain killers because they have a very serious problem to solve directly affecting their QOL.

vitamins have product market fit with people who are deficient in vitamins or anxious

those 2 groups probably 'need' it

You need to assess willingness to pay, people will more likely pay for something they need than something they want. You obviously won't market a tech product or SaaS like a vitamin or painkiller, but its much harder trying to convince someone (let alone a company) to buy something they want vs something they need, whether sales led discussion or online conversion

There's not a lot of context here around what exactly this means in relation to your project, however what this could mean, is that the project is more of a minimum-viable implementation rather than a customer-facing product/service.

Some useful questions to consider here could be:

Does this product/service have a good customer-experience? Is it usable with supporting documentation?

Does the product/service have a clear documented purpose and roadmap? Why does it exist? Does it have an identity?

Are you developing maintainable processes and practices around this product/service in order to secure its future and enable growth?

Without a wider amount of work to establish concrete answers to these questions, a project could be considered to be more of a feature than a startup/business.

Auth0 is basically a login feature.

1password is a password manager - you could define that as a feature.

I don't know how well companies like these are doing, but it seems that some people manage to create a business around "a feature".

Perhaps it's more risky than other avenues, but hey, if you can make it work, if you can get customers and have them pay for your rent, then go nuts.

So you're building a business. Presumably you have a hypothesis for why it's going to work. Then some people tell you something negative. You give up despite not even being sure what they mean? If these were potential customers or investors that would perhaps [0] make sense. But if you think you're still right, and some irrelevant people simply have a different opinion (which you don't agree with), then just proceed. I assume the disagreement isn't about what the product is, but whether it can grow into a big business. The "feature" argument is essentially that it can't and won't, but surely you must have believed it can.

[0] still overrated since a small minority of them liking you may be enough and customer behavior is tough to gauge pre-product despite what many will have you believe

First, I want to ask, "okay, and then what did you do?" That kind of feedback, to me, isn't a sign to give up, but that the idea needs more thought at a minimum.

Second, read BlueTie's response (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32013983) because that is also important but usually comes after they build the product on how to turn a viable product into a company/startup. There's a series of steps. Features < Product < Side business < Lifestyle business < Company/Startup.

For me, that usually means the idea is an incremental improvement, but if you built a full product for it, it wouldn't be attractive enough for existing users to migrate unless it could be sold as a plugin. Unless it is a ridiculously trivial process to adopt the new solution (i.e. a plugin), you won't overcome inertia.

To be a viable product, you can't be 1-10% better than existing solutions but need to be 20, 30, 50+% better. You must overcome loss aversion and sunk costs (time and money). The improvement needs AT LEAST a significant step-wise improvement for a vital feature of the existing solution.

If anyone looks at your idea and the existing solution and says, "Yeah, it's better, but ..." or "Eh, the current way is good enough." To be a product, there HAVE to be people who say, "I can't live without this feature!"

A good example is Anki. By most measures, it is terrible software, and every couple of months, you see a new flashcard program on Show HN. Most of the time, they are a flashcard program with a better UI, collaborative flashcard decks, or some other piece that's usually objectively better. These are almost always features, not startups. Now, if you took several of them and had them implement all of their ideas into a single product, you might have enough value to overcome inertia.

Don't fall into this trap, VCs love to say this but they are looking for a billion dollar company. If you are not a millionaire this not applicable to you. If a feature can make your net worth 50M it's very much worth it. Heck it's worth it if it can make you 1M richer. Going from $ to $$$$$ is a big jump in stability and quality of life.

Ability to accept payments is a feature, but no one would say Stripe wasn't a startup that's now grown into a large company.

Features can be viable startups if they provide enough value and hard enough to replicate.

I think two things need to be true for a “feature” to be able to mature into a full fledged company/startup: 1. People need to be willing to pay for it. 2. Other companies shouldn’t be able to replicate it easily and put you out of business overnight within a single release.

Part 2 is especially important if you’re building or extending functionality on top of a platform. An example might be the old swipe-to-touch keyboards on iOS. Once Apple built them natively, game over.

A very minimal MVP can be described as a feature. That's a good starting point where you can get your initial product validation. You can always add more features that people want.

This is true, but it also has to be "enough."

Enough to solve the whole problem. Enough to make people want to try it. Enough to be worth the effort of learning. Enough to overcome, "Meh." And so on.

Sure, but "enough" can be very subjective. What's enough for the developer might not be enough for anyone else.

"Real startups," as you use the term, are solving problems that are subsets of problem spaces. The vision of the company should always be focused on the problem spaces. The ability to bridge between the one thing your product does, better than anyone else, and the larger problem space, is really hard. If you can make the leap, you've gone beyond being just a feature.

The things that made me the most money and learned me the most are without exception those which are hard to sell in person.

Or in other words, I never got actually positive feedback before releasing and yet these products found their right customers.

Paradigm shifts are obvious and quickly associated as “new products” and I’d guess what most people are expecting you to show them when you say “check out my new product”.

It sounds like you’re building something they don’t view as such. Perhaps it just looks incomplete because it only does a few things. Perhaps it replicates 100 things they’ve seen before but adds 1 thing incrementally. In either case, I think what they really mean with their feedback is “I don’t need this” or “I wouldn’t pay for this”. If your startup is a feature, that’s fine if it’s a good enough feature that they’d pay you for it.

I think since you’re gathering feedback, just try to drill into it to understand it’s meaning and why. In other words, ask them more questions about what they mean with their statements.

Your idea probably is not worth paying for to put it blunt. So you got to come up with a thing people would pay for, for it and it alone.

If a feature has paying customers it’s a startup. A feature is something you would open source.

Its impossible to know what people actually meant without an example, but when I read that reply, I think of a "Feature" as an incremental improvement in existing products. That improvement could be unique, it could be pulled from existing other businesses/industry, or whatever. The main reason a feature is "bad" is that its indefensible, and/or minimally differentiated.

To take a detailed example... Take music services - Apple Music vs Spotify. If you build "Spotify but the pause button works different" then thats a feature. Most likely, the idea is not so special you can pull customers away from their existing solution, so you won't make money (minimally differentiated). If you do have an idea special enough to steal customers... well, any one of the existing competitors (who have more money, talent, resources, business connections than you) can build it before you grow enough to be a threat (indefensible).

A actual business has to do something different on a business level not different on a product level. If you're competing with iTunes and $.99 songs and you offer music streaming (eg you're Spotify)... thats very different (NOT minimally differentiated). People would pay for that, and its not "itunes with X" its a completely different business. Your competition can't dramatically change their entire business overnight because that would scare shareholders and because big businesses don't change that fast meaning no one can copy your idea quickly (NOT indefensible). Of course as we all know, even Spotify still faced competition eventually from Apple Music, but they were able to build a business and acquire MANY customers before apple caught up. Have you heard of Rdio? They were my first used music streaming service and my favorite. They arguably had the best UI and I think they were the first to allow you to use one client to control music playback in another client. They don't exist because their only value was a few features... which wasn't enough to build a business.

Today, music streaming as a whole is a feature that big companies offer as a perk for their other products (see YouTube music, or Amazon Music), so its probably a bad industry to start a company in if you want to "build a better music streaming service", because any change to the service is just a new set of features.

As another example, take personal mobility - in the US cars are dominated by a few big conglomerates that make many shapes/brands. No one can create a car business by making cars that are "basically fords but purple", but (1) Tesla could make make their cars unique enough in features to compete because they had unique electric car technology and the Elon-musk influence that existing car companies couldn't replicate (defensible tech/social moat) and (2) companies invented eBikes and scooters to compete with the mobility problem, but a different product to solve it (differentiated) where they wouldn't experience incumbent competition before they became successful.

> years later I still don't see the type of product I'd put together in the wild.

Someone in another comment said "Perhaps [your idea] replicates 100 things they’ve seen before but adds 1 thing incrementally" - I like this phrasing. You basically need to convince people to pay you for just that 1 thing, since the other 100 they already pay for and are familiar with. If your "1 thing" is 1% of the product value... sorry no one is willing to handle switching efforts. If your "1 thing" provides outsized value... then the existing competition will steal your idea and your only hope is that you grow fast enough to be a real competitor before hand (thats why people take VC money). Thats the problem with being a "+1" - you're either insignificant, or you just performed free market research for a very well funded org that will now compete with you by building that +1 themselves.

IMO if you have a really great 100+1 idea, build it and hope to sell it to the people who built a successful business around the first 100. It may be a good idea that just didn't have any business traction to exist. You could always try your hand at "creating a feature" - people may buy you instead of competing, so thats a nice "exit" for you if you want that. Most people don't want to build a business they need to run for the next 20 years anyways, so no shame in building a vision and selling it off.

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