Justin, can you comment on how you chose your feature set?
With Exec, I wanted to make something that was super simple and just works. Most of our challenge is actually figuring out how to inform users of what they can get done, because for most people outsourcing their errands is a new behavior to learn.
We haven't created any features that weren't based on iterating to solve a real user problem that was being experienced during our trial. Our minimum viable product really was "minimum" -- everything including the the map / location tracking, iphone app for the Execs, etc came out of that process. The first version of Exec was literally single text area.
We have done a ton of work on the backend to make sure that Execs pick up and do your jobs excellently -- a lot of that is transparent to the user. Lots of thought has gone into making that work well.
If by "basic" you meant the site's design, then I fully admit that. We used Twitter Bootstrap, which is awesome. I'm not a great designer, but hopefully we can bring someone on soon that is excellent :) (Shameless plug, Exec is hiring a designer and senior engineer for our core team. Come help us build the future of work: https://iamexec.com/hiring)
Exec does plenty. It planned an awesome weekend biking trip for my girlfriend and I, found me a great-sounding (and surprisingly affordable) stereo amp for my bedroom sound system, got me a new iphone (after minimaxing all of the plan options based on my historical usage and international travel plans), researched all of my options for cloud photo storage and got me set up, found me the most styling archival-quality inventor's notebook ever, helped me box up stuff and move it to storage, stocked our office with drinks.. gosh, probably some other things I'm forgetting. All in about a week and and a half. It rocks.
This was enough for Justin to sell me on offering a $100/month Exec credit to all of our employees (who am I kidding, I sold myself without any work whatsoever on their part.) So that quota-based, employer-pays billing system was the other thing they prioritized.
Like Uber, the genius of Exec is precisely that it is one text box and one button. More stuff on the webpage would probably make it worse.
The former doesn't imply the latter.