Make Your Startup Great at One Thing
medium.com
medium.com
And about this particular article, can you be any more banal than by stating "do one thing and do it well"? The only difference is that usually people make comparisons to Swiss army knife and in this case it's that ninja tool.
While this does apply to the article, it isn't even that good of advice for startups. It's not enough to do one thing really well. That one thing also must be needed very much by no matter how small group of people. You can create app that is really good at finding just McDonalds restaurants in your area, for example, but if nobody really needs it it will not matter.
And of course, Github built those things over time. But the question that still remains, especially on the early days, with limited resources:
What new feature should we add next to this one thing?
from a list of dozens of features that customers are screaming for... Shall we add a native app? or should we add Facebook integration? Should we add some gamification elements or redo the homepage to increase conversions? and the list goes on.
They do seem to have kept their heads on straight through it all.
Easier said than done, of course...
I have a Pocket Monkey (http://zootilitytools.com) which is similar to Wallet Ninja and have been carrying this around for over a year in my wallet. I personally love this tool and will never leave home without it. Much like as Swiss Army Knife, this thing has been useful so many times for me. Admittedly however my most frequently used part of the tool is the bottle opener. Other aspects of the tool don't get used quite as often. However if I were to carry the rather large tool the author links to, it would not fit in my wallet.
gmu3 mentions the issue with airports. I travel very frequently through several different countries including the US and have never had any issues keeping this in my wallet. I've only been questioned once but they were okay with it and let me keep it. It's not sharp enough.
The Pocket Monkey is an easy conversation starter as well. Every time I whip it out to open someones beer because there are no openers available they are often impressed of how small and strong it is.
Disclaimer: I was given a Pocket Monkey (worth $12) free to review on my own site in 2013.
My company has a niche software product and we have people contacting us all the time who love it, but find it missing just one feature to get their business. That feature may happen to be extremely difficult to write or have limited use to our core customers. But if this is a large company or a lucrative contract then it can be very difficult to resist. There may be times where, financially, you really need the income. It could even mean the difference between staying in business or not. So, it is not always so cut and dry when you're in the middle of it.
Was working with a client trying to get a narrowed focus of that 'one thing' to latch on to, vs the "this tool will do ABCXYZ for all working people". We got to the point where, when imagining potential users, there were more people who were not a fit than who were a fit, and things picked up after there. Suddenly there was one problem that was being solved for one particular type of person in one industry, and it became easier to focus everything else around that.
I think what articles like this me is that the author/company has 'figured it out' through their own experiences and are so excited to share that joy in some way.
For example: JIRA, it's very complicated software. Many of the complicated features I think are essential for it to get into the Enterprise market. Revenues $242 million.
Basecamp: Their mantra is simplicity (although they do not actually do just one thing, they have several features as part of their software). Revenues estimated at over $100 million.
I do no think there is one simple answer to how to build a successful startup. Focusing on being great at one thing might be a good idea for some businesses but it's not only way to do things and it's far from proven as "the" way to build a startup.
http://www.afr.com/p/technology/atlassian_sales_leap_as_reve... https://medium.com/@hungrycharles/basecamp-the-small-bootstr...
And I'm only half joking. I mean, have anyone ever successfully been productive at using the thing? To me, it certainly doesn't do well in department of being useful to developer (or manager, for that matters).
First, startups do need to find out what is that "one thing". So many startup end up building more features (use cases) since they are searching for "the thing". That is ok - but the problem is that many startups are not removing features (use cases) even after their metrics show that this new feature is not "the thing".
I heard arguments like this:
It is wrong to release a user feature and then simply remove it when your testing shows it isn't improving any metrics. Users will feel they are being cheated, even though they aren't spending a single penny for that feature.
My answer to that is: "How much money did you say they paid for this?"
Jack of all trades and master of none. will only leave you among the mediocre. It is easy to be good at multiple things, but as I said, almost everyone is good at a lot things. But a Few are the real class.
As a generalist I find myself in high demand, commanding strong rates and being in the position of building a web or mobile product from start to finish as I want.
By defintion, most people are going to be average in the field. A little extra enthusiasm, ambition, discipline and hard work will push you out of the average.
Show me one "real class" professional who only performed in one field.
More "functionality"? Better marketing? Better UI? Better traction? Better team?
Final point: it seems like you consider investment to be a necessity to build a company. It's not.
Were that the case then we'd only have one product in each market where, by your definition, the market would allow all but one to die out.
For what it is worth, I think you do need to make the product substantially better for people to check it out within a crowded market, but in a similar spirit to one of your other posts, there are multiple ways to distinguish your product (scaling, UI, feature set, etc.)
One of them had amazing traction with sellers because they said "it's free to sell right now, hop on in!"
They failed because they didn't have customers.
The other one was an advertising platform, but they didn't have enough advertisers to actually PROFIT from selling their advertising. So they sold lots of advertising... only to pay Facebook to show it (because people want their views and they want them fast) and actually lost money.
What if they just focused on one thing? A business focused on referring sellers to marketplaces... a business working to sell someone else's products... they'd both be very successful at one thing instead of failing to provide on both ends
And B may become more successful than A, but you never would have gotten there without first doing A really well.
Some 'one things' scale to epic proportions, like Google's search engine or Facebook, and become large stand-alone products all to themselves (and dominate their category).
If your product doesn't have that capacity, you're likely to eventually end up as the target of a bigger company that has that. The Windows ecosystem was famous for that, Microsoft continually ate things that were useful and put them into Windows, killing off entire niche product segments.
The iPhone is about 3/4 of Apple's entire business (the iPad shrank significantly this past quarter, and nobody cared much, because of the iPhone's growth). Search + ads is the extremely share of Google's business. And Facebook (11 years old) only makes money from its core social network for now.
Most very successful companies only do one thing really really well. There are a few conglomerates running around, but they're a very small fraction of businesses.
Also, being good primarily at one thing, doesn't mean you can only ever be good at just that thing. The iPod has all but disappeared as a meaningful business for Apple, to the extent that they essentially no longer talk about it. Apple has been good at one thing, with three different unique things: PC, iPod, iPhone.
Thanks.
Having read other comments here, I am kind of wondering how one figures out or defines that "one thing" that the business is supposed to focus on and do well. I don't know of any business that survives by doing literally one thing and only one thing well. So you are awesome at your One Thing, but you can't figure out how to take credit cards or secure the premises or keep people from showing up at work drunk or high. Any of those things can destroy a business.
The reason business is hard is because you have to juggle so many things successfully. If that weren't true, we wouldn't have so many articles on how to do this. We would all just be rolling in dough, doing our one thing or whatever.