John Wall: The first one is to always consider bugs and pain points as more important than new features, right? People tend to get caught up in “Well, let’s add a bunch of stuff. Let’s make the product do a whole bunch of other things.” Pain points really cause more trouble and introduce friction into the product. So anytime, if you have four bugs that can be fixed versus four new features, getting rid of the bug should be your initial priority. I mean, you can dig in further, and maybe you can come up with arguments about new features, opening up new markets for you. But normally what we see is that to get to the mass market, you want your product to be almost frictionless. Basically anybody needs to be able to use it. So having bugs or a weird setup, things that need to be done that require talent, any of those things that you can get out of the product so you make it simpler, faster, easier, and fix everything that’s broken, those things tend to be more effective in the long run and get you more solid customers who are willing to then at another point, add features.
John Wall: A second thing is that with new features, you want to keep diving deep into a specific group of customers. So for example, let’s say you have a piece of accounting software that you’re putting out to the market, right? You don’t want to just keep adding everything that every accountant wants. You want to pick one type of accountant. Let’s say it’s somebody who works with the construction industry, and any new features you want to add, you actually want to go deeper down that. What do these specific construction customers want? The idea is to lock down a single vertical and grab as much or all of the business if you can, because by making something, again, more frictionless and easier to use for that specific group of people, that actually makes your product more valuable to them specifically.
John Wall: The last thing with new features is the idea of speed and becoming more agile. Now there’s a whole bunch of software development stuff that we’re not going to get into about how having a very quick churn is actually the fastest way to do it. You don’t want to do this thing where once a year you roll out your new product with 35 new features and find out that nobody wants 22 of them, right? You’re much better off every week testing one feature and seeing what sticks and what doesn’t, and that will get you to a better place. In general, don’t build until you know you have a customer that’s willing to pay for something. Another way we test this for new products that don’t exist is running ads for products that you don’t yet have. Go ahead and run ads and see who’s out there and who’s willing to click through and raise their hand to say they want something. Because we’ve seen so many situations where people think, “Oh, yeah, this is going to fly.” Then when launch day comes around, nobody’s interested, nobody’s buying. So always make sure that you’re doing the work to evaluate the amount of interest out there before you start spending money building.
