What a wonderful quote[1].
Last week I was chatting with two old friends, each with a great product idea, and each one too afraid to go at it. Entrepreneurship is not about coming up with the-next-big-thing-idea… it’s about jumping into the cold water and making it happen.
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[1] I borrowed this slide from Garr Reynolds’ absolutely excellent Presentation Zen blog, who borrowed the quote from a Guy Kawasaki interview. I hope it’s OK to post it here… in Hebrew we say "Hagonev Mi Ganav Patur".
From Wikipedia:
Featuritis is a term used to describe software which over-emphasizes new features to the detriment of other design goals, such as simplicity, compactness, stability, or bug reduction.
Featuritis is often accompanied by the mistaken belief that “one small feature” will add zero incremental cost to a project, where cost can be money, time, effort, or energy.
I recently met an entrepreneur who has been developing a web-based service for over a year, and was having trouble getting traction for it. He asked for my advice on how to improve his product so that users start flocking to it.
Two minutes into the demo, it was crystal clear what his trouble was – it was a classic case of Acute Featuritis. He was proudly showing off how his product did this, that, and the other 12 things, way more than any of his competitors ever dreamed of doing. He was shocked speechless when I told him I thought that the best cure for his product is to kill 99% of it and focus obsessively on that single aspect or feature that makes his product unique. That is the last thing in the world he expected to hear from me, and he seemed to be very disappointed with our meeting.
These are the common misconceptions about features, as they relate specifically to startups:
The urge to add more features and appeal to a bigger audience always exists. But as an entrepreneur that’s an urge that has to be fought daily. The best question to ask is: “What features can I afford to kill today?”
I find that the best way to think about it is this: If our users love the few things we do now, we can always add more features later; And if our tiny niche audience loves what we do now, we can always try to appeal to a broader audience later. Think about the alternative to this approach: “if lots of people don’t really get all the stuff we’re trying to do now, can we improve our focus later?….”.
I think you know my answer…
A couple of months ago The New York Times published a story about Quigo (disclosure: a company I co-founded). A couple of highlights:
What Quigo offers is transparency and control in what can often be an opaque business: advertisers pay Yahoo and Google for contextual ad placement on a wide variety of Web pages, but get little say over where those ads run or even a list of sites where they do appear…
…In response to further questions about Quigo, though, Google said it was prepared to make changes to its AdSense service that mimicked Quigo’s approach, an unusual step for a company accustomed to mapping the terrain in every aspect of its business.
Looks like the NYT nailed it. Today Google started following Quigo’s lead on becoming a more transparent network. More about this by John Battelle, Barry Schwartz, SEW, and Mashable.
From what I can tell, the Google implementation is more lip service than a real way for advertisers to buy placements on specific publishers. That is to be expected. AdSense would not be successful if it weren’t fundamentally a blind network. Google takes a small number of loss leader sites like Ask.com and AOL on which it makes little or no money. Those are thrown into the blind mix to keep the overall blended-average quality of traffic reasonable. But Google makes its real AdSense money on the very long tail of crappy/fraudulent/parked-domain/self-clicking/link-farm/etc websites. Those are the sites that advertisers would never ever bid for if they had the choice. Those are also the sites that Google can take whatever % of the revenue they see fit (which I estimate at 50% at least) because they never tell long tail publishers how much they pay out.
That’s where Google’s true money pot is, and if they remove their network’s opacity and truly allow advertisers to bid transparently for specific sites – all that revenue will go away.
This new report is definitely a welcome change for Google advertisers. Even lip service is a form of service, I guess… But don’t hold your breath for any genuine effort from Google on making its network truly transparent as long as it makes so much money by having advertisers bid blindly on sites they’d never want to be placed on. For true transparency your only choice is still Quigo’s AdSonar.
