My goal with this blog

I write about relevant changes in the way that people use the web and how startups are built to provide services and products for this ever changing wonderful thing we still know as "the web." As a former entrepreneur turned early-stage investor, my greatest hope is for this to be useful to other folks that are like me in the hopes that they can avoid some of the mistakes I've made.

From:
Antonio Rodriguez

Focus on that one killer feature

tech
by Antonio on

David sent me a fantastic survey that provides a whole lot of good data about the who, how, where, and why of smartphone usage in the US. The most intriguing part of the study is that they dig into the "why" behind the various different choices people make and discover that iPhone owners are overwhelmingly choosing a portable web surfing experience while Blackberry owners are picking a portable email/messaging experience. By contrast the G1 phone (which I have been disappointed with) does some of everything but nothing exceptionally well and is thus hard to choose.

It's good to stop for a second while we are in the middle of AppStore mania and think about this: according to this survey, the iPhone is the best hardware representation of a web browser that you can put in your pocket out there, and this, more than any of the hype around the 3rd party ecosystem, is what drives the massive adoption.

One outstanding feature.

As we get more sophisticated in what we buy (thanks to the information tidalwave the web enables), I think that the "one outstanding feature" approach to building products and services is going to become more and more important. Think of Asus and its diminutive and cheap laptops unseating Dell and HP. Or the Flip's ease of use crushing Sony and Canon.

Another way to put it is that one amazing feature is what makes the beachhead and that everything else just solidifies that position. This is a good mental model for the apps in the AppStore— as the 3rd most important feature, they can still contribute to stickiness, but they just aren't in and of themselves that one killer thing you've gotta have.

In a related post, Mike Speiser has a nice post of diversification of products and entrepreneurs which gets at the same dynamic. In a nutshell, his post argues that being awesome at one thing demands incredible focus, and focus is the friend of success, while the opposite leads to mediocre mush. It's true of design-by-committee in big companies, but increasingly, even among the startup crowd, I've noticed this new trend for previously successful entrepreneurs to claim to want to "diversify" by taking on multiple projects at the same time. I totally get the intellectual appeal of the diversification, but at a gut level it just doesn't feel right, and Mike nails exactly why in his post.