“Does Your Product Do X?”

I’ve been building a product for the last four or five months, working on it as I have time. When I started the product, I had a very firm idea of what it needed to be and who the customer would be. I’ve spent a lot of time in this particular market and listening to what customers want, so I feel pretty good about what I’ve included and what I’ve excluded to date.

One of the things I’ve promised myself is that I’m not going to overbuild. If I can’t sell this baseline product to someone then I don’t need more bells and whistles. As I’ve been demoing the product over the last couple of months to prospective customers, I have of course gotten the inevitable question of “Does it do X?” This is one of the hardest questions to answer as a software product company because you always, always always want to answer “Yes! Of course we do!”

The reality, however, for an early stage product is quite different. Everyone thinks the feature they’re asking for is a must-have, and when you’re trying to get those first few sales the temptation is to over-promise and then go build each and every thing you’re asked for. But, that’s not a product company. A product is your vision of what the market needs, not everyone else’s. Being willing to say “No” in this conversation can be incredibly valuable.

I have implemented two rules for managing this process, and they’ve been remarkably effective in calming my angst about having a product with gaps.

1. Asking a question such as “If it had this, would you buy it today?” is very effective in determining the level of urgency you need to apply. If they back away, or start listing 50 other things it has to have before they’ll say yes, you have a tire kicker and not a serious buyer. If they say “Yes”, then you have a real decision to make, which directs me to the second rule…
2. Is this the first time you’ve heard this request, or is it coming up regularly? I recommend keeping some kind of roadmap where you can track who’s asking for what (there are a number of tools for this but in the early going you can manage it in your project tool or even in a spreadsheet) If it’s the first time I’ve heard it, I will generally say “No we don’t have that yet, but it’s on our roadmap” or “No, we don’t intend to include that and here’s why.”

This is, as with most things, part art and part science, but if you’ve done the hard work of early customer discovery and built your initial product based on that, you should be able to sell what you have to someone, and then manage getting new features in over time. If you’re just guessing about what your product should be, then everyone’s idea will sound like a good one and you’ll never have a product you can sell over and over again, which is where the money is in this business.

Have conviction around what you’re building and stick to it until you have sufficient evidence to change your mind.