Read a great blog today called Creating Passionate Users by Kathy Sierra who writes some fascinating articles on product marketing and how to make the users central to everything you do. Nothing about “social shopping” yet, but you can’t have everything 
This particular article was one very close to my heart and I’ll summarise it here and add my own thoughts:
One of the temptations with starting a business is that you want to look at all the potential competition or those that are may be close in some way and see what features they have implemented, in order to see if you should do the same. Often they will have made an announcement along the lines of “we’ve launched a whole new set of features today, why not take a look…”. I used to look at this and think “oh arse, that’s even more work for us to do to try and catch up now”.
The article mentions that it is fear that makes us think in this way by assuming that everyone goes for the product with the most features – investors, users, and even the general internet community. There is also the feeling that you may be falling behind and that what you are offering will no longer be good enough. What happens is that everyone gets caught in a “features arms race” leaving the poor users to try and keep up with the multitude of things being thrown at them every month.
Now for a startup this is very important as we have limited resources equal to how many biscuits I can afford to buy for Chris and his other developer. More features = more time = more biscuits I have to buy!
The curve below shows that there is a happy equilibrium somewhere in there in terms of no. features for a user.
So, actually now I do a three step process with any features I see:
- What exactly is the feature being proposed, how would it work better, and what value would it add.
- Do our users actually want it or are we doing because we think it is cool
- If it’s needed, make sure we implement it better and communicate it well. It needs to be simple.
There are quite a few features our competitors entering the social shopping space (I say competitors but they’re not really doing something on this scale) are implementing which we look at and just think “why?” – and based on Kathy’s analysis – forget about that and just concentrate on what we do best: creating features that our users really want and can learn to use quickly.
After all – how many biscuits can one team eat?
