Is This a Feature OR a Company?

Posted by on Feb 19, 2008 in Business, Business Theory, Developing, Innovation, Inspiration, Personal | 4 comments

I have often heard people (including myself) say “That isn’t enough to build a company on. That is just a feature”. In theory it is good to think about this. Is your idea or technology something you can build a company on or just something interesting that might be added to another company or product?

But in reality things work differently. Yahoo started as a page with links to websites. Can you imagine that someone said “Yeah that is nice. But it is just a feature. You can’t build a company on a page with links”.

Or take Google. All they had when they started out was a better technology to index pages called ‘BackRub’. They tried to sell this ‘feature’ to a few established search engine companies. These companies weren’t interested so they started their own search engine to show off their technology.

I think it is dangerous to dismiss ideas as only ‘features’ and have decided to stop saying this to people. Great companies are built on simple features. Lets respect that.

4 Comments

  1. Scott Rafer
    February 19, 2008

    I agree with the conclusion but came to it differently. I think the “My company is just a feature, and I think that’s OK,” is a Web2 thing. Consumer broadband made it economically viable. I’m starting to advise another EU company, whose name will remain quiet for brief time. Here’s the response I suggested they send to one of the big EU VCs who had that exact critique:

    We think that the current players, including us, are missing a large, disruptive opportunity in [redacted]. We’re all being very Web1.0 and widgets-for-their-own-sake about it. The large opportunity is to treat [redacted] as shared social media and create the tectonic shift in our area that flickr did in photosharing and last.fm in music sharing.

    It means that:
    – yes, we care about a small set of features to the exclusion of a “solution” by the traditional definition.
    – broad usage is more critical to us than attracting users to our particular destination site.
    – vertical market targeting will happen but after we see what segments organically take up our new offer.
    – we’ve figured out how to put off fundraising until after the summer and are now figuring out what milestones we need to hit before that time.

    I created this cleaned up text from my initial private version to the founder:

    wow is [this VC] in for a rude awakening. single product companies are
    the only decent early-stage investments and destination sites are a
    terrible idea. we haven’t yet chatted about how the directory gets
    syndicated but pls put it on the agenda for wednesday.

  2. Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten
    February 19, 2008

    Thanks Scott for sharing that. Made me VERY curious too about who you are talking to…

  3. Scott Rafer
    February 19, 2008

    as intended, boris, as intended.

  4. jansegers
    February 20, 2008

    Simple things tend to grow organically into complex ones. I think this is due to the flexibility of them to adapt based on bottom-up input feedback loops.

    Top-down reorganisation fails very often, bottom-up reshuffling is much less costly and generally more efficient.

    del.icio.us , shoulddothis.com , sellaband.com , flipfact.com, kiva.org and others are also based on rethinking and simplicity…

    More recent examples are hellotxt.com, instapaper.com and babl.nl .

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