Comments on: Is This a Feature OR a Company?

By: jansegers

jansegers — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 08:08:22 +0000

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 .

By: Scott Rafer

Scott Rafer — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 16:12:33 +0000

as intended, boris, as intended.

By: Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten

Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 16:06:10 +0000

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

By: Scott Rafer

Scott Rafer — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 00:27:04 +0000

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.