Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten

The Internet Entrepreneur

Is This a Feature OR a Company?

February 19, 2008 at 12:07 am (0:07)
Filed under Business, Business Theory, Developing, Innovation, Inspiration, Personal

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.

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4 Comments »

Scott Rafer said,

February 19, 2008 @ 1:27 am (1:27)

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.
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten said,

February 19, 2008 @ 5:06 pm (17:06)

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

February 19, 2008 @ 5:12 pm (17:12)

as intended, boris, as intended.
jansegers said,

February 20, 2008 @ 9:08 am (9:08)

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 .