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Otherwise known as feature creep. Start with making one thing better than anyone else has done. You're not going to be another Facebook, they've already have a

Otherwise known as feature creep. Start with making one thing better than anyone else has done. You're not going to be another Facebook, they've already have a ten year head start.

jpmoyn 8y ago
This certainly isn't "otherwise known as feature creep", and you don't necessarily need to do one thing better than anyone else has done. All you need to do is find an opportunity, and grow from there. The point he is making is not that you will be the next facebook, but that if you start with a small, possibly non scalable idea that works, who knows what it could turn into. And maybe its better to do this than to try to penetrate the market with big picture bullshit.
- overcast 8y ago
  So basically not building a ton of features, and sticking to something small? All cleared up!
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
mikekchar 8y ago
On the other hand, it might be easy to beat Facebook -- they have 10 years momentum locking them in to a particular course. But the key is that you won't beat Facebook by building the exact same thing that Facebook is building. You have to build something more focused. You have to throw away all the cruft that they've built up over 10 years and identify the core value. There were impossible to beat spread sheets before Excel, impossible to beat word processor before Word, impossible to beat drawing programs before Illustrator (er... I don't know if that's actually the popular thing right now...) Those loosing applications were loosing customers well before feature parity in their rivals. That's really the secret in competing against the established competition: don't build the parts of their app that suck, and spend a lot more time perfecting the parts that are great than the behemoth can justify. Work with the rifle like precision of a team of 10, rather than the shotgun like vagueness of a team of 1000. Know what's important, what's not and concentrate on execution.

Otherwise known as feature creep. Start with making one thing better than anyone else has done. You're not going to be another Facebook, they've already have a ten year head start.

jpmoyn 8y ago

This certainly isn't "otherwise known as feature creep", and you don't necessarily need to do one thing better than anyone else has done. All you need to do is find an opportunity, and grow from there. The point he is making is not that you will be the next facebook, but that if you start with a small, possibly non scalable idea that works, who knows what it could turn into. And maybe its better to do this than to try to penetrate the market with big picture bullshit.

overcast 8y ago
So basically not building a ton of features, and sticking to something small? All cleared up!

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

mikekchar 8y ago

On the other hand, it might be easy to beat Facebook -- they have 10 years momentum locking them in to a particular course. But the key is that you won't beat Facebook by building the exact same thing that Facebook is building. You have to build something more focused. You have to throw away all the cruft that they've built up over 10 years and identify the core value. There were impossible to beat spread sheets before Excel, impossible to beat word processor before Word, impossible to beat drawing programs before Illustrator (er... I don't know if that's actually the popular thing right now...) Those loosing applications were loosing customers well before feature parity in their rivals. That's really the secret in competing against the established competition: don't build the parts of their app that suck, and spend a lot more time perfecting the parts that are great than the behemoth can justify. Work with the rifle like precision of a team of 10, rather than the shotgun like vagueness of a team of 1000. Know what's important, what's not and concentrate on execution.