One thing I realised recently is when you have traction, this is a much easier problem to deal with. Everyone keeps hounding you for improvements and you prune

One thing I realised recently is when you have traction, this is a much easier problem to deal with. Everyone keeps hounding you for improvements and you prune these requirements to increase utility and demand. So its critical that you find a good sponsor/client in the early days. One that you have easy access to and you work together with until your product gets to the point where its utility is obviously apparent to new clients. And work it from there. When your working with your first client they will inevitably drag you down into the small details (improve this/ make this). I call these the "meh" features. What you need to do is focus on analysing the underlying reason why they want the "meh" features and work on eradicating that reason. If you crack it, you get a "wow" feature. And that brings traction. For example, we designed a financial platform for schools in a developing country. Finance operations in schools is complex with varying chains of manual processes. Our "meh" features were digitising these processes, improving each individual task. Our "wow" feature was to completely automate the end-end process for a small subset of schools with similar requirements. Instead of making their tasks easier, we just completely removed the need to do them. After that it was pretty apparent what we had to do.