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Ask PG: Feature or Business Question from Investors
What does it mean when an investor asks: Is this a feature or a business?
- deleted 18y ago[deleted]
- pg 18y agoThey're saying that a) they worry you don't have sufficient potential, and b) they are not very smart. The reason it's a sign the investor isn't very smart is that there's no real distinction. There are a lot of impressive startups (e.g. Twitter) that could have been called mere features when they started. So all anyone accusing you of being a feature is really saying is that you're small, which you both already know.
- justinsb 18y agoThey're asking where you're going with the company, without wanting to get drawn into incremental improvements. Say you built a website that analyzed your social graph on facebook and showed you who your most connected/least connected friends were. Suppose you stopped there, or started iterating on more metrics (who's added the most friends in the last week?): then your website feels like a feature, and not a long-term business; it's too easy for facebook to implement the same feature set if you ever generate cash. But, if you can explain how this feature is just a trojan horse, and you're going to go across social networks, or introduce a dating service, or implement some sort of real-world trust/recommendation system, somehow building long term value and competitive advantage; then you look more like a business. They're just asking how you plan to get there, or just to help them understand ways that you could get there.