Recently I’ve been working on reporting tools for The Resumator. I’ve learned non-profits that receive government funds above a certain amount must collect voluntary sex, race and disability data from applicants, and report this to the government. This told me that collecting equal employment opportunity (EEO) data would basically be a deal maker or deal breaker for many .orgs looking for an resume management system. Five months later, it’s just now about to be released. There’s a lesson here.

When prioritizing the features that you want to dedicate time to, you should focus on features that are deal makers and deal breakers. If you get caught up implementing features that are no big deal, you’re just wasting precious time and precious early-stage resources. It’s sort of like an airplane pilot checking that the window shades are all up while taking off from a short runway.

When you’re an early stage startup, and you don’t have the luxury of war chest of cash from a recent VC round, you should generally have these financial goals at the top of your operational plan:

• Getting the first revenues
• Getting to break even revenues

Notice I did not even mention making a profit. You can’t be concerned with profit until you can cover the bills, so don’t even put it in your early stage operational plan. Now, this means that your team should focus on features that get customers to sign up and pay. If your driving well-qualified traffic to your website, and your web app does not have the features that these ready buyers need, that will be seen in a cringe-worthy “Bounce Rate” or “Avg. Time on Site”.

In general, you can think of features as falling into one of these categories:

• Deal breaker – This is a must-have feature that will close the sale because it is essential to the customer, and quite possible required in order for them to operate. Most features will fall in this category. They’re not innovative. They’re table stakes.
• Deal maker – This is your secret sauce, or at least your creative take on a problem. It separates you from your competitors. It’s a feature that is unexpected and exciting at the same time. It gets people excited and ready to sign up. These features get you press, interviews and buzz. They’re very, very rare.
• No big deal – This feature is a nice-to-have or maybe just something you’d like to get off your task list. It will not be a factor in a customer deciding to buy your product. Often these features are the fun or easy stuff (customized colors!), which is why we get caught up on developing them.

Let’s focus on deal breaker features, because I have no way of helping you identify deal maker features. Here’s some examples of popular web apps, and what I think would have been deal breaker features, and features that are no big deal—at the time the product launched. That’s not to say the features are not valuable—remember we are talking about early-stage companies and prioritizing features:

All of these companies did a good job prioritizing at least the features mentioned above. They’ve probably done a good job prioritizing other features as well, as their traffic is good. I have made some good decisions for my product, but here’s the examples where I failed to prioritize with The Resumator:

• I implemented custom CSS for job boards when I should have implemented automated resume parsing for manual resume uploads. Businesses and recruiters hate to type in all the contact information just to upload a resume.
• I implemented resume flow charting when I should have expanded the resume search form to allow more granular searches. Both are valuable but the resume search still has not been expanded and people are asking for it.
• I updated my marketing website many times before implementing reporting tools. This is the deal maker that has been lagging behind for months. I could kick myself!

Once I implement the deal breaker reporting feature, I’m going to hit non-profits real hard. If my hunch is correct, with my pricing and features, I can snag a decent number of customers in this category. Hopefully, the fact that I waited five months to implement the deal breaker reporting feature will actually become no big deal in the long run.