What Furnishing an Empty Apartment Teaches Us About Feature Requests
I’ve had the privilege for two years of being part of an AlphaLab alumni panel that takes questions from the newly selected class. One of the questions I hear over and over again is about product features. First-time entrepreneurs and “I can build basically anything” hackers both struggle with identifying and prioritizing features in order to deliver something substantial within the small pocket of time between now and Demo Day. The answer has always been the same: Listen to your users. But entrepreneurs often cite Henry Ford as saying, “If I had asked my customers what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse.”
Well, let’s come back to Earth and realize that we’re building online software and not the future of transportation. Most of us have a practical problem we are trying to solve, full of just enough innovation to potentially be a success (a lucky few are creating something truly amazing). Innovation does come from individual thinking (the “aha” moment), but listening to customers is the only way you can understand what they need in the first place. We’ll never know, but perhaps if Ford never heard someone complain about the inefficiency of buying horses, watching them get old and slow, and then dying, we’d be trotting to the grocery store today.
While I’ve written about this subject in the past, the focus of that article was more on prioritizing features, and not how to use customer feedback to drive early product development. This article focuses on uncovering essential product features by leveraging the intelligence of your customers. So, when you have no product, and just a dream of the solution, how do you pull back from that dream and leverage your early users to help you identify what’s essential?
My answer is you treat early feature requests as if you’re furnishing an empty apartment.
How to Create a Great Startup Office Space on a Bootstrap Budget
Four weeks ago The Resumator outgrew my home office and “forced” me to look for office space. I am beginning to bring on part-time help and needed an office space so we could collaborate, plus the business needed to feel more “real”—this is a hard concept to explain but what happens in your house can sometimes feel more like a hobby. Now let me tell you, I do not have some big VC investment to dole out for Aeron chairs and a sheet metal version of our logo for the wall. Hell, I wouldn’t even want to spend that kind of money even if I had it. This all said, I come from a design background, and that means I am used to energetic work spaces that fly in the face of the conventional cubed world that corrals so many corporate employees worthy of our sympathy. A great space is a great recruiting tool. Here’s how I created what I feel is an energetic office space for basically no cost at all.
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