#64 - Common Startup Mistakes: Broad Platform Plays from Day One
Features...Products...Platforms... They aren't the same thing.
Tl;dr — remaining focused is key for early-stage companies. You should spend most of your energy innovating at the altitude that the moment requires…not on refining your pipe dream.
One of the most common mistakes a startup can make is trying to do too much, too early.
It’s completely logical that this pitfall is so common. Here’s how:
Person has idea for a startup, because it solves a problem they have. Let’s say it’s a … point-of-sale system (a.k.a. checkout machine) for coffee shops
They think no one else is doing this (…btw highly unlikely: someone else has almost certainly already tried to do whatever they’re thinking about)
They start building some kind of product (most people fail here btw…because they never finish building. I’ve gotten held up here multiple times)
Then they start talking to potential customers (“prospects”) about it
Prospect 1 says: I really want to be able to see my projected revenue for the week
Prospect 2 says: I want to be able to get replacement baristas in quickly in case someone is sick
Prospect 3 says: I’ll use you if you have a feature to predict coffee input prices
Prospect 4 says: I’ll use it if you have an integration with liquor distributors
Etc. etc.
Most founders / founding teams will look at this and start adding things to their product backlog. “YES, that’s a GREAT idea!” or “Let me come back to you in two weeks and show you what it could look like…” are the kinds of things you might hear them say to a prospect, but I think this is such a mistake for most founders.
The problem isn’t taking feedback — you should take feedback, you should note what prospects / customers are asking for. The problem is when you don’t have a clearly defined “box” that you stay within, and that feedback leads you to add on or try so many things that you start to lose what makes the original idea special.
In other words, there’s a very thin line between enhancing your existing idea or just plain changing it.
And because early-stage startups are really, in a word, experiments, you should strive to actually maintain some kind of coherent experimental structure… Controlling variables, and avoiding adding in too many confounding factors.
This is something I’ve had to work on over the years, especially coming from the world of huge companies where “platform plays” are the move. And to be clear, this way of thinking oftentimes makes sense for Microsoft/Google/Apple, where they NEED to see many many billions of dollars of revenue to pursue a space, which usually means owning a platform.
Ah, maybe I should define my language here…Let’s go with this hierarchy:
Features: very specific functions (e.g., logging in to an app)
Products: collections of features that fuse together to create value for a user (e.g., Instagram Threads — many features stack on top of each other to deliver this holistic experience)
Platforms: collections of products that come together to address a lifecycle of needs (e.g., Microsoft Teams)
Teams is full of so many other features and products that you almost never need to leave it for the use case of “Work”
For the use case of Food, Uber Eats is a platform — they have:
Drivers delivering food. They use the driver app
People ordering food. They use the consumer app
Payments features
Review features
Map / food discovery features
Tipping features
etc. etc.
Many startups begin with a vision of building platforms. This is totally fine, especially if you realize that winning platforms typically aren’t built in a year, and that your original end vision is almost certain to change over time.
More startups should help their teams maintain hyper focus on things that are right in front of them — products. Building products people love. If you do that many times in one space, eventually you’ll earn the right to build platforms.
And while I certainly love to dream of platforms, the future is made in the day-to-day building of products… And good products are dialed into a thoughtfully-chosen set of personas / users. They’re not built for everyone; they’re built for specific types of people who have specific needs.
One reminder I’m giving to myself these days frequently is to: innovate at the altitude that the moment requires.
Most moments require you to get very granular things done…or to complete “projects.” Focusing on how to do the things right in front of you better is where victory starts to happen. Example: finding a new way to tune your customer outreaches, or a new way to position one of the features within the product you’re building.
Some moments require you to dream big and to think about what things might look like five years from now. It can be helpful to think about this, and to consider what you might do to create that future you want. Example: dreaming about the future of mobility when flying cars are more ubiquitous… and dreaming of building the next gen “electricity station” where you land way up in the sky, and while you charge your favorite local coffee shop is making your latte. This is not happening right now!!
Recognizing the differences in these two things will allow you to remain focused and deliver high-quality thinking + outcomes