Comment by raw_anon_1111
19 days ago
Isn’t this exactly the problem that Joel Spolsky wrote about a quarter of a century ago?
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/03/23/strategy-letter-iv...
A lot of software developers are seduced by the old “80/20” rule. It seems to make a lot of sense: 80% of the people use 20% of the features. So you convince yourself that you only need to implement 20% of the features, and you can still sell 80% as many copies.
Unfortunately, it’s never the same 20%. Everybody uses a different set of features.
Trello was a successful product despite having way less than 20% of jira's features
And there are hundreds if not thousands of Show HNs and YC funded companies that have disappeared in a whimper trying to be the “smaller lightweight version of $x”
They can fail for any reason and it’s not always for not having enough features..
MVPs shouldn’t have 100% of features, they need to be small, get feedback and iterate.
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> and you can still sell 80% as many copies.
This is the key to that quote. If you resolve to selling less, you can still have a multimillion dollar product. If you resolve to it being a billion dollar product, then yeah you need every thing for everyone.
The quote is taken out of context, he’s arguing just the opposite. Everyone has a different 20% and that 20% is an overlapping Venn diagram. It’s almost impossible to find the “right” 20%.
It’s just like the RAD tools - or Java or any of the other cross platform frameworks - there is always something that you need to use that the vendor doesn’t support.
There is no “right”. You build what you want based on what product vision or user pattern you’re aware of and you sell that. You can still build a healthy sized business on it if you tap into the right niche and have gotten close enough.
This space specifically is tough. Figma and adobe products are similarly cheap.
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