Comment by devin
7 hours ago
In some ways it feels like exactly what you'd do if you wanted to tank your product over the coming years. I look back at the last 20 years or so, and what I see over and over is that one player in a space gets huge, keeps adding features, loses sight of what makes them a good market fit, and then 10 small upstarts swoop in to bring back the opinionated or simple view again. One or two win, and then eventually they repeat the same mistake.
I'm not trying to buy a labyrinth.
You described my observation of many products today extremely well!
One interesting care study is Posthog (I felt like it was a labyrinth; using your analogy) - primarily build in an age of LLMs, with a large investment and a large team behind it - it reached this stage:
> one player in a space gets huge, keeps adding features, loses sight of what makes them a good market fit
My first experience using their product (they had a generous free year for new startups) felt like exactly what the author describes. A collection of features.
I think it's just really hard to "not build a feature" and keep a product focused. Whether you're solo or a large team