The less you do - the better you do it.
Startup for pet owners offered food delivery, dog marketplace, and veterinarian services on-demand. $0 MRR for a year.
Founder came to me asking what other things they are missing. I said enough building. Time for selling. I had to find the easiest way to make money with what we have without spending another fortune on devs. I didn't believe in dog marketplace for this case. Messing with food delivery is complex and margins are low. That's why I believed it's best to focus on telehealth for pets part.
Why?
- huge queues to local veterinarians
- many pet owners are wealthy and have business to do
- wealthy people are ready to pay for saving time
We threw away 85% of features, turning it into the best app for getting pet prescriptions online. Less than 4 weeks in, founder closed 4 sales with clinics and oboarded more users than in entire year.
Do less, make more.
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Yeah. Easy to say but difficult to do, specially for technical founders 😂. We always think that the more we add features, the better our product will be
Thanks a lot for the advise. You are absolutely right. Especially at the beginning it is better to focus on few things
Tech founder CEO here. Adding features is completely useless until you get your MVP right. Trust me!
I wish we didn't have to kill 3 products to learn it the hard way :)
True!
Well said, always be doing less, but making sure what little you do is focused on the right idea or product. People I know are always doing long marathons of work, context-switching between different projects and ideas, and I think that is less effective then just doing a bit each day and have the work focused on one activity or goal. When a person has multiple goals, it's hard to do all of them well. At best you will do only a few of them decent and a few others will suffer dramatically. It's better, I think, to always be exception at one thing than mediocre at a few things.
Do less, make more. Love this as it reminds me of the book: 'small is beautiful'
Glad to hear! What are your top 3 books from the last few years?
How about you? Top 3 books from the last few years?
I read the one thing too, it's one of the best! Hooked is good too.
You should check out The Hard Thing About Hard Things, you'll enjoy it.
Cool post Denis! I like the idea of doing less to give yourself the space you need to do it better. But in this example, even though there were things you had to throw away (i.e. features), surely you had to add new features to accommodate the new functionality of the app, no? Also, given the re-brand, how did you go about positioning the new version of the product to a new audience? Thanks for sharing - really interesting experience.
The product was over coded (many features, no users). It took founder's team less than a week to add missing components.
Funnily, there was nothing extraordinary about new positioning! Before working with me founder was trying to serve 3 markets at once. When you're "ok" for everyone - nobody buys from you.
When you come to people and say you have a pill to their pain - they just buy! "Look, you sounds like X hurts you. Our product gets you from X to Y. Are you interested?"
Imagine your leg hurts. Would you buy a pill that prevents you from leg pain, head ache and flu or the one that's called "eat this leg painkiller and your leg won't hurt"? Took me a few startups to understand the answer :)