When you start a business in Silicon Valley, you inevitably run across people who are interested in your business because they want to sell you something or they want to invest in you. This takes up maybe 10-15% of my time these days — the networking is actually hard work for me but it’s usually satisfying. I’ve met a lot of cool people and it’s been really fun this time around. When I first started a business in 1999, the opportunities for networking weren’t nearly as good as they are in the valley today. I find advice, feedback and encouragement from all kinds of people — even ones that don’t get what we’re trying to do at the moment — to be vital.
One meme that keeps coming up with respect to the site I’m running now is the notion that “this feels more like a feature” (as opposed to a “product,” which is what you’re supposed to be aspiring to). I’ve heard this phrase two or three times out of the literally hundreds of people I’ve pitched my site to over the past few months. My brain kicks into obsessive-analytical mode when I hear it — not because vague, unactionable feedback isn’t welcome (snork), but because something at the heart of “this feels like a feature” seems untrue or illogical or ill-informed. Having been a product manager at a couple of companies, I wanted to apply my product management superpowers to determine exactly what might be meant by “product” versus “feature” in this context.
I develop and run a web site which is sparse and simple by design. We spend a lot of time adding features to the site each week, but we also spend a considerable amount of time sanding down rough edges and deprioritizing features, which in some ways is more difficult. Often people say that my site “feels like a feature,” sometimes before they’ve even used it (which I find doubly maddening). The phrase itself (starting with the word “feels”) necessarily implies that you have to experience it to have an opinion on it, and at the end of the day what you feel about it just that — your feeling or your opinion.
There are some harmful, even toxic, implications for “feels like a feature.” I suspect that “this feels like a feature” is the reason why applications like Microsoft Word wind up with 50,000 useless and poorly-conceived features. But nobody wants their product to be perceived as a feature, so they work hard to bog it down in complexity and cruft instead of focusing their energy in making it simpler, easier to use, better integrated, more open, and less obtrusive.
My suspicion is that when someone says “this feels more like a feature than a product” they really mean:
- I don’t understand where you’re going with this.
- Your product is trivial. It is something that my 12-year-old kid could hack together in a weekend.
- I don’t feel like there’s a viable business here.
#1 is very difficult to get around, particularly when you’ve only got 30 seconds to pitch your product/feature and the person you’re talking to has a cocktail in their hand and Donna Summer is blasting in the background.
#2 is also difficult to get around, particularly since most of the people who feel qualified to say “this feels more like a feature” have never actually put together a web site (or a web business, which is much more difficult to do). So they ultimately don’t know first-hand whether something really is trivial or not.
#3 is where a visionary entrepeneur can really go to town, because it lets you compete against the personal perception of someone who is trying to see the future. As a former co-worker once said, “if I could forsee future, I’d be a wealthy man.”
As many venture capitalists are fond of saying, “the market bats last”. “The market bats last” is one of many glib chestnuts of the VC world, but I happen to love it because it implies that you can hire a roomful of hypothetically clairvoyant Harvard MBAs who are then quickly and convincingly proven wrong by a small team of hard-working nerds.
A side note: It can’t be the case that “products make money and features don’t.” Netscape Navigator was never seriously intended to be a money-making product; it was a loss-leader for other stuff like web server software. There were always questions as to whether Netscape could ever be a viable standalone business, but that didn’t stop it from attracting a metric buttload of venture dough from some of the supposedly smartest VCs in the valley. Yet nobody would have ever argued that Navigator was just a feature of Netscape Enterprise Server; there was always a perception that it was a “product”.
Linux (another exception that may or may not prove any rules) is another example of a free product that nobody would ever confuse with a lowly “feature”, even though there is certainly an ecosystem of for-profit businesses that have sprung up around it.
For the sake of argument let’s drill down deeper into what we might mean when we refer to thing as “products” and “features” based on some historical examples:
In the dark ages circa 1997, web search was not really a product, it was mainly a feature — it was something you built into your web site. The big search product at that time was AOL, which charged internet startups millions of dollars to own keywords within its formerly walled garden. So in 1997, web search — the multi-billion dollar engine that is driving the current wave of web innovation — was really not much more than a lowly feature. My suspicion is that there is at least one investor who had the opportunity to invest in Google in 1997 who passed on it because it seemed like a feature (just a second here — your business is based on one text box and two buttons…what the huh?). I’d be surprised to find an investor who would admit they passed on Google in 1997, but if they did, I bet it was at least partly because it then “felt like a feature”.
Using Google and Microsoft as examples is usually unconvincing since those are epoch-defining companies — they are their own huge ecosystems, so they don’t necessarily prove any points about the universe at large. But there are lots of other examples of why “this feels like a feature” isn’t a terribly logical way to evaluate a nascent business.
At one point in the history of the net, email was a feature (of the operating system). Now it’s a product in some places (see Thunderbird and GMail, although you could make the case that GMail is actually a feature of Google AdWords).v
The word processor (or the editor) used to be a feature of the operating system, then it became its own product for a while, and now it seems like it’s a little of both.
The venerable ZIP utility used to be a product, then it became a feature (of Windows XP). It remains to be seen whether a product like WinZip will survive in the face of commoditization now that ZIP is built into both Windows and the Mac, so the challenge for WinZip’s product managers is to figure out how to go back to being a product after having become a feature.
I am a huge believer in wikis, but the wiki always “felt like a feature” to me, and I am pretty sure that in time, the notion of openly editable pages with accessible hyperlinking as a workgroup productivity tool will come to be perceived as a feature rather than as a standalone product. That doesn’t prevent wiki companies from attracting venture dough or getting acquired, though.
Every video search product I’ve ever seen totally feels like a feature to me. At our house, I have painstakingly handcrafted a way to make YouTube a feature of our Tivo, and it’s the way we watch YouTube videos 90% of the time. (Tivo recently announced that they’re building this feature into their service, which will be terrific.) So does this mean that Google just paid $1.6 billion for something that will be relegated to “feature” status in a year? As a Tivo user and stockholder, I really hope so, because video is, and always has been, not a product, but a feature — a feature of the television. (Duh.)
And so on, and so on.
Now, as a counter-example, let’s imagine that you invented a product that somehow took over the HTML boldface tag and charged people money to use it. This seems less than trivial — it wouldn’t even qualify as a feature, really, because the boldface tag is meaningless without the rest of HTML, HTML isn’t relevant without content, and content it’s relevant without a way to deliver it — the browser. However, eBay makes boatloads of cash each year from charging sellers money for the boldface tag (they now charge $1 for boldface, which is a lot more than I remember it being when I worked there in 2003-2005). On the face of it, your first reaction might be, “they are really on to something there — that boldface thingie is the kind of feature I wouldn’t mind having as my business”. But then you realize that this really is a feature instead of a product, since to get people to pay you $1 for boldface you’d have to first build this big honking thing called eBay and attract millions of users.
My point is that there is more than one way to characterize a product, and that the “product” versus “feature” continuum has more to do with perception than reality — it has a lot to do with where your product or service fits into an ecosystem at a given moment in time and not a lot to do with how many flashing buttons or levers your product has.
But however you may happen to “feel” about a “product” at any given moment in time, the market bats last. You may think I have a feature and I may think I have a product, but if I can attract 100,000 users, you will probably concede that I have something at least vaguely product-ish. If users think there is value and utility there, they will come to the site and sign up and use it and invite their friends (and, if we’re lucky, we’ll be able to derive revenue from that), and by virtue of all that, what we’re doing will be perceived as a product rather than a feature.
I have this notion that there is a magic combination of features that we need to implement before we will get our site to 100,000 users. We know we’re on to something because people keep signing up for the site and inviting their friends, but we know we’re not done yet because people keep asking for new features. (I had a nice conversation with a guy last week who wants us to localize the site into Swedish. We are going to accomodate him, eventually, because frankly we love the Swedes.) And, interestingly enough, while we look at Swedish as a feature and not a product, we’re looking at localization itself as a product, something that we could provide as a compliment to the main site. Hopefully if we do this, it won’t “feel like a feature.” Stay tuned.
Update: Just revisited this post while doing some spring cleaning on the blog, and realized I hadn’t heard the “this feels like a feature” argument ever since Twitter came out. HMMMM.
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