October 2010
Beginner
352 pages
6h 11m
English
Content preview from Do More Faster: TechStars Lessons to Accelerate Your Startup
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Chapter 6. Forget the Kitchen Sink
David Cohen
David is the co-founder and CEO of TechStars.
I've seen "everythingitis" kill many a startup. This is the disease a startup gets when it sets out to add more features than the competition does. This is a fundamentally flawed strategy that presumes that users will adopt a new service just because it has more features. The reality is that most people use a particular service because it does one thing really, really well. Think about your own experiences and you'll understand that this is true.
I've been guilty of trying to solve problems by throwing in more and more features, including the kitchen sink. iContact[2] was the second startup that I founded and it had a serious case of everythingitis. I proudly told everyone that iContact did more than any other mobile social networking product that existed at the time. But the market said: "So what?" No one understood what iContact did better than anybody else in the world, including us. When it didn't take off, we made the fatal mistake of responding by adding more features (including several shiny new kitchen sinks) when we probably should have been removing them and focusing more on the few things that our users did like. iContact eventually died, and that's how I learned this lesson firsthand.
Several TechStars companies came in with a plan like "MySpace + FaceBook + YouTube + kitchen sink." ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.