Do More Faster: TechStars Lessons to Accelerate Your Startup

Chapter 41. Quality over Quantity

Andy Smith

Andy is the co-founder and CEO of DailyBurn, the premier fitness social network for detailed tracking, online accountability, and motivation. DailyBurn raised $500,000 from angel investors after completing TechStars in 2008. They were acquired by IAC in 2010.

Feature creep. The sound of those words should scare you to death.

If you are a technical founder, please listen carefully: You don't need to build a bunch of new features to make your startup successful. Trust me, I know.

Both of the founders of DailyBurn (we were called Gyminee while we were at TechStars) are technology geeks. Naturally, our instinct is to always look at our product, see what is missing, and then try to quickly build the next killer feature that will magically get all of our users to convert to paying users. It's a problem facing all startups, but especially startups that are filled with developers.

Most technical founders have the skills to quickly build a ton of features. It isn't hard for us to bang out some code and get the thing up and running on the web site within hours. But many of these features don't matter and often detract from the product.

So what is the secret behind building useful, meaningful features?

First, focus on ease of use. Your site and your new features have to be very easy to use and graphically appealing. If you try to rush out a ton of features, ...