Do More Faster India, 2nd Edition

Chapter 8Forget the Kitchen Sink

David Cohen

David is the cofounder and Managing Partner 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. It is a fundamentally flawed strategy that presumes that users will adopt a new service or product just because it has more features. Most people use a particular service, product, or technology because it does one thing really, really well. For example, a lot of people use their computer just to access the Internet and browse, although the computer itself has far more power than most people will ever use. 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. iContact¹ 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. Basically, iContact was a mobile social network that solved the problem of knowing what your friends were up to—Foursquare before it existed. But the market said: “So what?” No one, including us, understood the one thing iContact did better than anybody else in the world. When it didn’t take off, we made the fatal mistake of responding by adding more features (including several shiny new kitchen sinks). In retrospect, we probably should ...