There is always one more feature for success.

Original author: Andy Brice
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DiggingI advise start-up entrepreneurs of small IT businesses and have noticed that these entrepreneurs have something in common. For example, the belief that their product is distinguished from well-deserved commercial success is separated only by a lack of just one feature. They think that as soon as they make this feature, sales will immediately flow like a river. Well, if they don’t flow, maybe it’s because of that other feature that they don’t have, but which competitors have.


It’s like a horizon to which you can move until you run out of money or interest disappears. I can say from my own experience that weak sales are almost always due to insufficient promotion. This is a fact that is confirmed by research.(eng.). It doesn't matter how good your product is if no one knows about it or you cannot persuade people who find out about the product to try it.

It is not surprising that small IT business owners are obsessed with features. Such entrepreneurs usually start with a study of programming, and learn how to progress along the way. I have yet to meet the one who started with marketing, and then learned to program. Features and programming are what we like most of all and it is these classes that seem to be “real work”. But all too often, the soft hugs of your favorite IDE are just excuses for not leaving your comfort zone. Of course, features are important. No features - no product. But if your site has low traffic and / or you do not really manage to communicate with those who come to your site, then increasing the number of features will not help much. If you are in a hole - stop digging. To successfully promote a product is to be unlike competitors. The absence of features can even be presented as a virtue. If your competitors have more features, then focus on the simplicity and accessibility of your product. For 37Signals, a similar approach seems to work.

Marketing can show alien knowledge to the developer, but you can learn it just like any other skill. There is enough information on this subject. For example, Marketing for computer engineers from Eric Sink(eng.). In addition, some elements of online marketing are actually quite technological. There is where to tinker with numbers. Analytics, split testing and Adwords will give you more data than you can digest. This can give developers a significant advantage compared to those who studied marketing, since most of the latter cannot seem to master anything more complicated than a 2 by 2 matrix. You do not need to be a marketing genius, you only need to be better than your competitors. It’s like a lion’s attack: you don’t need to be able to run faster than a lion in order to survive, just run faster than the rest. Given that your competitors are most likely also developers (who probably don’t do enough promotion) or marketers (who really don’t understand the program, and probably

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