Common Founder Issue
Anyone who’s ever launched the initial product for a startup knows the drill. The temptation is to add lots of features because you don’t know which will be most popular and your ultimate vision for the business is huge, so you might as well start on that big vision now.

The reality is that your small startup will only get big (with limited resources) if your customers really love that one thing that you do 10x better than anyone else in the world.

In practice this means distilling down your initial value proposition to one thing and launching as quickly as possible to validate your assumptions. Market apathy and running out of time are what typically kills startups, so move as quickly as you can to get a basic product out to figure-out if the world needs what you want. And if it doesn’t, you’ll have time to alter the business and try again.

Context
At this point in the podcast, Jay is asking Kathryn about how she progressed from being mostly content to developing a product.

If you are particularly interested in product, here are all my blog posts tagged "product." Enjoy!

Get Right To The Point
I’d recommend listening to this entire podcast, but to get right to the point go to minute 33:47 of this podcast.

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Thanks to these folks for helping us all learn faster
NextView Ventures (@NextViewVC)
Jay Acunzo (@Jay_zo) of NextView Ventures (@NextViewVC)
Kathryn Minshew (@kmin), co-founder and CEO The Muse (@dailymuse)
Paul Graham (@paulg) of YC (@ycombinator)

Please let me and others know what you think about this topic
Email me privately at dave@switchyards.com or let's discuss publicly at @davempayne.