Pitfall #5 - shiny object syndrome
Thrash for the win.
👋 Howdy, Erik here. Welcome to the 5th edition of Early Product Pitfalls. Each week I bring founding teams at startups ⏳ 2-3 minutes on a not-so-obvious pitfall when building new things.
🕳The pit
You just had a great conversation with an investor, user, team member or advisor that prompted a new insight. Your growth goals are haunting you. You stop engineering in its tracks and pitch a feature that brings your new perspective to life.
🤖 What you might sound like
This is the feature that will fix our retention.
I’m sorry everyone, but this is a startup. Things are going to change fast.
👀 You, knowing better …
You take a deep breathe, knowing full well that recency bias is coursing through your veins. Instead of enthusiastically pitching your new idea to folks who likely feel some pressure to agree, you take 15 minutes to clearly document the idea in a 1 pager.
Now you take a look at your roadmap with your team. It’s full of features that you, at one time, expected to be more valuable than the sum of their parts. They tree up to needle-moving high level objectives.
You ask yourself, “Does this new idea fit into our existing objectives? If not, is this new objective more important to prioritize?”
It might be. As an acid test, you think through the gates that early stage companies need to consider in a particular order:
Validate your product market fit hypotheses
Establish retention
Make retention more viral
🔦 Light for the dark
Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.
Mike Tyson
