Richard Hart

Head of Something @ Somewhere
Kent, UK

My Music
My Photos

LinkedIn
Mastodon

Trying to be feature rich makes you feature poor

People setting out to build a webapp are often desperate to fill it with as many features as possible. They look at Facebook and see all the things it does, they read about some other hot “start-up” that just got bought and see all the the things they offer and immediately think they have to do the same. To anyone doing this, just stop. Stop right now. You’re going to kill yourself before you’ve even had a chance to get going. It’s like watching an F1 driver and thinking all you need to do is get in an F1 car, practice and you’ll be as good. What you don’t see is the the whole back story. The humble beginnings. The days when there was just one main feature on the site. The days when nothing worked and things hung together by a thread.

If you want to create a successful webapp, do just one thing. Then when you do that thing well, move on to the next and the next and the next. Don’t do everything at once. You’ll never get anything done.