Hi everyone 👋🏻 My name is Evgeny, and I’m a systems analyst at Purrweb, a studio specializing in MVP design and development for startups. In my work, I often see founders wanting everything at once from their product. It’s rare to hear a client say, “Listen, I came up with this idea, but I thought it’d be better to start with a small set of features.” Though this approach is more reasonable, developing an unnecessary feature can still cost between $12,000 and $100,000.
In this article, I’ll explain why useless features appear in products and how you can test the success of an idea before and after its release.
Lack of confidence in the idea
Sometimes, a startup founder has a product concept but lacks confidence in it overall. The idea is fresh, but there’s no understanding of why people need it. As a result, the founder wants to make the app more attractive, not by analyzing the market and testing the hypothesis but by adding a million unnecessary features to at least hook the audience with something.
👉🏻 Anti-case from practice. Once, we were developing an app with courses for entrepreneurs. It was supposed to have lectures from coaches, psychologists, and energy practitioners.
The founder wanted to integrate a webinar platform which took a lot of money and time to develop. This could have been avoided since there are many external resources like Twitch or YouTube. Instead of spending several months on such a player, it was enough to add a button with a link to a playback format familiar to the audience.
A founder unsure about their business idea doesn’t fully understand why they need this or that feature. The main argument becomes, “Well, how can we launch the product without this?” It resembles an abstract idea you subconsciously don’t want to discuss with the target audience to avoid disappointment.
Four simple tips to help a startup founder analyze a business idea
Insufficient analysis
Sometimes, when launching a project, startup founders don’t talk to their target audience. They seem to have come up with the product idea, and brainstormed tech solutions but still don’t understand how and with what MVP will meet user needs. As a result, it turns out during development that the features invented don’t match user needs.
✅ To always choose the right features for development, I recommend using the Jobs To Be Done framework.
The essence is that people use any product for their purposes. In the JTBD framework, this is called “hiring for a job.” For example, some people “hire” Telegram to communicate with friends or colleagues, others to promote a business, etc. The key is to understand why the user will “hire” your app as a whole and each feature in it.
Simply put, any job can be described with this formula 👇🏻
When A happens + I do B + to achieve C + feeling D = the job
For example, [when] twice a year Natalia + [does] compiles her tax report + [to make sure] everything is in order + [feeling] extremely bored and frustrated.
This formula illustrates Natalia’s need to simplify tax reporting. If you incorporate all four components into the product, it’s more likely to find its target audience.
Every need we identify brings countless technical solutions. To decide which ones to develop, we consider two factors: deadlines and budget. Additionally, you can look at competitors and analyze their solutions.
Jobs To Be Done provides a clear perspective on user needs to offer the optimal solution.
Focusing on сompetitors
Startup founders often look at other counterparts, hoping to find something non-trivial, differentiate themselves from competitors, or appear cooler. But they don’t account for significant differences in audiences. Different living conditions, cultural backgrounds, and mentalities affect the IT products we use.
Sometimes, you see a competitor being successful, constantly implementing interesting features, getting positive App Store reviews, and investors discussing their product. But behind the facade, there’s often much more to discover.
The competitor’s apps may not be perfect, so a feature that seems great might not appeal to users.
👉🏻 Case from practice. A client wanted to create a social network for people interested in sports and streaming their exercises together. The idea was borrowed from Chinese competitors. But before launching, we needed to check how promising the idea was.
At Purrweb, we helped conduct research and found that the state segment wasn’t particularly interested in streaming their workouts. Instead, they struggled with how to exercise correctly and make progress. Consequently, we suggested an app where specially trained fitness coaches help with workouts. This saved the client $181,000 that the social network would have cost.
What to do if you want to borrow a feature from a competitor 👇🏻
✔️ Adapt it to your target audience. If you like a competitor’s feature, understand how and under what circumstances it will benefit your users.
For example, we once developed a premium-class dating app. Not just Tinder, but Tinder for the wealthy. The core of such products is the “match” feature, or finding a partner based on common interests. However, the needs of wealthy users differ.
Hypothesis: users enter the app not just to boost their self-esteem or browse profiles, but to find an interesting person to talk to or an equal partner. Hence, the matching mechanism will differ.
Tinder’s core is mutual swipes, but for this app, we came up with a more straightforward system. Women send the first message. Men receive a message with the profile info and can decide whether to accept or decline the request to chat. As a result, users save time on communication — they don’t have to browse through numerous profiles and wait hours for a message.
Pavel Durov managed to skillfully borrow some features from Western competitors for the Telegram messenger. He based it on the structure of a messenger: chat and calls, then enhanced it with author channels.
Trying to please management or investors
A startup can’t create an app in a vacuum, so there are often people around who exert pressure. For example, an investor or business partner insists on an unnecessary feature. You feel obligated to listen, but there’s a risk of doing something wrong, wasting the budget, or even burying the whole idea.
👉🏻 Anti-case from practice. We once developed a CRM system with training courses. The client’s investor strongly insisted on including a social network in the MVP version — with communities, posts, and comments. But the main flow didn’t appeal to the users, so no one used the groups and posts either.
Time and money were irrevocably lost on developing a social network (remember, it costs $181,000) that no one needed but fit beautifully into the investor’s strategic vision. It would have been wiser to test the MVP with training courses first and if successful, implement social media features.
Balance can be achieved with a competent product manager. They manage the backlog and understand the target audience. Moreover, they have a set of hypotheses agreed upon with investors and management and control the project budget.
If you don’t have a budget for a product manager yet, try to prioritize all technical solutions. The Project Management Triangle can help. Balancing time, money, and audience needs assurance that one person’s opinion doesn’t lead the product to a dead end.
How to test the success of a feature
✔️ Before development. Conduct audience research and maintain constant contact with them. Observe how their needs change, what interests people, and how they respond to ideas.
✔️ During MVP development. You can do a “pre-show” of the product like a movie director does after shooting. Test what’s already in the project and make changes quickly before the release.
The success of individual technical solutions can be conveniently checked using analytics systems like Google Analytics. You can see how often people click a certain button, move from one section to another, launch a chatbot, and so on. For this, you need a frontend developer and an analyst to install conversion counters and interpret the results correctly.
Can you make a feature just for the sake of it?
Yes, if you have a free budget, time, team resources, and the potential feature won’t complicate users’ lives. For example, you can add gamification elements, Easter eggs, or create a fun experience for users who encounter a bug. Like the dinosaur game in Google Chrome that opens when there’s no Internet connection.
Check out a few examples of these features 👇🏻
The task of the Easter egg in Google Chrome is to jump over cacti using the spacebar.
If you open a non-existent page in Discord and click on the snake poster, a childhood game will be launched.
Google sometimes makes references to search queries. For example, when searching for the Mars mission “Ingenuity”, Google might include playful elements or fun facts related to the mission.
