feature velocity is a moat. features are not.
Most products aren’t unique. Not entirely anyway. There may be only a handful of ways to solve certain problems, so competing products often start to look, feel, and sound like one another.
You find yourself saying things like “We’re like XX, but with YY.”
Some features are must-haves. So we all have them. What then becomes a real differentiator in the market?
Brand? Yeah. Brand will only get more important as AI makes more tools feel anonymous.
Availability? Yup. This is changing quickly with localization being so easy now.
Unique features? Sure. For a moment while competitors build fast follows.
Believing these features in and of themselves are a moat is a trap.
This quote is from Rob Walling in his book The SaaS Playbook. He also talks about how big competitors can be slow to roll out new features.
So speed becomes an important lever. Do customers feel like they have the best tool on the market right now? I think you can give them that feeling with fast dev cycles.
It’s more than just speed, though.
Speed — move fast and release things. This should be driven by both customer needs and keen product gut feel.
Quality — there’s no sense in releasing garbage. High quality is mandatory, not optional anymore. Bad UX leads people right to the door.
Cost — are new features included in what customers already have or is it an upgrade? There’s no sense in giving it all away, but there’s value in letting all pricing tiers have a taste.
Before anyone replies with the ol’ “there’s no such thing as cheap, fast, and high quality” I’m going to call BS on that now. You can have it all, my friend. In part because features don’t have to be gigantic things.
Size — size matters. Of course small teams aren’t going to release huge features every week. But small teams can release exciting little updates quickly, at high quality, and low cost.
It’s a trap I fall into a lot. I hear “Feature” with a capital F and think big monster of a thing. What if we focus on small f “features” instead?
How quickly can we release those? Can we build systems that ensure high quality? Can we do it in a way that adds more value to the product without costing us or our customers a boatload of money?
This is just me thinking through a competitive space we’re in. We get compared to a few products regularly and I’ve heard myself say “We’re like XX, but with YY” and “No we don’t have that feature, but we do have this one” too many times.
Being tuned in to what customers need and being able to meet those needs quickly is a big advantage.
Stay speedy,
Peter
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