[pfarrell]

I learned something similar founding a startup. If I could do it again, I would have aggressively avoided pursuing the table stakes feature in our space. Instead we should have done the minimal amount to be comfortable that our architecture could support the enterprisey things. We should have then concentrated everything on something that would set us apart, something we could demo and get a “wow… I see where this could go” instead of something like “oh this is just a clone of x”.

[wrs]

I sort of see your point, but you’re misusing the term “table stakes”, which by definition are what you have to put up to play at all. It sounds like you would implement the table stakes features, but not go farther with the “normal” extensions. The strategy being to get a callback with the exciting features, and have the table stakes features that let you avoid being vetoed for missing something essential.

[pfarrell]

Yeah that’s pretty much what happened. What I was thinking was we over estimated what the table stakes were. We were building a collaborative SQL editor aka notebooks. We spent way too much time getting it working with different dbs instead of focusing on a couple and building the things that actually made us stand out. A single customer wouldn’t really care about all the dbs we could talk to that were the one she was using.

[allknowingfrog]

I don't disagree, but I also hear "table stakes" used more often as a hand-wavy justification for a feature list than as a genuine, informed evaluation of customer demand. This seems to align with the sentiment of the parent comment. At some point, "common usage" become unassailable, no matter how much it irks me.

[Xcelerate]

If I understand you correctly, you’re saying implement the bare minimum for enterprise customers—whatever their leadership requires to do business with you—but beyond that, forget about those features and focus on something very novel that sets you apart from the competition?

[AnimalMuppet]

If you're just like the competition, you lose, because you're more of an unknown. If you want to win business, you have to have something that your established competitors do not. (And, of course, it has to be something that your customers want, not just some random thing.)

[lelanthran]

> If you're just like the competition, you lose, because you're more of an unknown.

That sword cuts both ways.

The reason the competition in a field has converged on all the same features, all looking the same and acting the same is because they were all shaped by the same market forces: that's what the businesses wanted!

If a potential client looks at your product and it doesn't look like a duck, doesn't talk like a duck and doesn't walk like a duck, they're going to assume that it's not a duck.

I've pitched a fairly simple product (still iterating on it so not sharing details) that had some extra features (not AI) to a business, and the business eventually went with a more expensive competing product, with my contact at the place explaining "The stakeholders feel that your product is for a slightly different use-case."

Yes, my product did have all the features of the competition. The added feature was low-code extensibility for the backend API. The business interpreted the API-extending-mechanism as "Something only big companies would use", not "Something we can ignore if we don't use".

Now, fair enough, this is absolutely an outlier - in most cases extensibility is regarded favourably. But, in this edge-case the audience came away with the primary impression of "Great Development Tool", not "Great User Product"[1].

Humans still have this notion that a thing has a primary purpose and multiple secondary purposes, and they'll absolutely go with the product that has, as it's primary purpose, satisfying their need, even if some other product's secondary purpose also satisfies their need.

[1] And yes, this was a failure of the pitch. For future pitches, I'll tailor to the audience, highlighting their needs and ignoring anything that the product does which isn't in their list of needs.

[Qwertious]

>The reason the competition in a field has converged on all the same features, all looking the same and acting the same is because they were all shaped by the same market forces: that's what the businesses wanted!

By this logic, we all want AI. We're screaming out for Microsoft/Amazon/Google to make all their services AI-driven.

I'm sure some customers do want AI, but mostly it's their investors.

[lelanthran]

> By this logic, we all want AI.

With AI, specifically, it's way too early to say that products with AI in it were shaped by market forces.

It takes years for the forces of the market to have an effect on what the product looks like:

1. Purchasers have to make poor purchases, which isn't known until years later.

2. Sellers have to get feedback from rejections to determine what to refine, and how, which also takes years for most products.

3. Sellers have to run out of money when ignoring the signals, which also takes years.

So, sure, maybe extra AI in $PRODUCT isn't wanted by the majority of people, but we won't actually know what forces the market for $PRODUCT is exerting until much later than 2024.

EDIT: web3 was so obviously unwanted, and yet it took about 4 years for that to reflect. It is not so clear about AI, so we can expect that to take longer to establish.

[pfarrell]

That’s what I was trying to express. We implemented the features that were unique and interesting too late. We should have led with them and build some compelling demos

[michaeljx]

Kind of like what the iPhone did when they launched without copy-pasting, and a very underwhelming gsm radio

[pfarrell]

Yeah, that original iPhone launch keynote is something I like to watch every so often. It really emphasized we’re only doing this because we see what’s wrong with smartphones and this is our vision. They didn’t go “we made the best stylus you can have”.