[raw_anon_1111]

Isn’t this exactly the problem that Joel Spolsky wrote about a quarter of a century ago?

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/03/23/strategy-letter-iv...

A lot of software developers are seduced by the old “80/20” rule. It seems to make a lot of sense: 80% of the people use 20% of the features. So you convince yourself that you only need to implement 20% of the features, and you can still sell 80% as many copies.

Unfortunately, it’s never the same 20%. Everybody uses a different set of features.

[shawabawa3]

Trello was a successful product despite having way less than 20% of jira's features

[raw_anon_1111]

And there are hundreds if not thousands of Show HNs and YC funded companies that have disappeared in a whimper trying to be the “smaller lightweight version of $x”

[swat535]

They can fail for any reason and it’s not always for not having enough features..

MVPs shouldn’t have 100% of features, they need to be small, get feedback and iterate.

[raw_anon_1111]

The old cliche “you only get one chance to make a good first impression”. If you don’t have the features I need when I first look at it, why would I pay for it or think about it again?

[conductr]

> and you can still sell 80% as many copies.

This is the key to that quote. If you resolve to selling less, you can still have a multimillion dollar product. If you resolve to it being a billion dollar product, then yeah you need every thing for everyone.

[raw_anon_1111]

The quote is taken out of context, he’s arguing just the opposite. Everyone has a different 20% and that 20% is an overlapping Venn diagram. It’s almost impossible to find the “right” 20%.

It’s just like the RAD tools - or Java or any of the other cross platform frameworks - there is always something that you need to use that the vendor doesn’t support.

[conductr]

There is no “right”. You build what you want based on what product vision or user pattern you’re aware of and you sell that. You can still build a healthy sized business on it if you tap into the right niche and have gotten close enough.

This space specifically is tough. Figma and adobe products are similarly cheap.

[raw_anon_1111]

And you still for B2B SaaS have to worry about:

1. Where does this fit in Gartner’s Magic Square? No one ever got fired for buying Salesforce/ServiceNow/Workday/well known company

2. “What if I don’t need feature $y now. But I might need it in the future?”

3. “Everyone in my industry already knows how to use $x, so it will be easier to onboard new employees. Even if they don’t know it, there are courses available”

In today’s world for any SaaS to be taken seriously, it has to have Slack/Teams integration and SSO logins with the company’s IDP - there is an industry standard so if you support one, it’s relatively painless to support all of them. So what is your enterprise sales story - even for small startups?

Even if you work at a company that gives everyone a yearly stipend to get almost anything they want that will improve their work, you still have to get approval for any tool where the company’s info is sent to a third party.

These are all things that most people don’t think about when they want to turn their passion product into a business

[conductr]

This is being built by a single dev. He only needs a couple thousand users to likely make this a meaningfully successful product to him. You guys are really blowing this out of proportion if you think there’s no room for stuff like this. There’s tons of potential users out there. His challenge will be reaching them but it’s totally possible he’s on to something decent here. Even if he shuns enterprise altogether. If he’s solved this problem in a way that is simplistic and approachable then he’s maybe onto something. Pro designer likely are not his target user.

I’m not making assessments of whether it is or not, but it sure as hell could be. There’s room for all this and he can choose to add features or choose to stay feature light.