[Yardlink]

I joined a small company that had made this mistake horribly and many times over. The entire product was just a mess of half-baked incoherent features. It looked like many were put in to satisfy customer requests while others were just there to be able to say "It's got X!" without thought to the rest of the product. There were even two duplicated features in different places with different names. The worst part (well, best from my point of view) was that a lot of them didn't actually work correctly. They didn't have testing. That gave me license to chop a lot of it away with the justification of "If anyone was using this they would have told us it was broken. They didn't so they aren't. Get rid of it.". In those days we had feedback like "It's free and worth every penny". Now it's more like "I introduced it to my colleague and he was impressed, expect another sale soon". The feature set now is smaller than it was then, and looks less impressive when it's itemized, but what's left is more focused on a narrower type of user in one profession, more powerful and cleanly integrated into an elegant, usable product.

[dm2]

The concept of starting with an MVP is very important.

You're not going to build a better Facebook by adding more features than they have, the only way to do it would be to create a simpler platform and focus on the users who find your site the most useful (for Facebook it was college students, now it's families and old friends).

Just think if HN started to allow pictures in posts and comments or allowed a wider variety of posts (lolz look at my cat), the site would likely be ruined instantly. It would have also never been as popular as it is if it allowed these types of posts from the beginning.

There is also the method of adding that one feature that the big companies can't add, because it's one of their main sources of revenue. Look at DuckDuckGo, they started as a much simpler version of Google Search except it promises as much privacy as possible.