I was speaking with an entrepreneur recently and we were talking about “Feature to Traction ratio” in early product development. The idea was how many features are you trying to build versus the amount of paid customer traction you have. Here are some thoughts on why that is important.

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It is not about the features

I meet with many entrepreneurs who show me a demo and are super excited about all the cool features in their product. However, they struggle to answer what problem they are solving and for what customer. There is an assumption they are making that if you build cool tech people will naturally want to buy it. While that can be true, in my experience that is usually not the case.

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Building too much too soon

I am a big fan of building with design partners to help prevent building too much too soon. My experience is 80%+ of the features you'll build in a first version of a product will be wasted; that is normal! There are features you think will be great that are not, and there are features you think are just okay that customers will love. By working with design partners, you help focus on the core features that help them solve their problem and quickly iterate.

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Be 10x better for 1 ICP, 1 problem, and 1 feature set

Lastly, really make sure to focus when building your early version of the product. There are many different types of potential customers that each have different use cases. If you listen to all of them, you can end up with a bloated product that nobody wants. Instead, laser focus on one ideal customer profile, one specific problem, and build a killer solution that just solves that one problem and be 10x better than the current alternative. Then after iterating and getting traction, you can expand to the next area.

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Building an early product can be challenging. Really check your feature to traction ratio and make sure you are not building too many features with not much traction.