"Feature Creeper"

I thoroughly enjoy reading David Askaripour's blog, Flush the Toilet, a blog "focused on helping students start their own business." The best part is his brutal honesty when it comes to his entrepreneurial failures. He recently wrote a six-part post about an entrepreneurial failure where he discusses how he lost $12,000 on his first business. I highly recommend that you read it when you get a few minutes. I for one am inspired by his resolve. One of the hardest parts of being an entrepreneur is knowing when to admit failure and move on, and he has done an admirable job with it.

I began reading the six posts last night and continued with it this morning. To be honest, it was the first thing I did today because I couldn't stop thinking about it last night. The one thing that stuck in my head the most was the term "feature creeper." David describes it as:

When you start planning for a business you have to have two sets of ideas that you wish to implement. One set for ideas that “must” be offered when your business firsts launches and another set of less important services that can wait until your business matures a bit.

You need to ask yourself: “what are the features that really matter?” The features that really, really matter should be in the first version of your business. Everything else should and must wait until you to gain some credibility and trust from your clients, and then you can slowly start to implements some of those features/services you’ve just been dying to launch. Just be cool and take your time.

Some people call it “feature creeper” when you feel the need to keep on adding and adding ideas (the ideas just keep on creeping up on you), I just call it being overly-excited and trying to do a million things for a million people. Your business should only do a few things for a few people, not the world. Remember, a few people can mean millions of people.

Don’t feel the need to make your business cater to all groups of people because you feel that it can. Just because it can, doesn’t mean that it should. It’s always better to keep your business tight and focused on solving a certain problem for a certain group of people.

Now that is one thing that I definitely do that I need to stop doing. The perfectionist in me always sees something wrong with what I've done. The entrepreneur in me always wants to keep innovating. Combining the perfectionist and entrepreneur in me results in me becoming a feature addict.

I always tell myself "I need to focus on marketing more, but first I've got to finish this improvement." Then I work on marketing for a week or two, but inevitably I get sidetracked to another feature that needs improvement. I am pledging right now: for the next six months I will not make a technical upgrade to SportsLizard.com. I'm quitting cold turkey. No more "feature creeper" for Adam. We'll see how it goes.