James Sinclair argues that calling something a feature or product matters less than asking two things: Is the market large enough, and is it defensible? The iPhone flashlight failed as a standalone business. Dropbox succeeded because it had both.
Chapters
Startup founder One of the conversations you are inevitably going to have at some point is whether you are a feature or a product, what you're building, the general definition, I don't know if I agree with it. There's a lot of views of it is a product something is willing to pay for. A feature is something that steers or guides your determination into buying that product. There's a lot of views. Here's what I'm going to say outright. That doesn't matter. It doesn't matter if you're a feature or a product. If the market is big enough and you have enough defensibility, there is room to be either or both. It doesn't matter if the market is big enough if you can defend against it. Example, the flashlight app on the iPhone before they built it native. Not much defensibility in there, so not much reason anyone's going to invest in there. But we all paid for it for a minute. It was a product until it became a feature of the iPhone. None of us are buying the iPhone because of the flashlight, but it's definitely nice to have. Second example is Steve Jobs said Dropbox is a feature, not a product. He might be right. There might not be a need for Dropbox to exist. No one needs more file storage and synchronization in the cloud. When you have Apple icloud, you have Microsoft with OneDrive. But the reality is actually it doesn't matter. There is plenty of room for Dropbox, Microsoft, Apple and all of these other players box and so forth to live in the ecosystem. The market is big enough, the defensibility is big enough. Dropbox is adding new features to turn them itself into a more defensible product. So as you're going about this journey yourself, you just need to be able to articulate. When someone says, you know the acronym I think is FNAC feature, not a company, you need to be able to defend against it, articulate why and listen to what they're saying. They may have a view, they may be right. Is the market big enough, is it defendable enough and is the opportunity great enough that people are going to be willing to pay for it? And if the answer is yes, if it doesn't matter, this is separate conversation from building on someone's platform, ecosystem, place, HubSpot, Salesforce, Facebook, all of those things. This is are you building something which should or would be better to live in someone else's product, or can you bring it to market and scale it successfully on its own in your own right? Good luck.
