The Seven Most Dreaded Words for a Startup Business

This is a short-post.

If you ever hear the following words coming from a start-up founder run as fast as you can. The words are:

"But it can do so much more!"


A new product almost always has to compete on one dimension. It can never, ever compete on breadth of features or attributes.

It has to do one thing and one thing only better than any other product or service in the world.

This video on YouTube introduces a new concept called Text 2.0. The idea is great (basically, the text you are reading knows that it is being read by tracking your eye movement with some very cool technology.)

Unfortunately, they run into two problems:

1. They don't know who is the target audience. They don't address who are likely to be the early adopters for the technology.

2. They don't know what to offer to this early adopter set. So they throw out as many features and attributes as possible hoping that something will stick.

Looks like a bunch of very smart engineers in need of some positioning help :)