Big bold omission
It’s now common wisdom among smart web entrepreneurs that you should launch a new product with a minimal set of features so you can get it live quickly and start learning what people want.
Of course I live by this philosophy (look at everything we launched at Sawhorse). But I think it overlooks a concept I’ve seen several startups use to great success: a big bold feature omission. A feature that’s left out to define a product, rather than just get it out the door quickly.
Every search engine homepage had a directory on the front page. Until Google. Google’s omitted an information rich homepage even to this day, which is a constant reminder of their commitment to helping you find what you want.
eHarmony launched without profile photos not because they didn’t have time or resources to add them, but because they wanted to show their core value is connecting people who fit your personality rather than who you think is superficially attractive. eHarmony eventually caved on this and added profile photos in — though after matches were made — but think what a message it sent to employees, investors and customers that they’d launch with profile photos omitted and add them in only after it was demanded by the market.
Tumblr (which powers this blog) launched without a comments feature and still doesn’t support comments to this day. By the time Tumblr got started, the blogging platform market was crowded with leaders like Wordpress, Movable Type and Blogger (all of them have a comments feature). Rather than add what’s thought to be an essential feature for a blog platform, Tumblr innovated new features like reblogs, answers and photo replies. The comments omission told everyone was Tumblr was.
If you want to comment on this post, you’ll need to do so through the 3rd party commenting service I hacked on.
