The Mistakes We Made: Falling into the Featuritis Trap

This is the first post in our startup journey series that focuses on the mistakes we made along the way. We are sharing these lessons so that other founders (hopefully) do not have to make the same mistakes when building a startup.

In the fast-paced world of startups, the excitement of building something new can sometimes lead to overenthusiasm. At Gleap, we have learned this the hard way. Today, we want to share a critical lesson from our journey, a cautionary tale about what we call featuritis.

The Allure of Featuritis

When we started out as BugBattle, and even as we transitioned to Gleap, we fell into a common trap. We believed that adding just one more feature would be the magic bullet to success. If only we build this, we told ourselves, everyone will love and buy our product. So we kept building. And building. And building.

Before we knew it, we had developed a plethora of features, many of which were not fully utilized by our users. Instead of focusing on the core value our product offered, we diluted our efforts trying to cater to hypothetical needs. It is easy to see how it happened. As founders, we are passionate problem-solvers, and the thrill of adding new capabilities can be intoxicating. But featuritis taught us a humbling lesson: more is not always better.

The Cost of Building Without Focus

Developing unnecessary features is not only time consuming but also expensive. Each new feature requires:

• Development resources: time spent coding, testing, and deploying
• Support and documentation: creating help articles, tutorials, and answering user questions
• Ongoing maintenance: fixing bugs and ensuring compatibility with future updates
• Dilution of USP Communication: As the feature list grew, it became increasingly difficult to effectively communicate what our unique selling points were and what our product could do

These costs pile up quickly, especially for a startup with limited resources. Moreover, they can distract from your product’s core value proposition, the reason your early adopters chose you in the first place.

How We Pivoted to a Feedback First Approach

Our turning point came when we realized we were building in a vacuum. We were not listening to our users as much as we should have. So, we pivoted to a feedback first approach, which ultimately became a cornerstone of Gleap’s philosophy.

Here is how we course-corrected:

1. Prioritized User Feedback: We started actively listening to our users, collecting insights through surveys, feedback forms, and our own Gleap widget
2. Built a Roadmap Feature: To ensure we focused more on customer feedback when building additions to our product, we developed a roadmap feature. This helped us prioritize features that our users genuinely wanted and provided transparency into our development process
3. Introduced a Data-Driven Prioritization System: Our roadmap now uses a system that takes upvotes, revenue growth, and effort into consideration to calculate a metric that highlights which features would be good to develop and which ones might not be worth pursuing
4. Validated Before Building: Before developing new features, we now validate their necessity by analyzing feedback and assessing their alignment with our product’s mission
5. Focused on Product Market Fit: Instead of chasing every feature idea, we concentrated on understanding and addressing the real problems our users faced

This shift not only streamlined our development process but also strengthened our connection with our users. By focusing on their needs, we built a product that truly resonated with them.

Advice for Fellow Founders

If you are building a startup, here is our advice:

1. Listen to Your Users: Build mechanisms to collect, analyze, and act on user feedback. Tools like Gleap can make this process seamless
2. Resist the Urge to Overbuild: Instead of adding features indiscriminately, ask yourself: Does this solve a real user problem? Is it aligned with our core value proposition
3. Focus on Product Market Fit: Ensure your product is solving a clear and pressing need for your target audience before expanding its capabilities

Turning Mistakes into Momentum

Featuritis was a mistake. It taught us the importance of staying laser focused on our users and building with intention. By sharing this experience, we hope to help other startups avoid the same pitfall.

Building a successful product is not about having the most features. It is about delivering meaningful value. And the best way to uncover what matters most to your users? Start listening to them.

At Gleap, we are passionate about helping startups do just that. Our feedback widget empowers you to understand your users’ needs, so you can build smarter, not harder. Because in the end, the path to success is not paved with features. It is paved with understanding.

Ready to leave featuritis behind? Let us build better, together.