Does your startup need more
features?
New features won’t always enhance your product. In fact, they can slow you down.
Does your startup need more features?
What’s more important: adding features or staying flexible enough to adapt?
It’s clear that adaptability wins. New features won’t always enhance your product. In fact, they can slow you down. Every extra feature adds complexity, making it harder to adjust and improve quickly.
This might be fine if you’ve already found product-market fit, but if you’re still searching, it’s dangerous. Imagine having the perfect solution for your users but taking months to roll it out because your product is too weighed down.
Your core offering should provide real value — piling on features won’t fix that. Keep your product nimble for as long as you can. Building a product is like running a marathon with a backpack. Adding features adds weight to your backpack.
Some product features will add a lot of weight to your backpack. They make you go slower by a small percentage for the rest of your run. They make it harder to change your product.
Other features don't add much weight at all. The weight of a feature doesn't necessarily correlate to their value to the customer. Some features are REALLY valuable, but don't complicate your code much.
Other features might only be useful to a handful of customers, but significantly complicate the codebase going further. Slowing you down a little bit, forever.
Example 1: I delayed adding "private profiles" to WIP as long as possible, because adding privacy features impacts ALL THE CODE that deals with showing todos throughout the site. I've added it now, but it's one extra thing to think about, ALL THE TIME.
Example 2: Dark mode is great. I love it. But adding it to your product means ALL FUTURE DESIGN CHANGES require you to add a darkmode variant. Even if it's quick to add now, it will slow you down by a small percentage, FOREVER.
So the next time you decide on adding a new feature or making a change, ask yourself this: how much weight will this add to my backpack?
Credit: Marc Köhlbrugge
Richard Branson’s delegation process
The art of delegation has its roots in accepting perfect isn’t always possible.
- Richard Branson
Entrepreneurs often face an endless list of tasks, which is why Richard Branson believes that delegation is crucial.
You can’t bring new ideas to market through sheer force of personality, you need to delegate so you can focus on the big picture.
- Richard Branson
The idea that you can do everything yourself is a fairy tale, he says. It’s essential to hand off tasks that aren't your strength. Branson encourages curiosity, but if you aren’t good at something, let someone else take the reins.
This philosophy has been key to Virgin’s success. Branson highlights how they rely not only on internal teams but also on external contractors, freelancers, and agencies.
These partnerships, with experts in fields like web development and service supply, have fueled Virgin’s growth for over 40 years. Delegating can feel intimidating at first. But that’s okay. It’s the first step that starts all the progress that follows right after.
The VC tide has gone out
The era of easy money is over. Zero-interest rates and massive liquidity created a perfect storm for startups. Founders went from scraping by to raising millions.
But when money is essentially free, risk gets distorted. Venture capitalists over-allocated, pushing up valuations and lowering the quality bar.
The result? A lot of hype and little substance. Instead of driving true innovation, the past decade gave us buzzwords like crypto, fintech, and the Metaverse.
Real industrial advances? Not so much. GenAI Companies like came on top. OpenAI just raised the biggest venture round in history ($6.5B at $150B post), with Anthropic a relative bargain at just $40B.
If your company has a strong impact, you have nothing to fear. If it doesn't, you might be in trouble.
This article was originally published here.
The backpack metaphor makes the trade-off clear. Features either add weight that slows you forever or delivers real customer value without much drag. The tough part is knowing which is which, and resisting the urge to add things just because you can. Flexibility is often worth more than another feature, especially before product-market fit.
Branson’s take on delegation follows the same principle. Holding onto every task, like piling on every feature, limits progress. Delegation creates space for focus, just as restraint in features creates space for adaptability. Great post!
Thank you for this insightful perspective, Oliver. Your 'backpack' analogy powerfully illustrates how each new feature can add complexity, reminding us to prioritize simplicity and adaptability in our products.
It's so easy to get excited about an idea, but I love this advice of more or less starting small and building as you go or as needed to expand. It not only saves you money so you get your return faster, but also keeps those using your product 'hooked' as they see that this is going to be something that surely evolves.
Man, this hits hard. The “backpack” thing is way too real, very lil feature sounds harmless until it slows everything down later.
One thing that’s helped me clear my head is stepping away from the build grind and messing with startup sims. I’ve been playing around with Startupwars. com kinda like running a fake startup. Super helpful to rethink what actually matters before I overbuild.
Sometimes stepping back from the build and running a sim helps clarify what not to build.
Hey Oliver, love this perspective! The "weight in the backpack" metaphor really hits home, it’s so easy to get excited about new features, but they can slow you down big time. I’ve been there with my own SaaS project, where adding “just one more thing” started to clog up our iteration speed. Your advice on staying nimble, especially before nailing product-market fit, is super valuable.
How do you weigh a feature’s value against the complexity it brings? Thanks for sharing such a clear and thought-provoking take! 😊
This hits home for me. I just launched a product (Whale Curve Analyzer) that visualizes where companies are actually making — or losing — profit by customer, product, rep, etc. It started as a simple Excel-based toolkit for a freight carrier client, and even that barebones version delivered massive insight.
As I’ve expanded it, I’ve constantly had to check myself:
“Is this new feature adding clarity for the user, or complexity for me?”
It’s tempting to bolt on dashboards, slicers, filters, forecasting... but the real win was keeping it fast and usable.
Love the ‘weight in the backpack’ metaphor — that’s how it feels every time I debate adding one more export or formatting toggle.
Curious how others have balanced the temptation to add vs. the need to stay light — especially in the early months post-launch.
One of the biggest issues I've encountered is being able to trust your payment processor. When you are a startup and STRIPE is unable to resolve a payout issue due to passing it around too many people instead of just having a phone call to resolve it, it can literally crash your business. I've got an ongoing case that forced me to rapidly find another payment processing system due to their inability to resolve a simple issue. A little feedback for Stripe as well as start-ups- Continuity and a simple conversation ultimately save time, confusion and wins massive loyalty.
This is spectacular advice. At my first product role at a fin-tech start up we were obsessed with having a wide range of offerings. But this led to every feature not working that "deeply".
It is far better to have a very "narrow" product offering that "deeply" solves a customer pain point than a "wide" offering that really doesn't solve any pain point well.
that's really interesting
That's why you need a starting point (only core features) and feedback. Not everything you add will work. Sometimes it just overwhelms the user and shifts them from understanding the problem you are solving.
Always stay focused unless there is an evident need for a pivot.
Thankyou for sharing this but Have you ever removed a feature from your product to regain flexibility? What was the user feedback like, and how did it affect your product's growth?