You've heard the advice a thousand times.
Focus on one feature. Do one thing exceptionally well. Don't build what users don't ask for.
Great advice. I believe it. But it skips a harder question that I'm wrestling with right now and I'd genuinely love the community's perspective on...
How do you know which one feature to focus on before you have enough users to tell you?
Here's my situation.
I've been building GoBananas.dev... a low-code, AI-native platform for building production software... for several months. (It's finally live!) The core architecture is contract-first and multi-agent, which means when you chat with it you get a spec to review before anything gets built, and agents create contracts before they write code. No misfits. No context loss.
But before I felt comfortable putting it in front of anyone, there was one feature I felt was non-negotiable. The one thing I knew would differentiate GoBananas in the enterprise space and make it genuinely useful for people who'd outgrown tools like Lovable...Uploading existing code.
If you can't bring your existing codebase into the conversation, you're locked out of the enterprise market entirely. Legacy modernization, feature development on top of existing systems, helping Lovable graduates take their projects further... none of that works without it. That was my line in the sand.
I built it. It's in.
But here's where it gets complicated. Because in the process of building toward that one feature I also built five others... all of which are in various stages of beta and all of which have a genuine argument for being THE most important thing to focus on next.
Debugging — probably the least beta of the group. Given everything I've written about the vibe debugging problem this one feels obvious. But is obvious the same as most important?
Sharing projects — think Google Docs style collaboration. For teams working on the same codebase this is huge. But does it matter if I don't have teams yet?
Teams — branches, multi-person development, larger projects. The enterprise feature that unlocks serious organizational use. But is that premature if I'm still finding my first hundred users?
One-click deployment to Railway — removes the last mile problem. You build it, you ship it, done. Massive friction reducer. But does deployment matter more than building right now?
Live/spot editing — make targeted changes to existing code without triggering a full rebuild. Surgical. Fast. Genuinely useful. But is it a power user feature that comes after the basics are solid?
Each of these feels important. Each has a credible argument for being the thing that unlocks the next stage of growth. And I genuinely don't know which one to bet on without more user signal.
Which brings me back to the original tension.
The advice says let user engagement drive your roadmap. But you need enough core functionality for users to engage meaningfully before that signal is reliable. Too few features and you don't know what matters. Too many and you've spread yourself too thin to do any of them exceptionally well.
So I'm asking the people who've been here before...
How did you figure out which feature to double down on before you had enough users to tell you clearly? And looking at the list above... what would you focus on if this were your product?
Genuinely asking. Not rhetorical.
This is the classic "feature buffet" problem — everything feels important because you've already built it.
Here's a framework that's helped me: Instead of asking "which feature is most important?" ask "which feature removes the biggest blocker for my first 10 users?"
Looking at your list:
My bet: One-click deployment to Railway. Here's why — you've already got the "upload existing code" hook for enterprise, but individual builders (your likely early adopters) need to feel the end-to-end "I built something and it's live" dopamine hit. Deployment removes the "now what?" moment that kills momentum.
The pattern: People don't churn because you lack debugging. They churn because they never shipped anything worth debugging.
What's the current drop-off point in your funnel? My guess it's between "built something" and "deployed something." Fix that first.
Curious: of the few users you have, how many have actually deployed something vs. just experimented?
Thanks for the thoughtful response. Your framework is very helpful.
Currently I have a user that has deployed and several that are still building.
I think you are right and thankfully the deploy feature is finally working...but I definitely need to continue testing it to make it more robust.
In terms of sharing/collaboration...how do you wieght the "virality of the feature" in your calculus.