Do More Faster: TechStars Lessons to Accelerate Your Startup

Chapter 6. Forget the Kitchen Sink

David Cohen

David is the co-founder and CEO of TechStars.

I've seen "everythingitis" kill many a startup. This is the disease a startup gets when it sets out to add more features than the competition does. This is a fundamentally flawed strategy that presumes that users will adopt a new service just because it has more features. The reality is that most people use a particular service because it does one thing really, really well. Think about your own experiences and you'll understand that this is true.

I've been guilty of trying to solve problems by throwing in more and more features, including the kitchen sink. iContact^[2] was the second startup that I founded and it had a serious case of everythingitis. I proudly told everyone that iContact did more than any other mobile social networking product that existed at the time. But the market said: "So what?" No one understood what iContact did better than anybody else in the world, including us. When it didn't take off, we made the fatal mistake of responding by adding more features (including several shiny new kitchen sinks) when we probably should have been removing them and focusing more on the few things that our users did like. iContact eventually died, and that's how I learned this lesson firsthand.

Several TechStars companies came in with a plan like "MySpace + FaceBook + YouTube + kitchen sink." ...