I have often heard people (including myself) say “That isn’t enough to build a company on. That is just a feature”. In theory it is good to think about this: is your idea or technology something you can build a company on or just something interesting that might be added to another company or product?
But in practice things work differently.
Yahoo started as a page with links to websites. Can you imagine that someone said “Yeah that is nice. But it is just a feature. You can’t build a company on a page with links”.
Or take Google. All they had when they started out was a better technology to index pages called “BackRub‘. They tried to sell this ‘feature’ to a few established search engine companies. These companies weren’t interested so they started their own search engine to show the world that their technology provided superior results.
I think it is dangerous to dismiss ideas as only ‘features’ and have decided to stop saying this to people. Great companies are built on simple features. Lets not forget that.
I don’t think the Google guys where thinking of building a feature. They had a ground breaking approach to the architecture of the web, and knew how to solve an incredibly big problem. I see the point you’re trying to make, but I don’t agree with any of the examples mentioned.
There’s a lot of companies out there that start with a feature idea, which as you say isn’t necessarily evil. But I’m skeptical of people who lack the ambition to build a real product and a real business.
A single feature that achieves scale on the web is a sound strategy for market penetration.
Could you give me a quote on that? I couldn’t find this directly in the article you linked. They tried to sell their company in the beginning, but I doubt it’s because they didn’t have any faith in the greatness of it.
What I did find was this:
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Page was naturally aware of the concept of ranking in academic publishing, and he theorized that the structure of the Web’s graph would reveal not just who was linking to whom, but more critically, the importance of who linked to whom, based on various attributes of the site that was doing the linking.
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This, to me, doesn’t sound like a feature at all. More like research and forethought. And like the comments below say: if we try and explain every little thing Google did as something of a rule, we could end up lying to ourselves.
Well there are lots of “experts” here , the thing is its really hard to tell in the beginning of a start up or a product cycle whether its really a feature or not. No one really knows how a market develops!! regardless of all “experts” views. Its a little strategy and a lot of tactical moves. I would agree with the writer to a large degree.
This ‘feature not a company’ crap is just another way of VCs to tell ‘come to us when u have revenue’ or in other words your idea is running a company and having a positive cash flow. What a BS ;)
The google guys tried to sell their “feature” for 1 million to Yahoo because they didn’t consider it enough to build a company on. I’m not makig this shit up. Only after none of the big guys wanted to buy they decided to build their own search engine. True story.
Always great to see those constructive comments from the friendly people at HackerNews. Thanks and fuck you very much.