
Is your startup a company or just a feature? - a4agarwal
http://sachin.posterous.com/make-sure-your-startup-is-a-company-not-a-fea
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fleitz
Presumably whoever wrote an app that sells for $1 to $5 realized that the
barrier to entry was low and leveraged that product into a product line. No
revenue stream is going to last forever, eventually phones too will
commoditize and squeeze the margins out.

As long at the developer retained more revenue than it cost to develop the
product then it was a success. I don't care whether my startup is a 'company'
or a 'feature' I care whether it makes money. If you can sell to another
company just before your product becomes a commodity then that's even better.

Sounds like he's just jealous the IM Sense guys got a pay day for a $1 app.

Money Quote: "Surely their sales would drop to near zero since the feature is
now free."

Better let the bottled water industry know they are about to be put out of
business by the tap.

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mikeryan
Another view, a few smart guys build a small patent portfolio for doing HDR
and use an iphone app as a method for marketing their technology and making a
few bucks. Big Co finds them and their technology and buys them for a large
sum. Mission Accomplished.

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willheim
First, HDR is not available on the iPhone 3G or 3GS so those who didn't have a
4 would buy the app (and they do). Second, Posterous email-in a blog post is a
feature that is available to any blog platform I'm aware of but what they did
differently is to focus on it making blogging as simple as can be. It was sort
of a reverse engineering of the whole work-flow. That turned into a community
and it is that community that is the product. They found a niche within making
a company based on a neglected feature. Cute.

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ecaradec
Agree, it may even be a good thing for them, because as apple is popularizing
HDR picture, friends with 3G phones will want to do the same and find an app.
Sometimes it's nice to have the big player do the education of the market.

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brudgers
Feature v. Company is a matter of scale. Google buys real companies all the
time and turns them into features.

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fookyong
Posted something similar a while back:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1580396>

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jaekwon
the way i see it, companies are a just feature of the entrepreneurial life.

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ameyamk
Here you go new acronym: FNAC - Feature not a company

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lhnn
He called Apple the greatest company in the world. Anyone else immediately
flinch?

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qq66
"Greatest" could mean so many different things, but I can see some definitions
of the word under which Apple could claim that title.

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pzxc
Including market cap.

I consider myself an apple hater (or at least wanna-be hater), but I have to
give credit where credit is due. There are some things, like design process,
publicity control, and outright valuation where apple is almost undisputably
the top dog (right now).

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sabat
Here's the thing: bigger companies often buy "feature" startups to -- well,
add features. So it's not necessarily a bad thing to start one.

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mwsfc
Yes, and I do believe some would even say that is their "exit" strategy.

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TotlolRon
Leverage is mostly about having a place to stand on not about having a big
stick.

