
Just skip it: 9 features your product does not need to launch - charlieirish
https://benediktdeicke.com/2017/04/features-your-product-does-not-need-to-launch/
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justherefortart
1\. Self-service on-boarding: Agree, depending on your line of business,
direct contact is how I get all my sales in every startup I've done (on #8
now).

2\. Activity Streams: Agree

3\. Payment Integration: Agree mostly, but have them pay by check, do Net 10,
invoice them in the mail and put penalties in your contract (late fees).
Stripe is really simple though if your customers prefer to pay online or you
have revolving low income accounts (under 500/mo is too low for manual
invoicing IMO).

4\. Permissions / User Roles: Disagree completely, you should have users and
roles out of the gate or you'll likely end up doing as much refactoring/retro
work as you would if you did it properly in the first place. Not to mention
PII, GDPR, HIPAA, or any other issues that require levels of permission for
even viewing data (internally and externally).

5\. Administration Interface: Agreed mostly (ties in with above, do you want
to manually be doing this if you get a large customer base?)

6\. Advanced Technology: Agreed, doesn't matter if it's built in assembly or
the newest whizbang shit out there, working and delivered are all that matter.

7\. Settings and customization: Agreed, although I could see products where
this is critical.

8\. Metrics: Disagree, again, if you have even decent metrics setup (use
something easy to start and grow as needed), you can learn more faster with
the built in reports than you would simply "looking in your database".

9\. Customer support tool: Agree, I handle this by answering the phone anytime
a client calls if possible, even after hours and on the weekend. When you
answer the phone, no matter the issue you gain more trust than doing stuff
like requiring them to fill out help tickets or whatever.

9 part 2 knowledge base: Disagree, you need user documents and help so you're
not getting calls constantly. In fact, when I build software I do this work up
front along with the BA work to help build a proof of concept that shows what
users seemingly need and what they may want. I use it as a sales tool as well.

Bonus. Don’t build software at all: Laughable. Everyone wants their own
"custom" app. I've suggested Quickbooks online so many times that Intuit
should be giving me a sales kickback. I also have recommended to many clients
to keep/upgrade what they've got versus rebuilding because that technology is
"old".

I focus on contracts/software that is roughly 30-60k/year minimum dev + 30+60
in support contracts as well. So that's where my point of reference comes
from. I'm not moving on to possible enterprise clients until all 4 of my
current offerings have a min of 10 clients each. Maybe in another year or so
:-)

