Warren Buffett and Bill Gates were asked the same question in separate, unrelated interviews – what was the #1 reason for their success, in their own views?
Coincidentally, they both had the same answer – Focus.
There’s no startup founder who doesn’t know they need to bring ruthless focus to be able to succeed. But nonetheless, many founders make the same mistake all the time – doing too many things at once and spreading their limited resources too thin.
Why does this happen? Often, these are the reasons:
1/ Founders underestimate the amount of effort needed to do one thing really, really well
2/ Founders think if they do one thing only, the market size will become too small and they won’t have sufficient metrics needed for the next round of funding
3/ Founders focus more on what they (personally) want to build, which keeps changing (we’re all humans), leading to feature creeps, rather than focusing on customer needs and delivering a small yet complete product experience to the customers
Think about Uber’s v1 product. Initially it did only one thing (hailing black limousines in the city of SF). In order to deliver that relatively small experience, Uber still had to build the entire stack (imagine everything was working except for payment, or everything except for driver dispatching, etc). Doing one thing really well often requies a lot of work, such as building out the entire stack. There’s no v1 that’s too small, if you could deliver a very delightful end-to-end product experience to well-defined target users.