Edge Cases in Startup Products

Last week I talked a bit about successful startups that from the outside appear to have an easy business to duplicate. Once you pull back the covers you might find that they are spending over a million dollars per year on pay-per-click ads to generate customers, creating a barrier to entry for most startups. There’s another less obvious aspect of successful startups that you don’t quickly see when peering in: product edge cases required for happy customers.

Edge cases are scenarios the product has to handle that aren’t common or intuitive when first building the software. Here are some tips to think through regarding edge cases:

• Most edge cases come from customer feedback requiring you to get the product into the customer’s hands as quickly as possible
• Use edge cases as a way for your sales team to differentiate against upstarts (e.g. talk about the many different unique scenarios you’ve already had to solve that new companies wouldn’t have mastered yet)
• When encountering a potential edge case ask yourself how important it is to the product and stay extremely opinionated about what does and doesn’t get into the application

Edge cases can be one of the more challenging aspects of building great software but they also can result in happy customers when successfully addressed.

What else? What other tips do you have about edge cases in startup products?