Go Deep or Wide with Product Feature Set

Most startups should pick one or two things and do them extremely well. I’ve seen more startups fail trying to be all things to all people than ones that have picked a narrow set of features and gone deep with the functionality. Now, there is a place in the market for products that are broad but lack depth, especially in the small-to-medium sized business segment. It’s important to make a conscious decision when developing the product around the direction and opinion of the application.

Let’s look at a few examples:

• Bronto – great email marketing platform with a deep feature set targeted towards online retainers (large but specialized market)
• HubSpot – leading inbound marketing platform geared towards small businesses under 10 employees with solid features, but not as deep as specialized tools like SEOmoz.org or AWeber
• Salesforce.com – largest SaaS CRM provider by far with a deep salesforce automation feature set and massive ecosystem of third-party apps facilitating a best-of-breed approach

My recommendation is to make it clear early on whether you’re going to go narrow and deep (preferred) or broad and shallow (more difficult).

What else? What do you think about going deep or wide with the product feature set?