Kill the HiPPO

(This was originally a draft chapter of the book. I've removed it from the book and made it a blog post.) It took more than a year to complete the interviews for Kill the HiPPO. We usually worked on a single founder story at a time, from start to finish, before moving on to the next one. Founders are busy people; it would take considerable time to find the right people, get them to agree to be interviewed, and get their input on the draft of their story. That gave me time to reflect on each...

I feel that, as founders of software companies, we get stuck in the mentality of having to continually add new features. In our research for Kill the HiPPO, no-one we interviewed ever said, "we decided to add less features" or "we decided to slow down the rate we add features" or even "we decided to stop adding new features altogether because our product is complete". Why do few software products ever move to a "100% done" phase? Is this because our modern software development practices...

I usually roll my eyes when people talk about "product vision". It sounds abstract and wishy-washy. And yet in researching Kill the HiPPO I've found that it to be a critical part of choosing the right features to build in your product. Just as importantly, it helps you identify what features not to build. Consider Ulysses, the writing app, profiled in Kill the HiPPO. Who is Ulysses for? Is it a writing app for everyone? No, that's too broad. This doesn't help at all with deciding what...

Hello! There's a new chapter for you to read in the beta version of Kill the HiPPO, the book I'm co-writing on feature prioritisation for bootstrapped software founders. Kieran Delaney was talked out of delegating the product work for his Apple News delivery platform FlatPlan too prematurely—advice for which he’s grateful. So, until FlatPlan becomes big enough to benefit from a dedicated hire, he’ll continue as the company’s product manager. You can read the beta version of this chapter here....

I’m a strong believer in “fix bugs first” - especially in the modern age of “always be deploying” web apps. I was surprised that in our research for Kill the HiPPO - conducted via interviews with bootstrapped founders - the issue of dealing with bug fixes barely received a mention. Are bug reports and feature requests essentially the same? Adding features and fixing bugs fight for the same limited resources. Therefore, argue some people, they should therefore be prioritised in the same way....

Hi there, When Siew Ann and I started Kill the HiPPO , our book on feature prioritisation for bootstrapped software founders, just over a year ago, I did not conceive of just how long it would take. There are two reasons for it taking so long. First, the approach we've taken has been to work on one founder story at a time. And that's not a short process. From first contact, booking an interview, doing our research, writing a draft, fixing the draft, to getting a final review from the founder,...

Hello! There's a new chapter for you to read in the beta version of Kill the HiPPO, the book I'm co-writing on feature prioritisation for bootstrapped software founders. The chapter is “We Sell ‘Shovels’, Not Stacks”: IDRsolutions’ Mark Stephens initially developed an end-user application for a customer with a niche use case, but ditched that product in favour of selling software components, or “shovels”, as Mark calls them. 25+ years later, the company is still going strong, with Mark...