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 delegating product decisions to product leads now.

I really like how Mark and his product leads are able to reject a lot of customer ideas by having a strong and clear understanding of the type of product they are not building.

You can read the beta version of Kill the HiPPO here. (Find the new chapter in the side navigation: “We Sell ‘Shovels’, Not Stacks”.)

Please have a read and add helpful comments. Your feedback is helping us make this book as good as possible.

Until next time,

Steve
​https://killthehippo.com/​