Many a modern entrepreneur will remind you to cut features so you can launch your product or service or website sooner. The reasoning is largely that you don’t really know what features people will want until you launch, so wait to add them. If you keep adding features, development of the project will get bogged down, and the project will suffer.
But think of more than just your projects when you think of this mantra. Think about your business as a whole, and the services that it offers. Do you, like us, design websites? Maybe you want to offer hosting, to make things easier for your clients. Maybe you want to offer email campaign management as well… why not? You can make money at that, too. Maybe you should offer search engine promotion, full e-commerce, fancy server-side script integration, etc.
The problem is, the more of these that you offer, the more you have to support down the road. If you start spreading yourself a bit thin early-on to get the cash flow going, think about which of those you’ll have to maintain and support for years down the road. It might be worthwhile to wait and see if that’s really what you want to do. You might do better by keeping your offerings more focused, offering fewer services but doing a much better job with them.
