Planning your product: what to build first.

It has to show that real people will use your product for the main thing it's meant to do. That's it.

Every extra feature makes the first version slower to build and harder to learn from. If ten things are in it and nobody comes back, you won't know which one was the problem.

"People open our app to ______."

One verb. Book a table. Send an invoice. Mark attendance. If you need "and" in the sentence, you have two products, and you should pick one for now.

Write down every feature you've imagined. All of them, even the wild ones. Then sort:

• Can't launch without it. The main job breaks if it's missing.
• Nice to have. Users would like it, but they'd manage.
• Later. It only matters once you have lots of users.

Only the first pile goes in.

Go through each "can't launch without it" item and ask three questions. Would someone actually leave if this was missing on day one? Could we do it by hand for the first few weeks? Is there a plainer version that does the job?

Say you're building a booking app for salons. Online payment feels essential. But for the first fifty bookings, "pay at the salon" works fine, and it saves you weeks of payment gateway setup, testing and paperwork. Add it once you know people book.

• Detailed reports and analytics dashboards
• Lots of user roles and permission levels
• Settings for every preference
• Integrations with other tools
• A second type of user, like a vendor app next to the customer app

• The main flow working properly from start to finish, on the phones your users actually own
• Login and data handled safely
• An easy way for users to reach you when something breaks
• Simple tracking, so you can see which screens people use and where they drop off

Your feature list was a set of guesses. Now you have real behaviour to look at. Fix what frustrates people first, then build what they keep asking for.