"Hold some features back in your first release.<p>Release them next week or next month. This makes your customers think that you are actively developing your product and that there is momentum behind your product."<p>This statement really irks me, not just as a programmer, but as a consumer. I initially thought the article might be a little joke, but since the other tips were more reasonable, I have to assume that it is serious. I can understand holding back features in your initial release, but there are much better reasons than those that were cited. To purposely trick your potential users seems to me to be a bad business model, and smells of the corporate mindset of money and growth over all else. I think it is important to remember that the whole point of developing a product is to fulfill a need (or want) of the customer, and I think that as the average consumer gets more intelligent, these types of tactics will be more transparent and will do more harm than good to the startup.<p>As for better reasons for holding back features:<p>1. In any interesting piece of software, I would imagine that there are potentially hundreds of features which could be added. The difficult problem is deciding when to be (temporarily) content with what you have and release. Thus, some desired features must be left out in order to avoid the perfectionist mindset, where nothing ever gets released.<p>2. A mostly-implemented feature may work correctly most of the time, but fail mysteriously at other times. Even with a beta release, it's probably best to avoid these types of features which only serve to make your product less reliable.<p>3. A feature may be fully-implemented, but there may be no clear way to integrate it into the UI. In this case, it would probably be best to hold off and drop hints of the feature to beta testers, who could give their feedback on how best to integrate it. After all, the feature is meant for the users to actually use, isn't it?<p>4. A feature may add computational complexity to the software which may be overly taxing on the initial hardware that a startup company is using. Improve the hardware before adding the feature, or better yet, improve the code which implements the feature.<p>
Am I being overly idealistic? Am I alone in thinking that the proposed "marketing trick" is a bad idea?