Does your website add features or solve problems?

I liked that this included the question "What is the minimum viable product?". It reminds me of a game design article I read a long time ago, which mentioned that the best way to figure out if you have a game that will be fun when it's finished is to "start with the stupidest thing that could possibly work." In other words, starting small and focusing on the core mechanic, and building on that only once you've "found the fun," is a reliable way to produce fun games. This is in stark contrast to the way many projects are run (game or otherwise), in which thousands of features are planned out right from the start and presumably developed in parallel, like a hundred people simultaneously trying to stuff themselves through a single doorway.

I tried to get this ideology through to my boss at my last job, I said "Which features are the most important and must be done before we can release?" His reply was "All of them, somebody out there needs each of those features!" It was very frustrating not being able to make him see the benefit of less.

Brian, I like the link you have at the end of the article: "Back to Hacker News". I assume it does the same when referred from Reddit?<p>[ retracted comment ]