Dick Costolo’s post titled “Launch Late to Launch Often” contains (as always) some terrific ideas.

Extensible architectures generally provide more long-term business value than point solutions, although point solutions may monetize a specific market more quickly

  1. Software that hasn’t been released can be changed in ways that become less possible N customers after launch. As N grows, so does the difficulty in refactoring some percentage of infrastructure or functionality.
  2. Additionally, as more than 1 copy of the software is released into production, these difficulties multiply.
  3. You have no idea what capabilities the market will want from your software in one year
  4. Customers generally value functionality and speed of ROI over flexibility and extensibility, however in order to maximize your chances for long-term success, your business values flexibility and extensibility over specific functionality.

The bottom line being that you want to invest pre-launch such that you optimize for innovation post-launch.

This is right in line with Boyd’s law - Speed of Iteration is what matters but the challenge of planning for the future versus overthinking the present is always something to keep in mind.

The point that platforms generate more value than point solutions is something that resonates strongly with us. Scott Karp at Publishing 2.0 had a post along these lines talking about Aggregators (platforms) vs. content sites (point solutions.) Another great post if you’re interested in online media.