When you build a new product, you can gain early traction by just focusing on the key features that make you product different and uniquely useful.

Spend time understanding how your idea can add value. Spend time with your potential customers and see how they currently do the job that your product will help them do better. Ask what’s good and what’s not about their current process – don’t even discuss your product idea. Discover the central task they are trying to complete and then focus on delivering a solution that lets them do it better. Often, it’s just one good feature. Instagram killed Flickr by discovering what users wanted was to share pictures. Flickr was a perfectly serviceable way to store and manage images, but by making sharing easy, and enabling users to curate an addictive endless scroll of images, they carved out a new and desirable market – photo sharing.

Look for that one feature that makes all the difference for your users and focus on making that one feature awesome before building out a broader feature set. Don’t try to out-feature the competition, just solve that core problem for your users by delivering that core feature that makes your product uniquely useable. Test and fine tune, then build from there.