People often struggle with the idea of Focus.

They don't know why staying disciplined with a "Minimum Viable Problem" and a corresponding Minimum Viable Product is key to their growth and scale.

You'll hear phrases like this...

"Why can't we just support this extra use case?"

"Customers want our product to do X!"

"This is an important opportunity!"

"Isn't it easy to just..."

There isn't an industry, product category, or customer profile in the world where you won't be asked to handle more use cases.

Your customers will ALWAYS want to have more of their needs met across all their use-cases.

This ALWAYS appears like a great opportunity. A no brainer, right?

But it's not necessarily the RIGHT opportunity, or in YOUR startup's best interest to solve these additional use-cases. At least not right away.

Why?

The secret to scale is creating tight alignment from the very tippy top of your funnel all the way to the deepest part of your product so that you achieve REAL Product Market Fit (PMF) and corresponding rapid growth.

PMF is when users a high percentage of users go through the ENTIRE funnel cheaply and easily: Awareness -> Interest -> Education -> Adoption -> Value Creation -> Uh-huh moment -> Retention -> Advocacy

If you carelessly stumble into new use-cases, two bad things will happen.

Bad thing 1

1. At first, you will typically just add some features to the product and/or some messaging to your website.

You will typically NOT spend the time and money to create a solid funnel for the use-case from top to bottom (product marketing, product education, product support materials, product features, edge cases etc).

The customer will therefore fail to make it all the way to the bottom of the funnel (retention + advocacy).

This will result in either...

a) Produce high-churn customers who don't make it all the way through the full funnel OR

b) Access to a very shallow pool of customers who are willing to tolerate an incomplete funnel for that use case.

Bad thing 2

You will realize your mistake (hopefully) and work on creating such a funnel, but this forced and premature effort will pancake the team.

Supporting a new use-case is deceptively difficult and costly, cutting across all functions of the team from marketing, sales, product, engineering, customer support, etc.

In summary

This is a counterintuitive mistake that diffuses focus too early for startups. A mistake that most easily fall into.

You want to nail your first Minimum Viable Product use case.

You want to scale it to everyone who will buy what you have.

You want to avoid stumbling into new use-cases and instead make very intentional decisions when to expand your focus area.

You can typically expand into new use cases only after you have nailed PMF (or decided to pivot) and secured or allocated fresh funding and resources to win in that additional use case.