How New Ideas Almost Killed Our Startup

Thanks for this link; it could not have arrived at a better time. Need to go paste this into a couple email threads... ;)

I think you can go further, this post talked about ideas that are completely unrelated to your company.

In my experience, completely related on topic great ideas can still kill your startup, its an easy thing to bury your head in code and produce feature after feature without looking up and evaluating what that feature gave you apart from more code to manage. Microsoft can afford to make massive bloated software that does everything and the kitchen sink "decently" startups can rarely afford to do anything more than one thing very very well.

The OP is writing about choosing that one thing you want to do very very well, which I think is a bigger problem than feature creep.

Argh, this article is so true and should not be ignored.

I have recently been building projects, when in the middle, I suddenly get an idea for another project, I would down all tools to kick start something new with the belief I could multitask and do both.

The truth is, you can't! Give your initial project 110% and get it out of the door before you try anything new. That way all of your products will have the quality they deserve.

Great article.

You don't want to make any absolute statements. Sites like flickr are siren-like ideas that turned out very well. It's always a tough judgement call for when to get distracted.

The important thing is to make sure you're pursing this other idea because it's actually something worthwhile not just as an escape from your startup not doing so great... Basically, think about things rationally and not emotionally.