the horribly over used Ford quote:
> if i'dve asked people what they wanted, they'd have said faster horses.
is applicable here, much more so than in the battlecries of every company making something no one wants for some hypothetical market that doesn't exist.
While I don't understand the author's biz/space enough to comment situationally, this is a key insight. People almost always miss this. Users want to get to places much faster, and much more confortably in the Ford example. They speak in solutions and it is an entrepreneurs job to translate this into problems, rank them, and provide actionable responses.
The flaw I believe in your example, could be a few things. possibly if you are paid by a customer directly & are more a consultant/contractor than a SaaS provider, well, that's how you get paid. However, generalizing about a feature, especially without behavioural feedback is dangerous. if it is very easy to do, of course do it. However, the risk of a feature is some subset of:
* value to customer
* conviction/data in that value prop. & feedback
* difficulty to achieve
* is it replicable. how valuable is this to all my customers? is it very valuable to a few, or semi-valuable to many/all.
This is again, highest level, even in the last point above you can see the thread fan out.
So, again, i am bot super familiar with the authors company but I agree wholeheartedly with his process of decision making. Consider it is possible that either etsy was a big client, thus worth retaining for markwt goodwill & rev, or that it was quite easy to open an endpoint to data you already had, and thus doesn't discount this methodology