As we all know, YCombinator is the most successful startup accelerator in the world having funded over 5,000+ startups with over 5% of them converting to unicorns 
Whatâs one of their key success enablers? Avoiding âtarpit ideasâ.
This post will explore what the term "tarpit idea" means, and how another concept related to this (what I call a "tarpit feature") is relevant to anyone building a new product
I was intrigued by the term âtarpit ideasâ when I first heard about it in a video featuring Dalton Caldwell and Michael Seibel from YC
Tarpit ideas by definition are ideas that many people have, look and sound appealing on paper and seem like something customers would want but also are the cause of death of many startups. They also look to be unsolved by other companies globally, so they attract even more founders because it seems like âTHE problemâ that is yet to be solved - being blinded by the countless number of startups that have died trying to build it.
Now I donât want to dive deeper into âtarpit ideasâ specifically because there are many great YCombinator resources about it (you can find the video that inspired this linked at the end). But what I want to explore is an adjacent, related concept that I think is not spoken about as often: âtarpit featuresâ.
This is an interesting idea close to my day-to-day of building a product. The concept of tarpit features is very similar to that of tarpit ideas in the sense that when you start developing a new product, these are features that âseemâ important, obvious, useful for solving new userâs problems and might even be so big standalone that you might spend a lot of time working on them. But thatâs where the magic begins and ends.
These are features that will suck a lot of your time and energy trying to release, only to realise that they never deeply mattered to begin with and you spent precious time, i.e. the most important commodity for an early stage startup working on something that was never needed in the first place. Lost time, lost dev resources, lost $$ and the end output is something customers never needed!
What is even more important here is, tarpit features will not just hinder the growth and execution speed of tarpit ideas. They will also do the same to promising, high potential startups who might lose out to their competitors just because they got trapped in a cycle of development and lost opportunities working on features that werenât demanded.
Note, the point is not that products die due to just building one extra "fancy" or "unnecessary" feature - it's the side effect of building not so useful features (despite being in a promising market) repeatedly for the same company that does this and significantly negatively impacts their progress vs that of its competitors. And unfortunately this slowness compounds the death for companies because it progressively becomes harder for them to recover from it - do this a few times and your metrics start stagnating, you lose focus, try things thinking your idea sucks, lose confidence in yourself and so on
So the message is that despite working on a good idea, there's a huge chance you'll fail if you're just wasting time working on features that aren't needed while your competitors execute and build the key things that will give them an edge. People don't prioritise and evaluate product roadmaps as much as they should
Examples of most commonly developed tarpit features (TAKE THIS LIST WITH A BIG PINCH OF SALT, DON'T LATCH ONTO IT, THE MESSAGE IS THE REST OF THIS POST NOT THIS LIST OF EXAMPLES) - do note most of these examples are very basic and the commonly occuring ones, there will also be many features specific to certain startups that only the founders can assess. These will be all the way from features requested by a particular customer or those the sales team thinks are important.
Of course, some of the cases above will have exceptions. Say youâre building a mobile app heavily focused towards on iOS users, it makes sense to have Apple Sign In too. Or if youâre building a mental health chat product, it might be critical for users to have the comfort of deleting their chats & data for privacy reasons. But these decisions should be quickly (and carefully) made based on your idea to avoid getting trapped in a cycle of wasted dev efforts.
The underlying message remains: keep your product roadmap simple and relevant to your target customers. Anything else is a distraction early on!
Do you relate to this or have any other tarpit idea to add?
Whatâs one of their key success enablers? Avoiding âtarpit ideasâ.
This post will explore what the term "tarpit idea" means, and how another concept related to this (what I call a "tarpit feature") is relevant to anyone building a new product
I was intrigued by the term âtarpit ideasâ when I first heard about it in a video featuring Dalton Caldwell and Michael Seibel from YC
Tarpit ideas by definition are ideas that many people have, look and sound appealing on paper and seem like something customers would want but also are the cause of death of many startups. They also look to be unsolved by other companies globally, so they attract even more founders because it seems like âTHE problemâ that is yet to be solved - being blinded by the countless number of startups that have died trying to build it.
Now I donât want to dive deeper into âtarpit ideasâ specifically because there are many great YCombinator resources about it (you can find the video that inspired this linked at the end). But what I want to explore is an adjacent, related concept that I think is not spoken about as often: âtarpit featuresâ.
This is an interesting idea close to my day-to-day of building a product. The concept of tarpit features is very similar to that of tarpit ideas in the sense that when you start developing a new product, these are features that âseemâ important, obvious, useful for solving new userâs problems and might even be so big standalone that you might spend a lot of time working on them. But thatâs where the magic begins and ends.
These are features that will suck a lot of your time and energy trying to release, only to realise that they never deeply mattered to begin with and you spent precious time, i.e. the most important commodity for an early stage startup working on something that was never needed in the first place. Lost time, lost dev resources, lost $$ and the end output is something customers never needed!
What is even more important here is, tarpit features will not just hinder the growth and execution speed of tarpit ideas. They will also do the same to promising, high potential startups who might lose out to their competitors just because they got trapped in a cycle of development and lost opportunities working on features that werenât demanded.
Note, the point is not that products die due to just building one extra "fancy" or "unnecessary" feature - it's the side effect of building not so useful features (despite being in a promising market) repeatedly for the same company that does this and significantly negatively impacts their progress vs that of its competitors. And unfortunately this slowness compounds the death for companies because it progressively becomes harder for them to recover from it - do this a few times and your metrics start stagnating, you lose focus, try things thinking your idea sucks, lose confidence in yourself and so on
So the message is that despite working on a good idea, there's a huge chance you'll fail if you're just wasting time working on features that aren't needed while your competitors execute and build the key things that will give them an edge. People don't prioritise and evaluate product roadmaps as much as they should
Examples of most commonly developed tarpit features (TAKE THIS LIST WITH A BIG PINCH OF SALT, DON'T LATCH ONTO IT, THE MESSAGE IS THE REST OF THIS POST NOT THIS LIST OF EXAMPLES) - do note most of these examples are very basic and the commonly occuring ones, there will also be many features specific to certain startups that only the founders can assess. These will be all the way from features requested by a particular customer or those the sales team thinks are important.
- Multi-platform SSO / User Authentication: if youâre spending days setting up user signups / authentication while knowing Google & email signups will drive >95% of your user signups, rethink what is needed and drop the rest
- User Profile / Account Management: spent 3 days building a user profile, account details management and deletion UI + API? congrats, 0 out of your 30 users needed it
- Dark Mode: no explanation needed, if youâre working on this while trying to find product market fit, you need to re-evaluate your product roadmap
- Ultra Fancy Onboarding Tutorials: While it's important to provide guidance to users, spending excessive time and resources on elaborate onboarding tutorials with intricate animations and multiple steps might not be necessary early on. Users often prefer a straightforward and intuitive user experience, and over-investing in onboarding tutorials can detract from the core functionality of the product
- Comprehensive Analytics / Tracking Capabilities: Analytics are crucial for understanding user behaviour and improving the product but building an overly complex analytics stack with numerous integrations, warehouses and visualisation tools can be a distraction for early-stage startups that often don't even have enough user data to go for such complexity
Of course, some of the cases above will have exceptions. Say youâre building a mobile app heavily focused towards on iOS users, it makes sense to have Apple Sign In too. Or if youâre building a mental health chat product, it might be critical for users to have the comfort of deleting their chats & data for privacy reasons. But these decisions should be quickly (and carefully) made based on your idea to avoid getting trapped in a cycle of wasted dev efforts.
The underlying message remains: keep your product roadmap simple and relevant to your target customers. Anything else is a distraction early on!
Do you relate to this or have any other tarpit idea to add?
