Your app only needs one thing the others don't have.

Strategy · 5 min read

A client came in with a long feature list. They'd looked at the competitors and mapped out everything those apps could do. Task management, budget tracking, team coordination, messaging. The competitors had most of it covered. Not brilliantly, but covered. And the client's initial instinct was to match all of it and then add more on top.

That's a losing strategy. You can't out-feature an established app that's had years of development and a full engineering team. And you shouldn't try. What you can do is find the one thing they don't do at all. The thing that nobody in the space has touched. And make that the centre of your entire product.

That's what this client did. And it's the smartest decision they made during the whole design process.

Find the gap, not the improvement

There's a difference between doing something better and doing something nobody else does. Doing it better is incremental. Your task list is prettier. Your onboarding is smoother. Your notifications are smarter. That might win you some users, but it's not a reason to switch from something that already works. People are lazy. If the app they've got is good enough, "slightly better" isn't enough to move them.

But if you do something their current app literally cannot do? That's a different conversation. Now you're not competing. You're offering something new. The user doesn't need to weigh up whether your version of feature X is better than theirs. They just know that you have feature Y and nobody else does. That's your edge.

This client looked at the top five apps in their space and asked, "What's missing?" Not "what's bad." What's missing. And they found a gap that none of the competitors had addressed. A feature based on their own subject matter expertise, something they knew mattered because they lived it. That's where the best differentiators come from. Not from brainstorming sessions. From experience.

Kill the one you love to protect the one that matters

Here's the hard part. Once you know your differentiator, you have to protect it. That means cutting other things. Not the features you don't care about. Those are easy to cut. I'm talking about cutting features you genuinely want. Features you've been thinking about for months. Features that excite you.

This client had a feature they were passionate about. A visual tool that would let users build something creative inside the app. It was a good idea. But when we looked at the screen budget and the development complexity, it would have eaten into the time and resources needed for the differentiator. So they made the call. They parked the creative tool for version two and put everything behind the one feature that would actually set them apart.

That takes guts. And it takes clarity about what your app is actually for. Most people struggle with this because they see every feature as essential. But the truth is, most features are nice to have. Your differentiator is need to have. Protect it at all costs.

One feature can carry the whole product

Think about the apps that broke through in crowded markets. Superhuman didn't build a better email client. They built speed. Everything about the product, every design choice, every keyboard shortcut, was in service of making email faster. That's one thing. And it was enough to charge $30 a month in a market full of free options.

According to Harvard Business Review, the most successful product launches focus on solving one core problem exceptionally well rather than addressing multiple problems adequately. The logic is simple. People remember one thing. If your app does twenty things at a six out of ten, nobody talks about it. If it does one thing at a ten out of ten, people tell their friends.

Your MVP doesn't need to do everything. It needs to do one thing so well that users can't get it anywhere else. Find that thing. Build around it. Let everything else wait. That's not a limitation. That's a strategy.

Sources
To Get More Customers, Narrow Your Focus (Harvard Business Review) - Narrower value propositions outperform broader ones in competitive markets.
Top Reasons Startups Fail (CB Insights) - Lack of market need and getting outcompeted are top failure factors.

Related blog posts:

The difference between a feature and a solution →

Your competitor's app doesn't matter as much as you think →

What is an MVP? →