“Why don’t we add x feature”, “let’s accommodate this business case”, “we can throw that in”, “I’m sure that someone would want to customise the background colours”…
Instead of trying to solve all problems for all users in your niche target market, launch your product for the most common user. Ignore the superusers and the outliers.
When Amazon launched the Fire Phone, it was crammed full of incredible functionality, including:
- A large screen, ample storage and an impressive camera.
- “Dynamic Perspective”, a smart system that used four cameras to track your eyes and follow your line of sight. With this, the phone was able to tweak the display to show depth and the appearance of 3D. It was impressive of games.
- “Mayday service”, technology support in less than 60 seconds.

Dynamic Perspective
The Amazon Fire Phone has been built by engineers to show off their brilliance.
When Steve Jobs launched the first iPhone, on the other hand, it didn’t even have copy/paste. It was buggy and missing features that were possible at the time.
The iPhone changed the world. The Fire Phone was a disastrous flop.
The problem with the fire phone was that it tried to attract and accommodate too many users in the smartphone market. It targeted gamers, technophobic grandmothers and everyone in between.
If Amazon had focused on what the most common smartphone user at the time wanted and not on what their engineers could do, the Fire Phone would probably have been more of a success.
Once the phone had been launched and adopted, it would have been possible to push software updates with requested features (like copy/paste).