Deleting features
I spent three months building a post discovery algorithm. Nobody used it, and it never answered the question people were actually asking. So I deleted it.
“What are the best RSS feeds to send to my Kindle?”
This is a common question people send me after signing up for RSS to Kindle.
So for the past three months, I went down a rabbit hole and built an entire post discovery algorithm. It would query every article ever sent to someone, rank the top ones, decay over time, weight publishers differently.
But when I looked at the PostHog recordings, no one used it.
It seemed smart but it didn’t answer the original question. People asked which feeds to follow, not what post was best.
So I deleted it.
I spent the last couple weeks rebuilding the app around that one question. Now the home page is a ranking of RSS feeds by how many people subscribe on their Kindle. There’s filters for category (tech, business, news, etc) and top vs. recent. That’s the entire feature.
It’s way easier to maintain and less costly than the original discovery algorithm. And it actually answers their question.
I do think that in the age of agents, a really important skill is deleting features. Otherwise your app will get bloated and hard to use.
Go check it out and let me know what you think.
Originally published on martymarkenson.com.
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