Startups as companies seems to be a common approach to create new business. There are many startups being created, with online services as their primary goal and goods. But the fact that only few companies of that kind can grow quickly — where many of their owners are expecting an exponential growing — others are failing on almost everything that they can expect, from project planning to the implementation, and many of them will not succeed. You will probably see many startup owners asking theirself «what did I missed?». I think that to succeed on a startup is to have a very clear an initial goal for the product features that it will offer. Without a clear goal — which leads to a product roadmap — they will offer something very different from the original idea. Without having a good roadmap, you will be missing resources, almost of all kinds. Is nice to have a good product, but no matter if it is fully implemented or not, the quality of that product with its released features should be good enough to support the initial investment, and probably it will make the product to grow as you are expecting.
The problem with online services is the fact that they are based on software. Software is not a physical product, so you can make any changes that you want — or many changes that your resources can support — and you can make mistakes on its design, speaking in terms of products, and you can rebuild it. But I think that having that flexibility is almost your biggest problem. Once you are creating a product like a fountain pen, a good desktop chair, and similar products, you cannot rebuild them without wasting resources on building a new product. The same applies in software, you can do changes on your product, but not without wasting resources if do not have a clear idea about what are you doing. So, you just need to sit in calm and think in a very good roadmap to get all those features done, and probably you should wait the next version to get them implemented.
Constant changes without getting things done will kill your startup. You need a roadmap, fixed milestones and well designed features to make your software a rock solid Software as Service product, something that has high availability in mind, not a buggy and quickly monkey patched application without a good code base. A good design and clear goals will make your product more feasible to allow future changes, without that, you will finish spending more time than is really required to implement new features. As example you can see how 37Signals products have grown in a short period, offering very good services which are widely used, but they have a very clear roadmap about their products, they do not introduce new features until they are really clear and well done. If you see, their products are simple, they meet a very good usability and their service is offering various integrated products with very good stability, like Basecamp, Highrise and Campfire.
Another example is GMail. Google got GMail running as beta for a long time of period, they have called “Google Labs” all their experimental features, without releasing them until they got a good knowledge about its behaviour, with further releases only once they have clear that they are working well. GMail beta was working for many years, without being released, and now they are offering not only GMail and their search engine, they offer a complete market of SaaS applications which are integrated with almost all their products. But they have roadmaps for all their products, they do have an intuitive planning of their releases.
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