Freeloader

Freeloader turned a power feature hidden inside existing browsers into a product. Mark Pincus built his first company, Freeloader, on offline browsing, a feature that already existed but sat buried in Netscape and Internet Explorer.

Pincus uses it as his example that the best proven idea is often buried in someone else's product. Nikita Bier did something similar, finding his product inside an Arabic-only version of another app. Pincus contrasts this with starting from a blank page, which he calls wildcat drilling.

Lenny's Podcast

Freeloader started from a very small, humble premise. Pincus groups Freeloader with support.com and early Facebook, a site for checking out Harvard students, as hits that began from embarrassingly small places.

His rule is that the bigger the eventual ambition, the smaller the starting point should be. He later broke it at Tribe, which tried to do everything and failed, then returned to it with Zynga, which began as a Facebook poker game. "The more ambitious you are, the more humble you should be and the smaller place you should be willing to start."

Lenny's Podcast▶ 23:55