As we’ve built Spreedly one thing we’ve tried to do at every turn is to stay focused on what’s really going to add value for our clients right now. Because of that focus we often put off “obvious” features until later – they just don’t add enough value yet. The “delete button” has been one of those features: we’d get the occasional request to delete a site from Spreedly but it was easier to handle it manually than to spend the time to make it accessible via the UI.

But: the requests have increased lately, and we’ve also seen a lot of Spreedly sites named “Delete Me 000”, so we decided it was finally time to knock out the feature. You can now leave any site you’re a member of:

If a test site is left without members, it will be immediately deleted. Production sites will be deleted 1 week after the last member leaves – the window is there so we can undo an accidental deletion. Of course, undo is currently manual, since there’s no point spending time on it until we’ve actually had to do it manually a few times.

The general lesson is: don’t add functionality just because it’s obvious, add it once you know it will get used. Sometimes you’ll need to experiment, but always do it in as minimal a fashion as possible – any time you spend on a feature that isn’t used is time taken from a feature that your customers could get value from immediately!