Edit wiki/building-all-in-one-product.md — Rookie Mistakes & Gotchas

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# building an all-in-one product

*(common gotcha)*

## what happened

teams try to build a full platform with auth, dashboards, analytics, social features, notifications — in 24 hours. they end up with nothing working.

## why it's a gotcha

you're not here to build a billion-dollar startup in 48 hours. you're here to show your ability to identify a problem and solve it with a creative, functional prototype. scope kills more hackathon projects than bad code does. this is the feature-level version of [[optimizing-for-scale-too-early|optimizing for scale too early]] — same over-engineering energy, different axis.

## the fix

pick one core feature and make it work beautifully. everything else is a slide that says "future work." judges respect a focused, working prototype over an ambitious, broken one. watch out for the [[just-one-more-feature-loop|"just one more feature" loop]] that causes this scope explosion in the first place, and resist the [[over-planning-trap|urge to plan a platform]] when you should be building a prototype.