What You Really Need Is A Market, Not An Idea
(Source: news.ycombinator.com)
I’d rather build something imperfect that a lot of people use than something really perfect that no one uses.
— Evan Sharp, Pinterest, from Designer Founders Book #1
What If Money Was No Object?
How to Get Startup Ideas, by Paul Graham
Must-read essay for startup-oriented minds. Don’t worry, this isn’t your 1-2-3 to making the next Facebook —- this is a soup to nuts breakdown of what it means to discover meaningful problems and how to approach solving those problems.
- Don’t chase your competitors. Chase your customers.
- Newer isn’t better. Better is better.
- Be useful first. Then be usable.
- Design your business around people, not technologies.
- Don’t bank on epiphanies.
— Scott McDonald, UX Magazine
(Source: uxmag.com)
I find easy to be the most personally rewarding, too. It has such direct impact. When something is easier, you feel it. You[‘ve] done it the hard way before, so when you experience the easy way you immediately know the difference.
— Competing on Easy — Jason Fried of 37Signals
Running a start-up is like eating glass. You just start to like the taste of your own blood.
— Sean Parker
(Source: allthingsd.com)
I’ve spent more than four decades founding, coaching, teaching and investing in startups, and nothing breaks my heart more than meeting a starry-eyed founder who says “we’re almost ready to show it to people.” The “it” is a physical or web product they’ve often been locked-down, pounding away at, for many weeks.
In my view, this is the nastiest of all startup sins: failing to involve customers and their feedback from literally the first day of a startup’s life, keeping the most vital opinions silent—those of the eventual customers—for far longer than necessary.
— Steve Blank, “Why Too Many Startups (er) Suck”
(Source: steveblank.com)
Things I've Quit Doing At My Desk
(Source: Lifehacker)
Today’s phones are fairly passive. You’ll come to your iPhone, you’ll unlock it … and the paradigm is that there’s a list of things you can fire up and you just pick which one you want. And I think we might look back on that 20 years from now and realize it’s incredibly dumb, compared to a reality where the phone automatically says, ‘here’s probably what you want, and here’s probably what you want to do after that.’
— Daniel Gross, Co-Founder of Cue (Universal Calendar App) (via Co. Design)
