(P) Making something you think someone else will want to use: Ideas like this suffer from a range of maladies. The need is unverified. The ideal feature set hidden in someone else’s head, and you...

Let me hit you with some logic: If no one will buy your product, you’re toast. If you can’t make your product, you’re toast. If you can’t make your product and sell it profitably,...

Maybe no one has said this explicitly, but I realized that I’ve almost come to believe that to start the next mega-company you need to be a twenty-something Harvard computer science dropout. I’ve been...

I didn’t think I’d believe this. I’m a major advocate of killing things that don’t work and quickly moving on to new ones, but I’ve noticed an interesting pattern in a few companies I’ve...

I’ve been noticing a trend in how some companies began, including Apple, Facebook, Airbnb, Ford, and others: Someone wanted something They made it They began to offer / sell it to other people  ...

  I’ve come to believe that customer validation interviews are detrimental to a pre-product startup for two reasons: You’ll wind up building something no one wants. You’ll wind up not building something everyone wants....

I’m on a contrarian kick right now. Peter Thiel recently released a book titled “Zero to One” about “Monopoly Theory”, in which he postulates that “If you’re starting a company, you always want to aim...

  There are plenty of caveats to this post. I’m going to ignore them all.   I don’t believe in “customer validation” or “customer interviews” anymore.   We’ve tried to “validate” ideas many times...

I listened to Daniel talk to someone about his referral program and heard a lot of the same things we’ve been hearing as we’ve coached people through their own campaigns. Here are five common...

This morning we designed an email to go out to our user-base with a very specific objective in mind: we want them to call us. We went through a few design iterations, changing colors,...