Al Ries Quotes
We need to reengineer companies to focus on figuring out who the customer is, what's the market and what kind of product you should build.
The grim reality is that most start-ups fail. Most new products are not successful. Yet the story of perseverance, creative genius, and hard work persists.
Start-ups make so many mistakes that the challenge to identify the root cause of a failure is tough. But believing in your own plan is probably the worst.
Only brand names register in the mind... What you should generally do is take a regular word and use it out of context to connote the primary attribute of your brand.
Customers want brands that are narrow in scope and distinguishable by a single word, the shorter the better.
The real barrier (to building a brand) is the human mind. It normally takes decades to build a brand because it takes decades to penetrate the gray matter in between your ears.
Strategy should evolve out of the mud of the marketplace, not in the antiseptic environment of an ivory tower.
The Law of the Generic: One of the fastest routes to failure is giving a brand a generic name.
Entrepreneurship is not really building a product, it's not having an idea, it's not being in the right place at the right time. It's fundamentally company building.
This is one of the most important lessons of the scientific method: if you cannot fail, you cannot learn.
The Lean Startup has evolved into a movement that is having a significant impact on how companies are built, funded and scaled.
Entrepreneurs can't forecast accurately, because they are trying something fundamentally new. So they will often be laughably behind plan - and on the brink of success.
If the plan is to see what happens, a team is guaranteed to succeed - at seeing what happens - but won't necessarily gain validated learning - If you cannot fail, you cannot learn.
A solid process lays the foundation for a healthy culture, one where ideas are evaluated by merit and not by job title.
The goal of every startup experiment is to discover how to build a sustainable business around that vision.
It doesn't matter if you call it a boom or a bubble. The startup business moves in cycles, and what goes up will eventually come down.
The lesson of the MVP is that any additional work beyond what was required to start learning is waste, no matter how important it might have seemed at the time.
Vanity metrics are the numbers you want to publish on TechCrunch to make your competitors feel bad.
At IMVU, the cost of customer acquisition through our five-dollar-a-day AdWords campaign was less than twenty-five cents. Our revenue from those same customers was more than a dollar.
What if we found ourselves building something that nobody wanted? In that case what did it matter if we did it on time and on budget?
By the time that product is ready to be distributed widely, it will already have established customers.
A head start is rarely large enough to matter, and time spent in stealth mode-away from customers-is unlikely to provide a head start. The only way to win is to learn faster than anyone else.
When blame inevitably arises, the most senior people in the room should repeat this mantra: if a mistake happens, shame on us for making it so easy to make that mistake.
Customers don't care how much time something takes to build. They care only if it serves their needs.
It normally takes decades to build a brand... It's the forgetting of the old truth that allows a person to accept a new truth. You need to allow enough time for this forgetting to take place
1. Do consumers recognize that they have the problem you are trying to solve?2. If there was a solution, would they buy it?3. Would they buy it from us?4. Can we build a solution for that problem?
