People are happy to pay for things that work well. Never be afraid to put a price on something. If you pour your heart into something and make it great, sell it. For real money. Even if there are free options, even if the market is flooded with free. People will pay for things they love.
Jason Fried
People are happy to pay for things that work well. Never be afraid to put a price on something. If you pour your heart into something and make it great, sell it. For real money. Even if there are free options, even if the market is flooded with free. People will pay for things they love.
Jason Fried
We all have the drum major instinct. We all want to be important, to surpass others, to achieve distinction, to lead the parade…. And the great issue of life is to harness the drum major instinct. It is a good instinct if you don’t distort it and pervert it. Don’t give it up. Keep feeling the need for being important. Keep feeling the need for being first. But I want you to be the first in love. I want you to be the first in moral excellence. I want you to be the first in generosity.
Martin Luther King
How will people judge us a generation from now?
Chris Guillebeau
The pain is not limited to the beginning of the venture. It’s still there three years in, despite real revenue, profitability, customers arriving everyday, and a great team.
A Smart Bear
Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.
Antoine de Saint-Exupery
If you’re worried about threats to the survival of your company, don’t look for them in the news. Look in the mirror.
Paul Graham
You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle.
Steve Jobs
Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it.
Steve Jobs
If you’re worried about threats to the survival of your company, don’t look for them in the news. Look in the mirror.
Paul Graham
Early in a startup you need to acquire your customers for free. Later on, you can spend on customer acquisition.
Fred Wilson
Whether you prevail or fail depends more on what you do to yourself than on what the world does to you.
Jim Collins
Understand your users. That’s the key. The essential task in a startup is to create wealth; the dimension of wealth you have most control over is how much you improve users’ lives; and the hardest part of that is knowing what to make for them. Once you know what to make, it’s mere effort to make it, and most decent hackers are capable of that.
Paul Graham
Start-up organizations provide an extraordinary example of chaos organized into manageable chunks. Perhaps more than anyone else, the individuals who comprise a start-up team are required to understand their team’s goals across a variety of disciplines — research, marketing, design, development, architecture, etc. — as well as their own responsibility to move the company’s overarching objective forward. Entrepreneurs must choose the direction, designers must think through the options, and developers must cull a functional product or service, all while giving feedback to and receiving it from their colleagues.
Good ideas need good strategy to realise their potential.
Reid Hoffman
I learned that quick releases and financial discipline are the lifeblood of any successful startup.
Michael Schneider
People love to imagine a worst-case scenario. Especially when it comes time to quit doing what they hate and start doing what they love instead.
Hugh MacLeod
It’s not only good software that takes a decade to develop, good companies do too. If you agree that’s true, it follows that you wouldn’t want promising entrepreneurs to go chasing waterfalls before they know how to paddle in the pond. Or something like that. I guess what I’m trying to say is that I want to see evolution get a chance to work its magic, but if great products and companies keep getting abandoned or bought after 3-5 years, there’ll be less of that. And that’s a damn shame.
David Fried
Ultimately, the best test of any product is to go to your target market and pretend like it’s a real business. You’ll find out soon enough if it is or not. You have to take some risks. You can sit and analyze these different markets forever and ever and ever, and you’d get all these wonderful answers, and they still may be wrong. The problem with the businessman type is they spend a lot of time with all their great wisdom and all their spreadsheets and all their Harvard Business Review people, and they’d either become convinced that there’s no market at all or that they have the market nailed.
Acquisition should never be the goal. Build something people love, and build revenue to keep it sustainable. After that, the decision to sell is very personal.
One clear focus for everyone. Your business needs laser focus on what the next objective is. Execution is key.
Ben Keighran
What is required in our field, more than anything else, is the continuous transgression. Professionalism does not allow for that because transgression has to encompass the possibility of failure and if you are professional your instinct is not to fail, it is to repeat success.
Risk is not obvious. And reward is not obvious. Don’t do the obvious thing. Because I can assure you it rarely works out as planned.
Fred Wilson
It’s the attention to detail that really defines great business delivery.
Richard Branson
Don’t waste your precious time. Phone calls and emails can eat your day. Don’t let them. No one will think less of you for getting to the point.
Richard Branson
Whatever your brand stands for, you have to deliver on the promise. Don’t promise what you can’t deliver, and deliver everything you promise. That’s the only way you’ll ever control your brand.
Richard Branson
Every brand means something, and nobody can ever really control all the meanings a brand acquires. Brands are ideas. They are tangles of associations.
Richard Branson
Do not let failure dictate your future choices.
Roger Ehrenberg
If you just want to become a professional and make money, I don’t want you on my team. But if you want to become the best player in the world and score a goal in the last minute to win the game, then I will help you become that. Me, when I was 4 years old, it was my dream to play with the best. When I got older, they paid me to play, but I would have played for nothing. I didn’t become a football player to become rich. Yes, rich as a person. Trophies. Memories.
Eric Cantona
Not everything you do actually gets a response. In fact, most of it doesn’t. But each effort is a tiny brick in the wall of perception, even when it appears to be dumb and even senseless.
Seth Godin
Every niche social circle will have its own cultural set of requirements and idiosyncracies. This will require custom approaches for aspiring tribe leaders to produce. If you’re setting up a community, you should focus less on the technical tools available to you and focus more on what the unique needs and wants are of that community. If you’re willing to customize the network just to fit that niche, you win.
Make art every day
Gaping Void
The market for something to believe in is infinite
Hugh MacLeod
Winners quit all the time. They just quit the right stuff at the right time.
Seth Godin
In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they are not.
Unknown
Innovation without execution is just a hallucination.
Colin Powell
Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.
Victor Frankl
Release early and often. Then try to find out what people think about what you are doing, get feedback. If people like your creation, that will inspire you and give you more energy to do even better. If you are doing something wrong, you will have a choice to fix things and continue or drop the project and move on to another idea. A lot of online businesses are failing because the owners think that they are creating value, but they actually they are not. And they find out about it too late and get frustrated. Be flexible and focus on your consumers’ needs. And you will always find ways of providing value.
Michael Dadashyan
Early in a startup, product decisions should be hunch driven. Later on, product decisions should be data driven.
Fred Wilson
Take risks when you get out of business school. If you don’t take risks, you won’t find yourself in an interesting job and career.
Fred Wilson
Ideas that most people derided as ridiculous have produced the best outcomes. Don’t do the obvious thing.
Fred Wilson
Unhappily Orin Silver, a man of far-reaching aims, had died too soon to prove that the end justifies the means. His accounts revealed merely what the means had been; and these were such that it was fortunate for his wife and daughter that his books were examined only after his impressive funeral. His wife died of the disclosure, and Mattie, at twenty, was left alone to make her way on the fifty dollars obtained from the sale of her piano.
Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton
Perception modifies reality
What’s the best reason to start a company?
Because you want to breathe life into something that didn’t exist and then see it provide value to others at scale.
Mark Hendrickson
It’s crucial in a startup to constantly prioritize the most important projects and put anything on the backburner that doesn’t have a relatively high expected value. I’ve made the mistake of prioritizing things that shouldn’t have been prioritized, which caused resources to get tied up in projects that weren’t going to make a big enough difference for the things that mattered most at the time.
Mark Hendrickson
Internet philanthropy works when you foster community and erase the once massive boundary between an organization and its constituents. On the Internet, the community IS the organization. Create a dynamic where people are moved to invite other people to join. It’s not a one- to-many relationship, it’s a many-to-many relationship. It is a relationship that is based on hope, not pity. Give users incremental rewards daily and appeal to motivations other than despair.
Matt Flannery
We are part of the first generation where it will be possible for every person to connect with every other person on the planet. People are fed up with an economic system that only captures our greedy nature and are looking for ways to express the compassion they naturally feel.
Matt Flannery – Kiva.org
Overconsumption, climate change, and mass extinction. Sorry to ruin the optimism around here, but if you’re not scared, you’re not paying attention! The current state of our habitat is the biggest challenge our species has ever faced. Are we going to confront the real issues, or are we going to keep following the “leaders” that just add more and more fuel to the fire? I vote for dethroning them – we don’t have time to screw around anymore. We all need to expect the worst, and then do everything we can to prevent it.
No is easier to do.
Yes is easier to say.
Jason Fried
The first rule of doing work that matters: go to work on a regular basis.
Seth Godin