• Failure is not a prerequisite for success. People who failed before have the same amount of success as people who have never tried at all.
• Unless you’re a fortune-teller, long-term business planning is a fantasy. There are just too many factors that are out of your hands: market conditions, competitors, customers, the economy, etc. Writing a plan makes you feel in control of things you can’t actually control.
• If you write a big plan, you’ll most likely never look at it anyway. Plans more than a few pages long just wind up as fossils in your file cabinet.
• Give up on the guesswork. Decide what you’re going to do this week, not this year. Figure out the next most important thing and do that. Make decisions right before you do something, not far in advance.
• Maybe the right size for your company is five people. Maybe it’s forty. Maybe it’s two hundred. Or maybe it’s just you and a laptop. Don’t make assumptions about how big you should be ahead of time. Grow slow and see what feels right—premature hiring is the death of many companies.
• Don’t be insecure about aiming to be a small business. Anyone who runs a business that’s sustainable and profitable, whether it’s big or small, should be proud.
• Workaholics miss the point, too. They try to fix problems by throwing sheer hours at them. They try to make up for intellectual laziness with brute force. This results in inelegant solutions. They don’t look for ways to be more efficient because they actually like working overtime.
• To do great work, you need to feel that you’re making a difference. This doesn’t mean you need to find the cure for cancer. It’s just that your efforts need to feel valuable.
• The easiest, most straightforward way to create a great product or service is to make something you want to use.
• If you’re solving someone else’s problem, you’re constantly stabbing in the dark. When you solve your own problem, the light comes on. You know exactly what the right answer is.
• Best of all, this “solve your own problem” approach lets you fall in love with what you’re making. You know the problem and the value of its solution intimately.
• Ideas are cheap and plentiful. The original pitch idea is such a small part of a business that it’s almost negligible. The real question is how well you execute.
• There’s always enough time if you spend it right. And don’t think you have to quit your day job, either. Hang onto it and start work on your project at night.
• Besides, the perfect time never arrives. You’re always too young or old or busy or broke or something else. If you constantly fret about timing things perfectly, they’ll never happen.
• For everyone who loves you, there will be others who hate you. If no one’s upset by what you’re saying, you’re probably not pushing hard enough. (And you’re probably boring, too.)
• If what we make isn’t right for everyone, that’s OK. We’re willing to lose some customers if it means that others love our products intensely.
• We’re in a service economy now. Service businesses (e.g., consultants, software companies, wedding planners, graphic designers, and hundreds of others) don’t require much to get going. If you’re running a business like that, avoid outside funding.
• When you turn to outsiders for funding, you have to answer to them too. That’s fine at first, when everyone agrees. But what happens down the road? Are you starting your own business to take orders from someone else? Raise money and that’s what you’ll wind up doing.
• There’s nothing easier than spending other people’s money. But then you run out and need to go back for more. And every time you go back, they take more of your company.
• Do you really need ten people or will two or three do for now? Do you really need $500,000 or is $50,000 (or $5,000) enough for now? Maybe eventually you’ll need to go the bigger, more expensive route, but not right now.
• Anyone who takes a “we’ll figure out how to profit in the future” attitude to business is being ridiculous. A business without a path to profit isn’t a business, it’s a hobby .
• Actual businesses worry about profit from day one. Actual businesses don’t mask deep problems by saying, “It’s OK, we’re a startup.” Act like an actual business and you’ll have a much better shot at succeeding.
• When you build a company with the intention of being acquired, you emphasize the wrong things. Instead of focusing on getting customers to love you, you worry about who’s going to buy you. That’s the wrong thing to obsess over.
• Business owners who sell out, retire for six months, and then get back in the game. They miss the thing they gave away. And usually, they’re back with a business that isn’t nearly as good as their first.
• Huge organizations can take years to pivot. They talk instead of act. They meet instead of do. But if you keep your mass low, you can quickly change anything: your entire business model, product, feature set, and/or marketing message. You can make mistakes and fix them quickly.
• You can turn a bunch of great ideas into a crappy product real fast by trying to do them all at once. You just can’t do everything you want to do and do it well. So start chopping. Getting to great starts by cutting out stuff that’s merely good.
•The stuff you have to do is where you should begin. Start at the epicenter. For example, if you’re opening a hot dog stand, you could worry about the condiments, the cart, the name, the decoration. But the first thing you should worry about is the hot dog. The hot dogs are the epicenter. Everything else is secondary.
• But getting infatuated with details too early leads to disagreement, meetings, and delays. You get lost in things that don’t really matter. Nail the basics first and worry about the specifics later.
• Commit to making decisions. Don’t wait for the perfect solution. Decide and move forward. When you get in that flow of making decision after decision, you build momentum and boost morale.
• When you get in that flow of making decision after decision, you build momentum and boost morale.
• The problem comes when you postpone decisions in the hope that a perfect answer will come to you later. It won’t. You’re as likely to make a great call today as you are tomorrow.
• You don’t have to live with a decision forever. If you make a mistake, you can correct it later. It doesn’t matter how much you plan, you’ll still get some stuff wrong anyway. Don’t make things worse by overanalyzing and delaying before you even get going.
• When things aren’t working, the natural inclination is to throw more at the problem. More people, time, and money. All that ends up doing is making the problem bigger. The right way to go is the opposite direction: Cut back.
• The core of your business should be built around things that won’t change. Things that people are going to want today and ten years from now. Those are the things you should invest in.
• In business, too many people obsess over tools, software tricks, scaling issues, fancy office space, lavish furniture, and other frivolities instead of what really matters. And what really matters is how to actually get customers and make money.
• When is it safe to let people have it? ss a lot sooner than you’re comfortable with. Once your product does what it needs to do, get it out there.
• Put off anything you don’t need for launch. Build the necessities now, worry about the luxuries later.
• Why are you doing this? Ever find yourself working on something without knowing exactly why? Someone just told you to do it. It’s pretty common, actually. That’s why it’s important to ask why you’reworking on.
• What problem are you solving? What’s the problem? Are customers confused? Are you confused? Is something not clear enough? Was something not possible before that should be possible now? Sometimes when you ask these questions, you’ll find you’re solving an imaginary problem. That’s when it’s time to stop and reevaluate what the hell you’re doing.
• Sometimes abandoning what you’re working on is the right move, even if you’ve already put in a lot of effort. Don’t throw good time after bad work.
• If you’re constantly staying late and working weekends, it’s not because there’s too much work to be done. It’s because you’re not getting enough done at work. And the reason is interruptions.
• You can’t get meaningful things done when you’re constantly going start, stop, start, stop. Instead, you should get in the alone zone. Long stretches of alone time are when you’re most productive.
• A lot of people get off on solving problems with complicated solutions. Flexing your intellectual muscles can be intoxicating. A better idea: Find a judo solution, one that delivers maximum efficiency with minimum effort.
• When good enough gets the job done, go for it. It’s way better than wasting resources or, even worse, doing nothing because you can’t afford the complex solution. And remember, you can usually turn good enough into great later.
• To keep your momentum and motivation up, get in the habit of accomplishing small victories along the way. The longer something takes, the less likely it is that you’re going to finish it.
• People automatically associate quitting with failure, but sometimes that’s exactly what you should do. If you already spent too much time on something that wasn’t worth it, walk away. You can’t get that time back. The worst thing you can do now is waste even more time.
• Forgoing sleep is a bad idea. Sure, you get those extra hours right now, but you pay in spades later: You destroy your creativity.
• The solution: Break the big thing into smaller things. The smaller it is, the easier it is to estimate. You’re probably still going to get it wrong, but you’ll be a lot less wrong than if you estimated a big project.
• Don’t prioritize with numbers or labels. Avoid saying, “This is high priority, this is low priority.” Likewise, don’t say, “This is a three, this is a two, this is a one, this is a three,” etc.
• Instead, prioritize visually. Put the most important thing at the top. That way you’ll only have a single next most important thing to do at a time. And that’s enough.
• Big decisions are hard to make and hard to change. And once you make one, the tendency is to continue believing you made the right decision, even if you didn’t.
• Instead, make choices that are small enough that they’re effectively temporary. When you make tiny decisions, you can’t make big mistakes.
• If you’re successful, people will try to copy what you do. It’s just a fact of life. But there’s a great way to protect yourself from copycats: Make you part of your product or service. Inject what’s unique about the way you think into what you sell.
• If you think a competitor sucks, say so. When you do that, you’ll find that others who agree with you will rally to your side. Being the anti-______ is a great way to differentiate yourself and attract followers.
• Conventional wisdom says that to beat your competitors, you need to one-up them. If they have four features, you need five (or fifteen, or twenty-five). If they’re spending $20,000, you need to spend $30,000.
• Do less than your competitors to beat them. Solve the simple problems and leave the hairy, difficult, nasty problems to the competition.
• If you’re planning to build “the iPod killer” or “the next Pokemon,” you’re already dead. You’re allowing the competition to set the parameters. You’re not going to out-Apple Apple. They’re defining the rules of the game. And you can’t beat someone who’s making the rules. It’s not a win-or-lose battle. Their profits and costs are theirs. Yours are yours.
• Don’t believe that “customer is always right” stuff, either. Let’s say you’re a chef. If enough of your customers say your food is too salty or too hot, you change it. Making a few vocal customers happy isn’t worth it if it ruins the product for everyone else.
• Don’t be a jerk about saying no, though. Just be honest. If you’re not willing to yield to a customer request, be polite and explain why. People are surprisingly understanding when you take the time to explain your point of view.
• Scaring away new customers is worse than losing old customers. And there are always more people who are not using your product than people who are. Make sure you make it easy for these people to get on board.
• You can’t be everything to everyone. Companies need to be true to a type of customer more than a specific individual customer with changing needs.
• By all means, have as many great ideas as you can. Get excited about them. Just don’t act in the heat of the moment. Write them down and park them for a few days. Then, evaluate their actual priority with a calm mind.
• There’s no need for a spreadsheet, database, or filing system. The requests that really matter are the ones you’ll hear over and over. After a while, you won’t be able to forget them.
• No one knows who you are right now. And that’s just fine. Being obscure is a great position to be in. Be happy you’re in the shadows. Use this time to make mistakes without the whole world hearing about them. Keep tweaking. Work out the kinks. Test random ideas.
• When you’re a success, the pressure to maintain predictability and consistency builds. You get more conservative. It’s harder to take risks.
• So build an audience. Speak, write, blog, tweet, make videos—whatever. Share information that’s valuable and you’ll slowly but surely build a loyal audience.
• Don’t be afraid to show your flaws. Imperfections are real and people respond to real.
• We’ve been written up in big mainstream publications like Wired and Time , but we’ve found that we actually get more hits when we’re profiled on sites like Daring Fireball, a site for Mac nerds, or Lifehacker, a productivity site.
• Emulate drug dealers. Make your product so good, so addictive, so “can’t miss” that giving customers a small, free taste makes them come back with cash in hand.
• You want an easily digestible introduction to what you sell. This gives people a way to try it without investing any money or a lot of time. You should know that people will come back for more. If you’re not confident about that, you haven’t created a strong enough product.
• You will not be a big hit right away. You will not get rich quick. You are not so special that everyone else will instantly pay attention. No one cares about you. At least not yet. Get used to it.
• Trade the dream of overnight success for slow, measured growth. It’s hard, but you have to be patient. You have to grind it out.
• Never hire anyone to do a job until you’ve tried to do it yourself first. That way, you’ll understand the nature of the work. You’ll know what a job well done looks like. You’ll know how to write a realistic job description and which questions to ask in an interview.
• Don’t hire for pleasure; hire to kill pain. Similarly, if you lose someone, don’t replace him immediately. See how long you can get by without that person and that position. You’ll often discover you don’t need as many people as you think.
• Pass on hiring people you don’t need, even if you think that person’s a great catch. You’ll be doing your company more harm than good if you bring in talented people who have nothing important to do.
• Problems start when you have more people than you need. You start inventing work to keep everyone busy. Artificial work leads to artificial projects. And those artificial projects lead to real costs and complexity.
• Hire a ton of people rapidly and a “strangers at a cocktail party” problem is exactly what you end up with. There are always new faces around, so everyone is unfailingly polite. Everyone tries to avoid any conflict or drama. No one says, “This idea sucks.” People appease instead of challenge.
• You need to be able to tell people when they’re full of crap. You need an environment where everyone feels safe enough to be honest when things get tough.
• We all know resumés are a joke. They’re exaggerations. If you hire based on this garbage, you’re missing the point of what hiring is about. You want a specific candidate who cares specifically about your company, your products, your customers, and your job.
• But after that, the curve flattens out. There’s surprisingly little difference between a candidate with six months of experience and one with six years. The real difference comes from the individual’s dedication, personality, and intelligence.
• That means you need to avoid hiring delegators, those people who love telling others what to do. Delegators are dead weight for a small team.
• Managers of one are people who come up with their own goals and execute them. They don’t need heavy direction. They don’t need daily check-ins.
• These people free you from oversight. They set their own direction. When you leave them alone, they surprise you with how much they’ve gotten done.
• When something goes wrong, someone is going to tell the story. You’ll be better off if it’s you. Otherwise, you create an opportunity for rumors, hearsay, and false information to spread. People will respect you more if you are open, honest, public, and responsive during a crisis.
• This may have caused” The “may” here implies there might not be anything wrong at all. That’s a classic non-apology apology move. It slights the very real problem(s) that customers are experiencing. If this didn’t affect them, you don’t really need to say anything. If it did affect them, then there’s no need for “may” here. Stop wavering.
• Everyone on your team should be connected to your customers—maybe not every day, but at least a few times throughout the year. That’s the only way your team is going to feel the hurt your customers are experiencing.
• After you introduce a new feature, change a policy, or remove something, knee-jerk reactions will pour in. Resist the urge to panic or make rapid changes in response.
• In fact, you may hear only negative voices even when the majority of your customers are happy about a change. Make sure you don’t foolishly backpedal on a necessary but controversial decision.
• When everything constantly needs approval, you create a culture of nonthinkers. You create a boss-versus-worker relationship that screams, “I don’t trust you.”
• What do you gain if you ban employees from, say, visiting a social-networking site or watching YouTube while at work? You gain nothing. That time doesn’t magically convert to work. They’ll just find some other diversion.
• When you turn into one of these people who adds ASAP to the end of every request, you’re saying everything is high priority. And when everything is high priority, nothing is.
• What it will do is create artificial stress, which leads to burnout and worse. So reserve your use of emergency language for true emergencies.
• If you want to do something, you’ve got to do it now. You can’t put it on a shelf and wait two months to get around to it. You can’t just say you’ll do it later. Later, you won’t be pumped up about it anymore.
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