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We must learn what customers really want, not what they say they want or what we think they should want.

Eric Ries

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Eric Ries
Age: 45
Born: 1979
Born: September 22
Author
Entrepreneur
Writer
Must
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Thinking
Customers
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More quotes by Eric Ries

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Reading is good, action is better.
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There is no greater country on Earth for entrepreneurship than America. In every category, from the high-tech world of Silicon Valley, where I live, to University R&D labs, to countless Main Street small business owners, Americans are taking risks, embracing new ideas and - most importantly - creating jobs.
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A pivot is a change in strategy without a change in vision.
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The big question of our time is not Can it be built? but Should it be built? This places us in an unusual historical moment: our future prosperity depends on the quality of our collective imaginations.
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The way forward is to learn to see every startup in any industry as a grand experiment.
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What differentiates the success stories from the failures is that the successful entrepreneurs had the foresight, the ability, and the tools to discover which parts of their plans were working brilliantly and which were misguided, and adapt their strategies accordingly.
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Meritocracy is a good thing. Whenever possibly, people should be judged based on their work and results, not superficial qualities.
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The mistake isn't releasing something bad. The mistake is to launch it and get PR people involved. You don't want people to start amping up expectations for an early version of your product. The best entrepreneurship happens in low-stakes environments where no one is paying attention, like Mark Zuckerberg's dorm room at Harvard.
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If you don't know who your customer is, you don't know what quality is.
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In the old economy, it was all about having the answers. But in today’s dynamic, lean economy, it’s more about asking the right questions. A More Beautiful Question is about figuring out how to ask, and answer, the questions that can lead to new opportunities and growth.
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Sustainable growth is characterized by one simple rule: New customers come from the actions of past customers.
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Innovation is a bottoms-up, decentralized, and unpredictable thing, but that doesn’t mean it cannot be managed.
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The only person who can put you out of business, in the early days, is yourself.
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Most companies are busy making their products worse, not better. Updating is almost always a disaster.
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Leadership requires creating conditions that enable employees to do the kinds of experimentation that entrepreneurship requires.
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All innovation begins with vision. It’s what happens next that is critical.
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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.
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If we stopped wasting people's time, what would they do with it?
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Every startup has a chance to change the world, by bringing not just a new product, but an entirely new institution into existence.
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Start-up success is not a consequence of good genes or being in the right place at the right time. Success can be engineered by following the right process, which means it can be learned, which means it can be taught.
Eric Ries