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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
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Entrepreneur
Writer
Customers
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Must
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More quotes by Eric Ries

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A pivot is a change in strategy without a change in vision.
Eric Ries
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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
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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.
Eric Ries
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Don’t be in a rush to get big. Be in a rush to have a great product.
Eric Ries
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The attributes for entrepreneurs cut both ways. You need the ability to ignore inconvenient facts and see the world as it should be and not as it is. This inspires people to take huge leaps of faith. But this blindness to facts can be a liability, too. The characteristics that help entrepreneurs succeed can also lead to their failure.
Eric Ries
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If we stopped wasting people's time, what would they do with it?
Eric Ries
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All innovation begins with vision. It’s what happens next that is critical.
Eric Ries
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Using the Lean Startup approach, companies can create order not chaos by providing tools to test a vision continuously.
Eric Ries
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Science and vision are not opposites or even at odds. They need each other. I sometimes hear other startup folks say something along the lines of: 'If entrepreneurship was a science, then anyone could do it.' I'd like to point out that even science is a science, and still very few people can do it, let alone do it well.
Eric Ries
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Here in Silicon Valley, I have taken part in hundreds of conversations trying to convince people to dive in and become entrepreneurs. All too often, innovators with good, safe, jobs are unwilling to put their family's access to health care at risk by walking away from company-backed medical insurance.
Eric Ries
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The only person who can put you out of business, in the early days, is yourself.
Eric Ries
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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.
Eric Ries
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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.
Eric Ries
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Vanity metrics are the numbers you want to publish on TechCrunch to make your competitors feel bad.
Eric Ries
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There is much that public policy can do to support American entrepreneurs. Health insurance reform will make it easier for entrepreneurs to take a chance on a new business without putting their family's health at risk. Tort reform will make it easier to take prudent risks on new products in a number of sectors.
Eric Ries
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I would say, as an entrepreneur everything you do - every action you take in product development, in marketing, every conversation you have, everything you do - is an experiment. If you can conceptualize your work not as building features, not as launching campaigns, but as running experiments, you can get radically more done with less effort.
Eric Ries
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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.
Eric Ries
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If your goal is to make money, becoming an entrepreneur is a sucker's bet. Sure, some entrepreneurs make a lot of money, but if you calculate the amount of stress-inducing work and time it takes and multiply that by the low likelihood of success and eventual payoff, it is not a great way to get rich.
Eric Ries
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This is one of the most important lessons of the scientific method: if you cannot fail, you cannot learn.
Eric Ries
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If you cannot fail, you cannot learn.
Eric Ries