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Because startups often accidentally build something nobody wants, it doesn’t matter much if they do it on time and on budget. The goal of a startup is to figure out the right thing to build - the thing customers want and will pay for - as quickly as possible.

Eric Ries

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Eric Ries
Age: 44
Born: 1979
Born: September 22
Author
Entrepreneur
Writer
Something
Possible
Customers
Time
Goal
Quickly
Often
Figure
Doesn
Build
Matter
Figures
Right
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Accidentally
Thing
Nobody
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Much
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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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If you cannot fail, you cannot learn.
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We must learn what customers really want, not what they say they want or what we think they should want.
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Most companies are busy making their products worse, not better. Updating is almost always a disaster.
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The only person who can put you out of business, in the early days, is yourself.
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Vanity metrics are the numbers you want to publish on TechCrunch to make your competitors feel bad.
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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.
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This is one of the most important lessons of the scientific method: if you cannot fail, you cannot learn.
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Zero invites imagination, but small numbers invite questions about whether large numbers will ever materialize.
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Leadership requires creating conditions that enable employees to do the kinds of experimentation that entrepreneurship requires.
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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.
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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.
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If you don't know who your customer is, you don't know what quality is.
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