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If you don't know who your customer is, you don't know what quality is.

Eric Ries

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Eric Ries
Age: 45
Born: 1979
Born: September 22
Author
Entrepreneur
Writer
Customer
Customers
Quality

More quotes by Eric Ries

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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.
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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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.
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.
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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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Products a start-up builds are really experiments…Learning about how to build a sustainable business is the outcome of those experiments [which follow] a three-step process: Build, measure, learn.” “[A startup is] … an organization dedicated to creating something new under conditions of extreme uncertainty.
Eric Ries
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Most companies are busy making their products worse, not better. Updating is almost always a disaster.
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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Entrepreneurs always pitch their idea as 'the X of Y,' so this is going to be 'the Microsoft of food.' And yet disruptive innovations usually don't have that character. Most of the time, if something seems like a good idea, it probably isn't.
Eric Ries
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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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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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As an entrepreneur, I knew that if my company failed, I could always try again. So I often felt that the only real risk of true financial ruin came from the possibility of a serious illness that either exceeded my insurance plans lifetime limits, or was not covered due to rescission.
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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The way forward is to learn to see every startup in any industry as a grand experiment.
Eric Ries
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When Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak created Apple computer in a garage in Palo Alto, it heralded the beginning of the PC revolution that ultimately dealt a death-blow to dozens of older companies.
Eric Ries
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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.
Eric Ries
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Innovation is a bottoms-up, decentralized, and unpredictable thing, but that doesn’t mean it cannot be managed.
Eric Ries
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A solid process lays the foundation for a healthy culture, one where ideas are evaluated by merit and not by job title.
Eric Ries
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A pivot is a change in strategy without a change in vision.
Eric Ries
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Sustainable growth is characterized by one simple rule: New customers come from the actions of past customers.
Eric Ries