We need to reengineer companies to focus on figuring out who the customer is, what's the market and what kind of product you should build.
Eric RiesIn my first start-up, I had an initial advertising budget of $5 per day total. That would buy us 100 clicks per day. At $5 per day, marketing people scoffed and said that is too small to matter. But if you think about it, to an engineer, 100 real humans everyday giving your product a try means you can really start improving.
Eric RiesEntrepreneurs 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 RiesProducts a start-up builds are really experimentsโฆLearning about how to build a sustainable business is the outcome of those experiments [which follow] a three-step process: Build, measure, learn.โ โ[A startup is] โฆ an organization dedicated to creating something new under conditions of extreme uncertainty.
Eric Ries