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You’ll learn more in a day talking to customers than a week of brainstorming, a month of watching competitors, or a year of market research.

Aaron Levie

Modularize, don’t customize. Build a platform as opposed to building all of the custom technology and custom vertical experiences.
AARON LEVIE

Building Custom Modularize Oppose Platform Technology
The benefit to building a startup is that customers don’t have the same kind of friction when they adopt new technology.
AARON LEVIE

Adopt Benefits Customer Friction Kind Technology
You want to find the really crazy but still somewhat reasonable outliers within the customer ecosystem.
AARON LEVIE

Crazy Customer Ecosystem Reasonable
Startups often win because it’s easier to see what comes next when you don’t have to worry about maintaining what came last.
AARON LEVIE

Come Easier Last Startup Winning Worry
Sometimes things are the way they are and can’t be changed, other times it’s because no one ever tried. Your job is to find the latter.
AARON LEVIE

Change Jobs Latter Sometime Tried Way
Companies have never won. You’re always either fighting for survival, or fighting for relevance.
AARON LEVIE

Entrepreneur Fighting Relevance Survival
Innovation in tech favors the naive and the stubborn. If you are too rational you won’t tackle problems that others once failed at.
AARON LEVIE

Favor Innovation Problem Stubborn Tech
Every single industry is going through a major business model and technology oriented disruption.
AARON LEVIE

Building Business Disruption Model Oriented Technology
Tip: Take the stodgiest, oldest, slowest moving industry you can find. And build amazing software for it.
AARON LEVIE

Amazing Industry Moving Slow Software Stodgiest
Do things that incumbents can’t or won’t do because it’s economically or technically infeasible.
AARON LEVIE

Building Incumbent Infeasible Technical Thing
There’s a lot of pride that business owners have. It’s actually really critical that pride and ownership extends to everyone in the organization. I think of everyone is in the same boat in driving the company forward.
AARON LEVIE

Extend Organization Ownership Pride Thinking
Your product should sell itself, but that does not mean you don’t need salespeople.
AARON LEVIE

Doe Mean Need People Product Sales
The 10% between 90% done to 100% done takes most of the time, causes most of the stress, but is all of the value.
AARON LEVIE

Cause Done Percentage Stress Time
If you’re waiting for encouragement from others, you’re doing it wrong. By the time people think an idea is good, it’s probably too late.
AARON LEVIE

Encouragement Idea People Thinking Wait Wrong
Look for new enabling technologies that create a wide gap between how things have been done and how they can be done.
AARON LEVIE

Done Enable Look Technology
You can keep ‘consumer’ DNA at the center of your product. That will always mean that adoption is easier.
AARON LEVIE

Adoption Consumer DNA Easier Mean

You’ll learn more in a day talking to customers than a week of brainstorming, a month of watching competitors, or a year of market research.

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You’ll learn more in a day talking to customers than a week of brainstorming, a month of watching competitors, or a year of market research.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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