Julia Hartz Quotes

Betting all your funds on the belief that you know what consumers want and are willing to pay for is like jumping into a river to test its depth - you'll need a lot of luck to stay afloat. To have a truly successful product launch, the conversations with your customers must start long before you write your first line of code.

Anything new and different is most susceptible to market research.

You have to understand who your customer is and her motivations and marry it to what's happening in the outside world.

We're not in the business of shaping consumer demand. We respond to it.

We need to be in front of consumer trends and translate those trends into insights and foresights.

I purposely got involved in the American market, as I'm really interested in it. I find the way they do marketing there really cool.

I love market research because you really have an idea of what your consumers are looking for.

Designing a product and understanding how it filters through into the market and into the rest of the company is very important to me.

When looking at trends I always ask myself basic and timeless questions about business, and the one I seem to always come back to is, 'How is this different than anything else in the marketplace?'

Tell your idea to whomever will listen, and you'll get valuable market feedback before writing a single line of code.

Customers don't know what they want. There's plenty of good psychology research that shows that people are not able to accurately predict how they would behave in the future. So asking them, 'Would you buy my product if it had these three features?' or 'How would you react if we changed our product this way?' is a waste of time. They don't know.

When companies try to guess what consumers want, they essentially make the choice for consumers.

Television networks are a lot like automobile manufacturers or anyone else who's in commerce. If something out there catches on with the public... I guess you can call it 'market research.'

We do have our finger on the pulse of the marketplace, if for no other reasons than having all these live events and listening to our audience all the time.

You can always change your branding or hire lawyers, but it's critical that you figure out if you have product market fit, and if you don't, figure out how to course-correct without getting stuck.

From the very first inkling of a concept, founders need to gather a target group of five to ten potential users to begin the feedback loop. We all think we know how the market will react to new ideas, but actual users live with the pros and cons of the existing market conditions every day. They are the market experts.

Launching a successful product or startup has little to do with luck. Any business that gains traction on the market is the result of very careful strategizing and market analysis, not to mention the development of an original product or service.

We're guided by consumer data, and it helps give us the confidence to invest where the consumer is going.

You've got to do the research. You've got to understand the market place, know your competitors.

It's not a matter of being first, it's being there at the right time, being first in volume to market, and knowing what trends to stay away from.

Using science to tell us what customers are looking for is second nature for us here.

Certainly in business terms, considering how thriving the market is. Understanding what people want is essential. We have a team on the ground whose job it is to keep tabs on what's good, whether it's a tapas bar in Barcelona, or an amazing fish and chip shop in Yorkshire.

To create something you want to sell, you first study and research the market, then you develop the product to the best of your ability.

Think about the market, think about the design, and think about who is going to design for that market. Hit the mark.

One of the things I've probably absorbed when I was in business school - and didn't know I was learning it - was about life cycles, that things begin, and they peak, and then they decline. So whether you look at life cycles of fashion, or you look at life cycles of things that people buy, designs, everything is in a life cycle. Getting out of the apparel businesses and into beauty and lingerie, those were very big bets, but they were very deliberately thought about and tested over time.