Eric Ries Quotes

If you're an entrepreneur and you're starting a company, I think the first thing you do is you go and talk to a bunch of people. But then the next thing you probably should do is figure out if there's a broader demand than just people you know. That's where I think SurveyMonkey is pretty valuable to people.

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.

What I tell founders is not to sweat the business model too much at first. The most important task at first is to build something people want. If you don't do that, it won't matter how clever your business model is.

Don't spend months building something without any idea if someone actually wants it.

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.

Has anyone actually asked the customer if they want to have something available directly after the show? You hear that three bags are going to be released tomorrow in five shops, so you produce 15 bags. How many customers are you going to satisfy with that? Fifteen!

I think, when I see entrepreneurs, they tend to talk about the market and the industry - which is obviously very important, but the most important thing is you're product. What are you selling? And does it really have product-market fit?

I never try to predict what will happen to any project, ever. There are so many factors. Does the public like the subject matter, the way you handle it?

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.

First be sure a thing is wanted or needed, then go ahead.

You only get points when you make something the market wants. So if you work really hard on the wrong things, no one will care.

It's really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don't know what they want until you show it to them.

It turns out that is exactly what product strategy is all about—figuring out the right product is the innovator’s job, not the customer’s job.

Tell the people what they want and decide what they need.

Watching how customers actually use a product provides much more reliable information than can be gleaned from a verbal interview or a focus group.

Listen to your customers, but don't always build exactly what they're telling you. This is a really key distinction around building enterprise software.

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

True marketing starts...with the customer, his demographics, his realities, his needs, his values. It does not ask, "What do we want to sell?" It asks, "What does the customer want to buy?"

Don't find customers for your products, find products for your customers.

Who cares and who doesn't care about a project, is going to shape the project in a significant way.

If the most important thing for your project is to put on a circus, then you have less chance of winning things.

Most startups are not just built for the person who is using them. When you do that, every now and then you get really lucky and... are representative of some huge class of people who all want the same thing you do... but very often that just turns into a side project that doesn't go anywhere.

Did Alexander Graham Bell do any market research before he invented the telephone?

Research is an organized method of trying to find out what you are going to do after you cannot do what you are doing now. It may also be said to be the method of keeping a customer reasonably dissatisfied with what he has. That means constant improvement and change so that the customer will be stimulated to desire the new product enough to buy it to replace the one he has.

We must learn what customers really want, not what they say they want or what we think they should want.