Bill Gates Quotes

Every startup should address a real and demonstrated need in the world - if you build a solution to a problem lots of people have, it's so easy to sell your product to the world.

The fundamental truth for developers is they will build if there are users.

Too many bar owners built a bar for themselves... when they should have built what their market and demographic demands!

Epic has prided itself on providing software directly to customers ever since I started mailing floppy disks in 1991.

Products are sold because they solve a problem or fill a need. Understanding problems and needs involves understanding customers and what makes them tick.

In general, it's best if you're building something that you yourself need.

The essence of a successful business is really quite simple. It is your ability to offer a product or service that people will pay for at a price sufficiently above your costs, ideally three or four or five times your cost, thereby giving you a profit that enables you to buy and to offer more products and services.

A successful business must have a sound knowledge of its market and work on how its product or service will be different, stand out and improve people's lives. If you can ensure it responds to a real need in the market place, your business can punch well above its weight.

I think if you are writing something that you are trying to design for someone else to like that is not necessarily you're demographic, it is a much harder road.

Even the most careful and expensive marketing plans cannot sell people a book they don't want to read.

Other trades may fail. The agitator is always sure of his market.

So my resolution this year is: I'm not a money guy, but I want to make our next product a commercial success, so that people will say, 'Hey, there's a huge market out there. If you make a high-quality games that can touch people, it's going to do great business.

I'm not a reader of young adult fiction for the simple reason that these novelists are writing for adolescents, so they are not writing for me.

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.

Life is so simple, really. Think through what people want, watch what others fail to give them, and provide it. Then bill'em.

I have discovered the most exciting, the most arduous literary form of all, the most difficult to master, the most pregnant in curious possibilities. I mean the advertisement. It is far easier to write ten passably effective Sonnets, good enough to take in the not too inquiring critic, than one effective advertisement that will take in a few thousand of the uncritical buying public.

I think the critical thing is the product or service that you're trying to raise money for. And probably the best description of that, people should say when they hear, "This is what I want to do. This is what I want to bring to the market." They should say, "Gee! That's a great idea" or "Gee! Why hasn't somebody else thought of that before? Well, that's an incredible idea!" In other words, the more a person is delighted, or astonished, or happy with your product, or service, or idea, the more happy they are to put up money for it.

The point is... you'd better figure out what your Customers - the Customers you want - value. Because that's what they'll buy. Anything else is a waste of their money, and they'll figure that out in a hurry.

I notice that you use plain, simple language, short words and brief sentences. That is the way to write English - it is the modern way and the best way. Stick to it; don't let fluff and flowers and verbosity creep in.

Over the years, I've found one rule. It is the only one I give on those occasions when I talk about writing. A simple rule. If you tell yourself you are going to be at your desk tomorrow, you are by that declaration asking your unconscious to prepare the material. You are, in effect, contracting to pick up such valuables at a given time. Count on me, you are saying to a few forces below: I will be there to write.

If you want to say something profound, writing from your heartbeat is different than writing from the loud voices you get from music. If they're rapping from noise, it's about robbing people. It's that simple.

Simplicity has power. Founding our life on constructive, positive behavior is the simplest, most direct, and powerful approach I've ever found-simple, but not easy.

This notion of universal Windows apps is a very powerful concept because we're now aggregating the 300-plus-million-socket run rate of Windows into one opportunity for our developers.

I have tried (I am not sure how successfully) to write plain tales. I dare not say they are simple; there is not a simple page, a simple word, on earth -\-\ for all pages, all words, predicate the universe, whose most notorious attribute is its complexity.

American writers often say they find it difficult to write Superman. They say he's too powerful; you can't give him problems. But Superman is a metaphor. For me, Superman has the same problems we do, but on a Paul Bunyan scale. If Superman walks the dog, he walks it around the asteroid belt because it can fly in space. When Superman's relatives visit, they come from the 31st century and bring some hellish monster conqueror from the future. But it's still a story about your relatives visiting.