We must learn what customers really want, not what they say they want or what we think they should want.
Interpretation
Understanding customer needs goes beyond their stated preferences and requires deeper insight.
This quote emphasizes the importance of truly understanding customer desires and behaviors, rather than relying solely on their verbal articulations or assumptions made by businesses. It suggests that successful product development and marketing hinge on thorough customer research and empathy, which leads to better alignment with actual needs.
In practice
In a product pitch, you could use this quote to highlight the importance of customer feedback.
There's nothing wrong with raising venture capital. Many lean startups are ambitious and are able to deploy large amounts of capital. What differentiates them is their disciplined approach to determining when to spend money: after the fundamental elements of the business model have been empirically validated.
Building the right product requires systematically and relentlessly testing that vision to discover which elements of it are brilliant, and which are crazy.
A lot of entrepreneurs hate big companies. But if you hate them so much, why are you trying to build a new one? The truth is, as soon as a startup has any kind of success whatsoever, it will face big company problems.
The grim reality is that most start-ups fail. Most new products are not successful. Yet the story of perseverance, creative genius, and hard work persists.
The reality is the Lean Startup method is not about cost, it is about speed. Lean startups waste less money, because they use a disciplined approach to testing new products and ideas.
You get a culture of entrepreneurship after you have successfully changed the accountability system so that people can use a better process. Process drives culture, not the other way around, so you can't just change the culture, you have to change the system.
CEOs are paid for doing a terrible job. If the system wasn't so messed up, guys like me wouldn't make this kind of money.
I'm a believer that you accomplish much, much more with direct relationships than by using an intermediary. And that cash you keep in the bank can be the difference between staying alive as a small business, or not.
When we first started our internet company, 'China Pages', in 1995, and we were just making home pages for a lot of Chinese companies. We went to the big owners, the big companies, and they didn't want to do it. We go to state-owned companies, and they didn't want to do it. Only the small and medium companies really want to do it.
Few relationships are as critical to the business enterprise as the relationship to the government. Managers have responsibility for this relationship as part of their responsibility to the enterprise itself. It is an area of social impact of the business. To a large extent the relationship to government results from what businesses do or fail to do.
When we launched a new company, I reviewed the ads and marketing materials and asked those presenting the campaign to read everything aloud to test the phrasing and concept. If I could grasp it quickly, then it passed with muster. We would get our message across only if it was understandable at first glance.
Courteous treatment will make a customer a walking advertisement.
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