Quotes on Customers

Meet customers where they are; question how to make the tools customers use more valuable.

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.

Courteous treatment will make a customer a walking advertisement.

Integrated marketing communications is a way of looking at the whole marketing process from the view point of the customer.

When something online is free, you're not the customer, you're the product.

The minimum viable product is that version of a new product which allows a team to collect the maximum amount of validated learning about customers with the least effort.

A head start is rarely large enough to matter, and time spent in stealth mode-away from customers-is unlikely to provide a head start. The only way to win is to learn faster than anyone else.

You need to get to the future, ahead of your customers, and be ready to greet them when they arrive.

If you're not trying to do something better, then you're not focused on the customer and you'll miss the possibility of making your business great.

If we do not know who the customer is, we do not know what quality is.

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

Startups are painful, stressful and at times demoralizing. You need to be a true believer in the vision of what you are doing. You need to passionate about it and love what you’re doing. If you don’t, there is no way you can sustain the hours, stress and disappointment. There’s no way you’re going to be able to convince investors, customers and most importantly recruit a world-class team if you not building something you think is going to change the world.

We will hire someone with less experience, less education, and less expertise, than someone who has more of those things and has a rotten attitude. Because we can train people. We can teach people how to lead. We can teach people how to provide customer service. But we can't change their DNA.

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.

No Plan Survives First Contact With Customers

Happy employees ensure happy customers. And happy customers ensure happy shareholders—in that order.

We watch our competitors, learn from them, see the things that they were doing for customers and copy those things as much as we can.

If you're long-term oriented, customer interests and shareholder interests are aligned.

We innovate by starting with the customer and working backwards. That becomes the touchstone for how we invent.

You can never go too far wrong by thinking like a customer who’s new to the business.

If the employees come first, then they're happy. A motivated employee treats the customer well. The customer is happy so they keep coming back, which pleases the shareholders. It's not one of the enduring green mysteries of all time, it is just the way it works.