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If we stopped wasting people's time, what would they do with it?
Eric Ries -
All innovation begins with vision. It’s what happens next that is critical.
Eric Ries
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When we're in the shower, when we're thinking about our idea - boy, does it sound brilliant. But the reality is that most of our ideas are actually terrible.
Eric Ries -
In the old economy, it was all about having the answers. But in today’s dynamic, lean economy, it’s more about asking the right questions. A More Beautiful Question is about figuring out how to ask, and answer, the questions that can lead to new opportunities and growth.
Eric Ries -
The only person who can put you out of business, in the early days, is yourself.
Eric Ries -
Customers don't care how much time something takes to build. They care only if it serves their needs.
Eric Ries -
Prove to yourself that your business, in micro-scale at least, creates value. If you believe it, you'll find it that much easier to convince potential investors, partners and employees, too.
Eric Ries -
I believe for the first time in history, entrepreneurship is now a viable career.
Eric Ries
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Most start-up companies fail and it is smart public policy to help entrepreneurs increase their odds of succeeding. But, the biggest loss to our economy is not all the start-ups that didn't make it: It's the ones that might have been created but weren't.
Eric Ries -
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.
Eric Ries -
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.
Eric Ries -
I would say, as an entrepreneur everything you do - every action you take in product development, in marketing, every conversation you have, everything you do - is an experiment. If you can conceptualize your work not as building features, not as launching campaigns, but as running experiments, you can get radically more done with less effort.
Eric Ries -
I asked all of our recruiters to give me all resumes of prospective employees with their name, gender, place of origin, and age blacked out. This simple change shocked me, because I found myself interviewing different-looking candidates - even though I was 100% convinced that I was not being biased in my resume selection process.
Eric Ries -
New Customers come from the action of past customers.
Eric Ries
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Entrepreneurs can't forecast accurately, because they are trying something fundamentally new. So they will often be laughably behind plan - and on the brink of success.
Eric Ries -
Learning to see waste and systematically eliminate it has allowed lean companies such as Toyota to dominate entire industries. Lean thinking defines value as 'providing benefit to the customer'; anything else is waste.
Eric Ries -
Building the right product requires systematically and relentlessly testing that vision to discover which elements of it are brilliant, and which are crazy.
Eric Ries -
Every startup has a chance to change the world, by bringing not just a new product, but an entirely new institution into existence.
Eric Ries -
Innovation is a bottoms-up, decentralized, and unpredictable thing, but that doesn’t mean it cannot be managed.
Eric Ries -
Most entrepreneurs don't need as many customers as they think. A lot of people think 10 is too few for a sample. But if all 10 refused a product, why is that not enough? If you want 100, 1,000 or a million customers, you first have to get 10.
Eric Ries
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The problem with entrepreneurship is we are often working really hard producing high quality products that no-one wants. The creation of stuff is not valued.
Eric Ries -
If you cannot fail, you cannot learn.
Eric Ries -
It doesn't matter if you call it a boom or a bubble. The startup business moves in cycles, and what goes up will eventually come down.
Eric Ries -
At IMVU, we opened up our board meetings to the whole company.
Eric Ries