The ability to learn faster from customers is the essential competitive advantage that startups must possess. - Eric Ries

Metcalfe’s law: the value of a network as a whole is proportional to the square of the number of participants. In other words, the more people in the network, the more valuable the network.

I consoled myself that if we hadn’t built this first product — mistakes and all — we never would have learned these important insights about customers. We never would have learned that our strategy was flawed. There is truth in this excuse: what we learned during those critical early months set IMVU on a path that would lead to our eventual breakout success. For a time, this “learning” consolation made me feel better, but my relief was short-lived. Here’s the question that bothered me most of all: if the goal of those months was to learn these important insights about customers, why did it take so long? How much of our effort contributed to the essential lessons we needed to learn? Could we have learned those lessons earlier if I hadn’t been so focused on making the product “better” by adding features and fixing bugs?

it’s human nature to assume that when we see a mistake, it’s due to defects in someone else’s department, knowledge, or character,