Trying to think of startup ideas doesn't merely yield few good ideas; it yields bad ideas that sound plausible enough to fool you into working on them.

Watch what they do, not what they say Watching what your customers are doing — or trying to do — with your product can light the way forward. But you have to be careful to pay attention to what they do and not just what they say. Expect to have your theories of human behavior tested Your theory about how individuals and groups behave should underlie your strategy, your product design, your incentive program — every decision you make. But be open and alert to when your customers show you a different theory or direction. That could become your product’s point of differentiation. Follow the leaders: Your customers To grow your business, you may have to give up control. Look for instances when your customers hack or hijack your product, and then go along for the ride. Get Mr. Spock and Dr. McCoy working together Customer data is your Mr. Spock, detached and logical. Customer emotion is your Dr. McCoy, passionate and all too human. Think of yourself as Captain Kirk, responsible for making the two work together to get the best out of each.

He described three stages to their development. "In the beginning," says Clarke, "people tell you that's a crazy idea, and it'll never work. Next, people say your idea might work, but it's not worth doing. Finally, eventually, people say, I told you that it was a great idea all along!

Customer Discovery is damn hard work. You can't fake it.

A startup is in reality a 'faith-based enterprise' on day one. To turn the vision into reality and the faith into facts (and a profitable company), a startup must test those guesses, or hypotheses, and find out which are correct.

The danger is in acting on what you believe satisfies the customer. You will inevitably make wrong assumptions. Leadership should not even try to guess at the answers; it should always go to customers in a systematic quest for those answers.

... I was deeply shocked when it was not my predictions or any of my immediate colleagues' predictions that came true in my data — but Milgrom's. This was completely outside my conceptual framework.

A major reason so many start-ups fail is the flawed assumption that if the product is good enough, consumers will find it, the Field of Dreams philosophy of Build it and they will come. Except a lot of times, they don’t. Founders can be overly optimistic when it comes to acquiring customers instead of better preparing for what is usually a time consuming and expensive aspect of growing a business.

She sighed. “We’re just guessing.”
“When you have a Ph. D., you call them hypotheses, not guesses.”