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

Companies that cannot bring themselves to pivot to a new direction on the basis of feedback from the marketplace can get stuck in the land of the living dead, neither growing enough nor dying, consuming resources and commitment from employees and other stakeholders but not moving ahead.

A few years ago, a team that sells products to large media companies invited me to help them as a consultant because they were concerned that their engineers were not working hard enough. However, the fault was not in the engineers; it was in the process the whole company was using to make decisions. They had customers but did not know them very well. They were deluged with feature requests from customers, the internal sales team, and the business leadership. Every new insight became an emergency that had to be addressed immediately. As a result, long-term projects were hampered by constant interruptions. Even worse, the team had no clear sense of whether any of the changes they were making mattered to customers. Despite the constant tuning and tweaking, the business results were consistently mediocre.

Startups exist not just to make stuff, make money, or even serve customers. They exist to learn how to build a sustainable business.