Always focus the majority of your efforts on serving your ideal customers. Your ideal customers buy early, buy often, spend the most, spread the word… - Josh Kaufman

Dunbar’s number” is a theoretical cognitive limit on the number of stable social relationships humans can maintain at one time. According to Robin Dunbar, a British anthropologist, humans have the cognitive capacity to keep track of somewhere around 150 close personal connections. Beyond this limited circle, we start treating people less like individuals and more like objects, and groups of people beyond this limit are likely to splinter off into subgroups over time.

Value can’t be created without understanding what people want (market research). Attracting customers first requires getting their attention, then making them interested (marketing). In order to close a sale, people must trust your ability to deliver on what’s promised (value delivery and operations). Customer satisfaction depends on exceeding the customer’s expectations (customer service). Profit sufficiency requires bringing in more money than is spent (finance).

Making mistakes is inevitable: no one is perfect. You will make a few decisions that, in retrospect, you’ll wish you hadn’t — count on it. If you could turn back time, you’d try a different approach, but you can’t. There will always be other projects, provided you don’t double down on a risky project to recover your losses. Throwing good money after bad is not a winning strategy.