"We’re not competing for attention but for memory. People do and will use many sites, but they just forget to do so on a regular basis."
"We had some well known users. Needless to say, Frederick’s of Hollywood got the most traffic. We charged a flat fee of $300/month…I once calculated how much Frederick’s was costing us in bandwidth, and it was about $300/month."
via Paul Graham - Snapshot: Viaweb, June 1998
Kyle Steed created this beautiful lettering from one of my list of Thirty Five.
(Source: handdrawnwords)
"The worst pre-existing condition we have in our health care system is our existing health care system."
Rakesh Agrawal’s response to: “What are some systems we live with today that were designed for a world of the past?” on Quora
"…we’re creating a product that we’ll be working on for the next ten years. Technology that’s merely “state of the art” today is going to be old and creaky in five years. We tried to go a little bit beyond “state of the art.” It’s a calculated risk."
"
I remember the first time I got someone to pay some attention to the website in that company.
It was not my constant on the knees begging.
It was a slide (one slide!) in the analysis deck that showed two pieces of data (both as a pie chart :)), that 24% of the ultimate purchasers (through any channel) listed the company website as the most trusted source of product information and secondly that 40% of the purchasers used the website during the purchase consideration process.
That got me money for Analysts, and that got the poor starved web team two resources to improve the website. All from one slide.
But that’s the power of data.
"Tracking Offline Conversions: Hope, Seven Best Practices, Bonus Tips
"
There’s nothing wrong with having a plan
Plans are great.
But missions are better. Missions survive when plans fail, and plans almost always fail.
""Don’t tell me about your company, solve a problem I have"
"The opposite of fear is not bravery, it’s initiative"
Four things I learned on a round-the-world yacht race | tonyhaile.com
"Be confident in the great product you’ve built and offer users the most simple model in deciding on how to use your service. If you focus on product and delighting your customers, they will in turn feel satisfied by paying for your service"
Julia Hartz, Co-Founder & President of EventBrite, on the company’s initial mistake to employ a freemium model. Read the interview here.
(Source: founderinstitute.com)
Great tip from Amy Taylor at Brains On Fire - every touchpoint is an opportunity to start a conversation, so give them something to talk about.
"You’re making a million decisions on the way to launching your business, and it’s important to recognize that many of these decisions aren’t based on facts; you’re making hypotheses about how the future might play out. Identify your top three hypotheses that are vital to making the business work and create a plan to validate them"
Victor Lombardi, Product Developer and Author. Read the full interview here.
(Source: founderinstitute.com)
"Get product in the hands of end users as early as possible. We waited 3 months with that first product, when I could have had high fidelity mocks in front of potential customers that first week"
Ethan Bloch, CEO of Flowtown describing the lesson he learned after misunderstanding his end user and throwing away 3-5 months of development. Read the interview here
(Source: founderinstitute.com)
"I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel."
Maya Angelou
The world hates change, yet it is the only thing that has brought progress.
- Charles F. Kettering
