More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
WARREN BERGER is the author of A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas.
Consumers don’t need many things from your brand—they just need one thing from your brand.
You may want them to need everything from you, but guess what: consumers don’t care what you want.
Your job is to care about what they want, not what you want them to want. The difference between the two is the distance between a customer-ce...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
A lot of brands don’t make it because in the process of trying to get many things right, they don’t get anything right. A great brand is a privilege, and it’s a privilege best e...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
the best way to start is by getting one thing right. That earns you the right to go from product one to product two. Take as much time as you need to get product one right, and to prove it—because if you don’t, no one is going to be waiting on pins and needles for product two.
You want your inaugural product to be wanted badly by your inaugural users, and that is hard to do with multiple products.
Everyone you meet—and everyone that visits your website or uses your products—must first be convinced that they should care about your product.
we are all lazy in the first fifteen seconds of any new experience.
we don’t want to invest much time or energy in truly understanding what something is.
Without a hook—be it a slick package, a great tagline, or a killer thirty-second pitch video—you’re unlikely to capture the user’s attention. And if you can’t do that, the deeper experience doesn’t matter, because they’re never going to get there.
you build your product or service, take a two-track approach. Optimize the product experience for the first fifteen seconds as a compartmentalized project. Then, for the customers that actually come through the door, build a meaningful experience and a relationship that lasts a lifetime.
make decisions with the short-term as well as the long-term in mind.
People will quickly become acquainted with your product and discover the surface features without your assistance.
While you may have a lot of other things to offer, the “default experience”—the one that happens without any additional learning or customization from the user—will determine the success or failure of your product.
the default experience is the one you want to focus on the most.
Don’t pick a peak because it’s easy. Pick a peak because you really want to go there; that way you’ll enjoy the process.
if you’re driving a car, and after three hundred miles the car runs out of gas, no one takes offense because the “failure” is inherent to the car, not to you. It’s not your failure to operate the car correctly. We all know that you have to refill the gas tank; that’s just the way it is. So if we think of failure in innovation in the same way—as having to refill the gas tank regularly—we can take it much less personally.
1. Put your product in the user’s hands before it’s perfect. See what happens.
the communications around the material would be just as important—maybe even more so!—than the material itself.
2. Show your users what they can do, rather than telling them what they should do.
3. Empower your users to be your ambassadors, their word is more powerful than yours.
they believed in our mission—that more people should be able to fix and improve things—and they were enthusiastic about the product. In short, they were like us.
Our website and social channels are full of real people demonstrating their fixes and projects every day. This culture of sharing didn’t just happen by itself, however. We nurtured it by designing for people who were likely to share their insights (e.g., people who love learning, sharing, and spending time online), and by connecting on a personal level with all our early users.
1. Don’t limit the shape of the solution too early. It’s common for people to approach building new products with technological constraints or preconceived notions of what the end solution should look like.
Instead, as Tesla co-founder Elon Musk advises, work from “first principles.” Ask yourself what would need to happen for the problem to be resolved if you were free from all constraints. From there, work your way back into more practical solutions.
2. Reduce the number of steps required. Cut out as many stipulations, actions, unnecessary choices, and extraneous options as you can.
3. Look for opportunities to lean on familiar patterns or mental models.
brands used to push their products and messages out in what was essentially a one-way conversation, the social web has transformed it into a two-way conversation.
we have to cultivate stories that create a real emotional connection to break through the noise.
we have to learn to speak authentically and honestly to our customers, and that we can’t hide when we make mistakes.
we must strive not only to help our customers but als...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
Faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a Eurorail locomotive, and better than any paid advertising, an army of allies is the greatest asset you can cultivate. If you’re just getting started and wondering where you should devote your focus, here’s the answer: devote it to recruiting and serving these people.
STEP 1: INVITE YOUR ARMY TO SERVE
An army does not materialize out of nowhere or assemble on its own. The most important thing you can do to gain allies and attention is to produce good work.
But your charge, as the leader of your all-volunteer army, is essentially to serve. Every day, start by asking yourself two questions:
What am I making?
STEP 2: IN TURN, SERVE YOUR ARMY
Make your expertise available to the community at regular intervals.
Share your paid content with users for free on different channels.
Look around and be generally helpful wherever you can.
Reciprocity is a powerful practice.
CHRIS GUILLEBEAU is the New York Times bestselling author of The Happiness of Pursuit, The $100 Startup, and other books. He visited every country in the world (193 in total) from 2002 to 2013. He writes about life, work, and travel on his Art of Non-Conformity blog.
At their best, the products we love become a part of the fabric of our lives. They become part of the stories that we tell ourselves about how we want to work smarter, dream bigger, and build a better world.
Ask yourself: How are you tapping into your audience’s aspirations and dreams?
Ask yourself: How is my product going to change the way people think or go about their daily lives?
Ask yourself: How can you share more of the process behind your product with customers? It can be good, bad, or ugly—as long as it’s honest.
“You never hear, ‘George increased market share by 30 percent,’ ” Huffington said at a recent event at Soho House in New York City. What you do hear in eulogies, she says, are stories of “small kindnesses.”
details make good art great. Subtle word choices separate great poets from amateurs. Small flourishes define superlative architecture. Tiny considerations make products world-class
Smartcuts: How Hackers, Innovators, and Icons Accelerate Success.
