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Kindle Notes & Highlights
Business is not about money. It’s about making dreams come true for others and for yourself.
Success comes from persistently improving and inventing, not from persistently doing what’s not working.
quote from serial entrepreneur Steve Blank: “No business plan survives first contact with customers.”
Quote
Never forget that absolutely everything you do is for your customers. Make every decision—even decisions about whether to expand the business, raise money, or promote someone—according to what’s best for your customers. If you’re ever unsure what to prioritize, just ask your customers the open-ended question, “How can I best help you now?” Then focus on satisfying those requests.
Starting small puts 100 percent of your energy into actually solving real problems for real people.
me, ideas are worth nothing unless they are executed. They are just a multiplier. Execution is worth millions.
Never forget why you’re really doing what you’re doing. Are you helping people? Are they happy? Are you happy? Are you profitable? Isn’t that enough?
That’s the Tao of business: Care about your customers more than about yourself, and you’ll do well.
I added two little lines of programming code that counted how many hours and minutes remained until 5 p.m. and then showed the result by the shipping options. “You have 5 hours, 18 minutes until our next FedEx shipment.”
“We’ll do anything for a pizza.” If you needed a big special favor, we’d give you the number of our local pizza delivery place. If you bought us a pizza, we’d do any favor you wanted. When we’d tell people about this on the phone, they’d often laugh, not believing we were serious. But we’d get a pizza every few weeks. I’d often hear from musicians later that this was the moment they fell in love with us.
Even if you want to be big someday, remember that you never need to act like a big boring company. Over ten years, it seemed like every time someone raved about how much he loved CD Baby, it was because of one of these little fun human touches.
To be a true business owner, make it so that you could leave for a year, and when you came back, your business would be doing better than when you left.
