Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

by Tony Fadell

A good story is an act of empathy.

Every person is different. And everyone will read your story differently. That’s why analogies can be such a useful tool in storytelling. They create a shorthand for complicated concepts—a bridge directly to a common experience.

They’d put a noose around their necks until the upstarts had no choice but to sell to Honeywell for a pittance.

Just don’t overshoot. Don’t try to disrupt everything at once. Don’t make the Amazon Fire Phone.

When it launched, the Fire Phone did everything he had promised—but none of it well. They tried to do too much, change too much. So the disruptions turned into gimmicks, and the project failed.

When you’re evolving you need to understand the quintessential things that define your product. What’s key to your feature set and your branding? What have you trained the customer to look for?

But we decided to eat our own. We had to make the iPhone, even though we knew it could, probably would, kill the iPod.

You cannot be afraid to disrupt the thing that made you successful in the first place.

Competition is a given, both direct and indirect. Someone is always watching, trying to exploit any crack in a more successful competitor.

After weeks and weeks of argument, Steve put his foot down.

To write a good press release you have to focus. The press release is meant to hook people—it’s how you get journalists interested in what you’re making. You have to catch their attention. You have to be succinct and interesting, highlight the most important and essential things that your product can do. You can’t just list everything you want to make—you have to prioritize. When you write a press release you say, “Here. This. This is what’s newsworthy. This is what really matters.”

press release

The external heartbeat, the constraint, drives the creativity, which fuels the innovation.

So keep your project small as long as you can. And don’t allocate too much money at the start. People do stupid things when they have a giant budget—they overdesign, they overthink. That inevitably leads to longer runways, longer schedules, and slower heartbeats.

We needed internal milestones within the project—regular check-ins where we would make sure everybody understood how the product had evolved and could evolve their side of the business along with it.

Milestones

Those milestones slow you down in the short term, but ultimately speed up all of product development.

Milestones

The “chasm” is the hole companies can fall into if regular people—not just early adopters—won’t buy their product. Today it’s called finding product/market fit.

Crossing the Chasm introduced the world to the famous Customer Adoption Curve chart

despite the many differences between atoms and electrons, hardware and software, there is one thing that has the exact same stranglehold on both: time. No matter what you’re building, reaching profitability will take longer than you think. You will almost certainly not make any money with V1.

Time

crossing the chasm isn’t a guarantee, even with much-loved products.

We traveled all over the globe and worked hard not to think about work. But no matter where we went, we could not escape one thing: the goddamn thermostat.

Four failed startups and years of professional disappointment had paved the way for a decade of success.

was the first time I started from scratch—from a single cell of an idea—and watched that cell divide and grow into a fully formed baby.

There are three elements to every great idea:

Most startups are born from people getting so frustrated with something in their daily experience that they start digging in and trying to find a solution.

But you can’t build a business on a germ.

If they couldn’t agree they would hem and haw, trying to be nice, trying to be reasonable, watering down their opinions until the company fell behind the competition, ran out of money, and the board had to swoop in, remove some founders, and change the whole team around.

When it started picking up steam, he asked if General Magic would be interested in it. No, thank you, was the answer; that’s a ridiculous idea. So he got a waiver from General Magic that said they claimed no rights to his work, quit, and started a small startup called eBay.

The best way to do that is with a compelling story. And knowing your audience. Even in Silicon Valley, most VCs won’t be technical. So don’t focus on the technology, focus on the “why.”

Why

Listen to people’s feedback on your pitch and your plan, change it when it makes sense, but hold on to your vision and your “why”

Why

Fifty percent of marriages fail, but 80 percent of startups do.

So you’ll need to get over the mental anguish of failure and losing other people’s money.

B2B just wasn’t in Apple’s DNA.

corporate Chief Information Officers (CIOs) were accustomed to the countless enterprise-level services that Microsoft and Windows offered.

any company that tries to do both B2B and B2C will fail.

like Costco and Home Depot (their big innovation was taking a B2B product and opening it up to B2C). Financial products and banks can be both B2B and B2C, since some households run like a small business.

you can convince a company to use your product if you appeal to the human beings inside that company.

He worked harder on vacation than he did in the office.

Steve Jobs

And sometimes that’s okay. Really. Sometimes it’s your only option. But there’s a world of difference between racking your brain, ruminating all night about a work crisis, versus letting yourself think about work in an unstructured, creative way. The latter gives your brain the freedom to stop hammering away at the same problems with the same worn-down tools. Instead, you let your mind rummage around to find new ones.

Instead of trying to find true balance or allowing anyone else to find it, Steve ran full tilt.

He let Apple become all-consuming in a way that pushed everything else in his life, except his family, to the periphery.

Not only did we need to build this completely new thing, but we needed to build it incredibly quickly, up to Steve Jobs’s exacting specifications, make it beautiful and delightful in a way that would remind everyone of what Apple could be, and then have it be a roaring commercial success.

Nobody believed we’d be able to pull it together in time to get it to customers by Christmas. But I had just come off four years at Philips, where more than 90 percent of projects got cancelled and killed. If you didn’t make your mark fast enough or your project ran into issues or dragged on, Philips corporate would descend upon you, ready to “save the business” from your mistake or steal it out from under you.

do it at the shortest timeline

Just like I couldn’t risk Sony launching a music player that Christmas and eclipsing us or risk getting caught in internal Apple politics.

We were a tiny little team sucking resources away from the core business, which was under huge financial pressure to succeed. Other groups did not like that. They did not like us. I could feel their eyes on us and their daggers out.

Writing by hand was important for me. I wasn’t staring at a screen, getting distracted by my email. A computer or a smartphone between you and the team is a huge barrier to focus and sends a clear message to everyone in the meeting:

The act of using a pen, then retyping and editing later, forced me to process information differently.

rifle through the good ideas,

Continually reprioritizing allowed me to zoom out and see what could be combined or eliminated. It let me spot moments when we were trying to do too much.

And then came the hard work of figuring out what had to be delegated, what had to be delayed, and what had to be crossed off the list.

I was forced to prioritize based on what really mattered, as opposed to what was just top of mind. That let me keep my eye on the bigger goals and milestones ahead of us, not just the fires at our feet or whatever feature we were most excited about that day.