Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

by Tony Fadell

Philips could see that, but they couldn’t capitalize on it.

I did eighty pitches to different venture capital firms. Eighty.

People often get excited about making something with atoms—they dig into the design, interface, colors, materials, textures—and instantly become blind to simpler, easier solutions.

Of course, sometimes you do need hardware—it can’t be avoided. But when that happens, I still tell people to put it away. I say, “Don’t tell me what’s so special about this object. Tell me what’s different about the customer journey.”

To do that right, you have to prototype the whole experience—give every part the weight and reality of a physical object. Regardless of whether your product is made of atoms or bits or both, the process is the same. Draw pictures. Make models. Pin mood boards. Sketch out the bones of the process in rough wireframes. Write imaginary press releases.

I’d watched other CEOs give pitches before, they’d hardly know what their supposedly revolutionary product was.

And the reason is simple: Steve didn’t just read a script for the presentation. He’d been telling a version of that same story every single day for months and months during development—to

To find that “why,” you need to understand the core of the problem you’re trying to solve, the real issue your customers face on a regular basis.

A good story is an act of empathy. It recognizes the needs of its audience.

Execution: Actually doing what you’ve promised to do and doing it well.

The key is to find the right balance—not so disruptive that you won’t be able to execute, not so easy to execute that nobody will care. You have to choose your battles.

Sony laughed at the iPod. Nokia laughed at the iPhone. Honeywell laughed at the Nest Learning Thermostat.

And they might sue you. If they can’t innovate, they litigate.

If your company is disruptive, you have to be prepared for strong reactions and stronger emotions.

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

everything would look 3-D,

Do. Fail. Learn.

That’s one of the (many) issues that befell Google Glass. The look, the technology—it was all so new that people had no idea what to do with

There was no intuitive understanding of what the thing was for.

When you’re evolving you need to understand the quintessential things that define your product.

That relentless march did a lot to define the iPod brand and keep people’s attention on Apple. And it depressed the hell out of our competition. I had friends at Philips who told me that every time they’d think of a great idea for how to outmaneuver the iPod, we’d come out with a similar feature a few months later and they’d have to go back to the drawing board. It crushed their spirits. We were moving so fast that by the time they caught up they were already behind.

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

Companies that become too big, too comfortable, too obsessed with preserving and protecting that first big innovation that put them on the map—they topple. They unravel. They die.

You’ll need to make many opinion-driven decisions without the benefit of data or experience to guide you.

I agreed with Steve. In principle. I just didn’t think we could pull it off with any of the technology I’d seen to date.

The lesson is about when and how vision and data should guide your decisions. In the very beginning, before there are customers, vision is more important than pretty much anything else.

If you wait for your product to be perfect, you will never finish.

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.

We couldn’t spin endlessly anymore, trying to reach perfection.

We forced as many constraints on ourselves as possible: not too much time, not too much money, and not too many people on the team.

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

Nobody can accurately estimate their time or all the steps they’ll need to perform.

Whenever the product would shift and evolve, we’d scramble. We’d have to harass everybody to tell us how many half days it would take them to deal with the change, instead of just dealing with it. We’d spend hours every week to “work the schedule” with each member of the team instead of actually working.

Those milestones slow you down in the short term, but ultimately speed up all of product development. And they make for a better product.

Once you move past V1 and onto V2, the pace of your external announcements, and possibly your competitors, will begin to drive your internal heartbeats.

But not January. Never January. They learned that lesson well.

Predictability allows your team to know when they should be heads down working and when they should be looking up to check in with other teams or to make sure that they’re still headed in the right direction.

The joke is that it takes twenty years to make an overnight success. In business, it’s more like six to ten.

You make the product. You fix the product. You build the business.

I didn’t need another middle-aged executive with decades of experience telling me what we couldn’t do.

All very shiny, very fancy. And complete crap. Garbage. None of it worked.

It solves a problem that a lot of people have in their daily lives.

The best ideas are painkillers, not vitamins. Vitamin pills are good for you, but they’re not essential. You can skip your morning vitamin for a day, a month, a lifetime and never notice the difference.

First you have to figure out if this idea is actually strong enough to carry a company. You need to build a business and implementation plan.

The potential company-destroying problems—and the steps to mitigate them—went on and on. But listing them out, breaking them down, talking honestly about them, that’s what ultimately convinced investors that we really knew what we were getting into. And that we could make it work.

There’s a reason why investors prefer to back second-time entrepreneurs even if they failed the first time around. It’s because these founders spent their twenties screwing up and learning. Most follow the same path I did: they work hard, fail and fail, take risks and go to doomed startups and try out giant companies and take the wrong job and luck into an amazing team and quit too early or don’t quit soon enough.

According to the book Super Founder, by Ali Tamaseb, around 60 percent of the founders of billion-dollar startups started another company before their wild success and many lost a ton of money.

Every decision was made by consensus, which meant every decision took forever.

(consider any failed startups in their past a bonus—that means they know what to avoid this time around),

Titles, pay, and perks should never be your main draw, but that doesn’t mean you should be cheap.