Build Quotes

“VCs who promise everything under the sun to get you to sign, then don’t deliver. Often they’ll repeat themselves over and over, telling you just how much personalized attention you’ll get, how much help, how much this or that. Make sure to talk to other startups who’ve worked with them to find out what they actually offer when they’re not in sales-pitch mode.”
― Tony Fadell, Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

“Even if you get a meeting with the biggest firm in Palo Alto, you won’t be meeting with the whole firm. You have to impress and form a relationship with one person in that room: the partner. That’s who will decide the terms of your agreement, who will be on your board. That’s the person you’re marrying.”
― Tony Fadell, Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

“If you do think you’re ready to take money, then what exactly do you plan to use that money for? Do you need to build a prototype? Recruit a team? Research an idea? Get a patent? Petition local government? Fuel a partnership? Create a marketing campaign? What’s the minimum amount necessary to meet your needs now, and how much will you require later as those needs change?”
― Tony Fadell, Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

“The first question you should ask yourself is the most basic one: does your business actually need outside money right now? For many early pre-seed-stage startups, the answer is “no” surprisingly often. If you’re still researching, still testing things out, making sure your idea has legs, then you don’t need to immediately leap to financing. Take your time. Get comfortable with delayed intuition”
― Tony Fadell, Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

“And that’s true even if everything’s gone crazy—even if it seems like anyone with half a pitch deck is getting funded. Like how it was in 1999. Or how it is right now in 2022. The world of investment is cyclical. The funding environment is always shifting back and forth from a founder-friendly environment to an investor-friendly environment. It’s like the housing market—sometimes it’s good for sellers, sometimes for buyers. In a founder-friendly environment, there’s so much money flowing into the marketplace that investors will fund just about anything because they don’t want to miss out on any deals. In an investor-friendly market, there’s a lot less capital to go around, investors are pickier, and founders get worse terms. And then sometimes there’s a crazy market when it feels like cash is raining from the sky, all the rules have been thrown out, and it’s never going to end. But it will end. Just like it ended in 2000. There’s always a reversion to the mean.”
― Tony Fadell, Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

“You can make do without a cofounder. You can survive for a while without a team. But you can’t make it without a mentor. Find at least one person who you deeply trust and who believes in you. Not a life coach or an executive leadership consultant, not an agency, not someone who’s read a lot of case studies and is ready to charge you by the hour. And not your parents—they love you too much to be impartial. Find an operational, smart, useful mentor who has done it before, who likes you and wants to help. You will need to lean on them when you start a company. Or even when you launch a project within a big company.”
― Tony Fadell, Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

“You’re looking for passion, enthusiasm, and mindset. And you’re looking for seed crystals. Seed crystals are people who are so good and so well loved that they can almost single-handedly build large parts of your org. Typically they’re experienced leaders, either managers of large teams or super-ICs who everyone listens to. Once they’re in, a tidal wave of other awesome people will typically follow.”
― Tony Fadell, Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

“Having two founders works well. Three can work sometimes. I’ve never seen it work with more.”
― Tony Fadell, Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

“The reason unprofitable companies are still around is that they have a giant pool of VC funding or were acquired by even larger tech companies. They focused on finding product/market fit and building their user base first, and figured they’d iterate on the business model to make money later. But that does not work for everyone. It relies on a swift dive across the chasm and then a long, meandering doggy paddle to profitability through a huge pool of capital. That can doom a company just as fatally as falling into the chasm on the first step.”
― Tony Fadell, Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

“The joke is that it takes twenty years to make an overnight success. In business, it’s more like six to ten. It always takes longer than you think to find product/market fit, to get your customers’ attention, to build a complete solution, and then to make money. You typically need to create at least three generations of any new, disruptive product before you get it right and turn a profit. This is true for B2B and B2C, for companies that build with atoms or electrons or both, for brand-new startups and brand-new products.”
― Tony Fadell, Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

“Breaking the rhythm of your external heartbeat should be avoided at all costs, but sometimes it’ll happen anyway. Something will break. Something will take longer than anyone expected. It almost always happens with V1, when you’re starting from scratch, trying to figure out everything at once. But once you’ve got your process in place and can finally get V1 out the door, your heartbeat can settle down. It can get steady. And when you ship V2, you’ll actually be on time. And everyone—your team, your customers, the press—will feel the rhythm.”
― Tony Fadell, Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

“Predictability allows you to codify a product development process rather than starting from scratch every time. It allows you to create a living document with checkpoints, milestones, schedules, and plans that trains new employees and teaches everyone: This is how we do it. This is the framework for how to build a product.”
― Tony Fadell, Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

“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”
― Tony Fadell, Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

“We like to think that we’re not ruled by schedules, that we can throw off the chains of habit at any time—but most people are creatures of routine. They’re comforted by the knowledge of what comes next. They need it to plan their lives and their projects.”
― Tony Fadell, Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

“But you also can’t slow down too much. The heartbeats of companies that work with atoms rather than electrons are often way too slow. Because atoms are scary: you can’t relaunch an atom. The right process and timing is a balancing act—not too fast, not too slow.”
― Tony Fadell, Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

“Look at Google. Its heartbeat is erratic, unpredictable. It works for them—mostly, sometimes—but it could work so much better. Google arguably only has one big external heartbeat each year at Google I/O—and most teams don’t bother aligning with it. They typically launch whatever they want whenever they want throughout the year, sometimes with real marketing behind it, other times with simple email campaigns. That means they can never communicate with their customers in a cohesive way about their entire organization. One team does this, another does that, their announcements either overlap or ignore obvious opportunities to create a narrative. And nobody, not customers, not even employees, can keep up. You need natural pauses so people can catch up to you—so customers and reviewers can give you feedback that you can then integrate into the next version. And so your team can understand what the customer doesn’t.”
― Tony Fadell, Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

“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. And to make sure the product still made sense. To see if marketing still liked it. To see if sales still liked it. To see if support could still explain it. To make sure everyone knew what they were making and the plan to launch it.”
― Tony Fadell, Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

“Generally any brand-new product should never take longer than 18 months to ship—24 at the limit. The sweet spot is somewhere between 9 and 18 months. That applies to hardware and software, atoms and bits.”
― Tony Fadell, Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

“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. Much, much slower.”
― Tony Fadell, Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

“Before you launch V1, your external deadline is always a little wobbly. There are too many unknown unknowns to write it in stone. So the way you keep everyone moving is by creating strong internal deadlines—heartbeats that your team sets their calendar to: 1. Team heartbeats: Each individual team makes its own rhythm and deadlines for delivering their piece of the puzzle. Then all the teams align for . . . 2. Project heartbeats: These are the moments when different teams sync to make sure the product still makes sense and all the pieces are moving at the right pace. Fig.”
― Tony Fadell, Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

“When they fall apart it’s usually for one of three reasons: You focus on making one amazing thing but forget that it has to be part of a single, fluid experience. [See also: Figure 3.1.1, in Chapter 3.1.] So you ignore the million little details that aren’t as exciting to build—especially for V1—and end up with a neat little demo that doesn’t actually fit into anyone’s life. Conversely, you start with a disruptive vision but set it aside because the technology is too difficult or too costly or doesn’t work well enough. So you execute beautifully on everything else but the one thing that would have differentiated your product withers away. Or you change too many things too fast and regular people can’t recognize or understand what you’ve made. 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 it. There was no intuitive understanding of what the thing was for. It’s as if Tesla decided out the gate to build electric cars with five wheels and two steering wheels. You can change the motor, change the dash—but it still has to look like a car. You can’t push people too far outside their mental model. Not at first.”
― Tony Fadell, Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

“The good news is that a lawsuit means you’ve officially arrived. We had a party the day Honeywell sued Nest. We were thrilled. That ridiculous lawsuit (they sued our thermostat for being round) meant we were a real threat and they knew it. So we brought out the champagne. That’s right, fuckers. We’re coming for your lunch.”
― Tony Fadell, Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

“Whatever you’re disrupting is going to be the thing that defines your product—the thing that will make people take notice. And it will be the thing that will make them laugh. If you’re disrupting big, entrenched industries, your competition will almost certainly dismiss you in the beginning. They’ll say that what you’re making is a plaything, not a threat. They’ll flat out laugh in your face. Sony laughed at the iPod. Nokia laughed at the iPhone. Honeywell laughed at the Nest Learning Thermostat.”
― Tony Fadell, Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

“You can continue evolving that product for a while, but always seek out new ways to disrupt yourself. You can’t only start thinking about it when the competition threatens to catch up or your business begins to stagnate.”
― Tony Fadell, Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

“There’s a competition for market share and a competition for mind share. If your competitors are telling better stories than you, if they’re playing the game and you’re not, then it doesn’t matter if their product is worse. They will get the attention. To any customers, investors, partners, or talent doing a cursory search, they will appear to be the leaders in the category. The more people talk about them, the greater their mind share, and the more people will talk about them.”
― Tony Fadell, Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

“And when I say “story,” I don’t just mean words. Your product’s story is its design, its features, images and videos, quotes from customers, tips from reviewers, conversations with support agents. It’s the sum of what people see and feel about this thing that you’ve created. And the story doesn’t just exist to sell your product. It’s there to help you define it, understand it, and understand your customers. It’s what you say to investors to convince them to give you money, and to new employees to convince them to join your team, and to partners to convince them to work with you, and to the press to convince them to care. And then, eventually, it’s what you tell customers to convince them to want what you’re selling. And it all starts with “why.”
― Tony Fadell, Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

“The most advanced phones are called smartphones, so they say. And the problem is that they’re not so smart and they’re not so easy to use.” He talked for a while about regular mobile phones and smartphones and the problems of each before he dove into the features of the new iPhone.”
― Tony Fadell, Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

“He used a technique I later came to call the virus of doubt. It’s a way to get into people’s heads, remind them about a daily frustration, get them annoyed about it all over again. If you can infect them with the virus of doubt—“Maybe my experience isn’t as good as I thought, maybe it could be better”—then you prime them for your solution. You get them angry about how it works now so they can get excited about a new way of doing things.”
― Tony Fadell, Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

“Every product should have a story, a narrative that explains why it needs to exist and how it will solve your customer’s problems. A good product story has three elements: »  It appeals to people’s rational and emotional sides. »  It takes complicated concepts and makes them simple. » It reminds people of the problem that’s being solved—it focuses on the “why.”
― Tony Fadell, Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

“But they didn’t understand that it wasn’t a straight COGS line item. It was a marketing expense. And a support expense. That screwdriver saved us so much money on phone support. Instead of angry calls, we had happy customers raving online about their great experience.”
― Tony Fadell, Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making