Anything You Want

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.

Starting small puts 100 percent of your energy on actually solving real problems for real people. It gives you a stronger foundation to grow from. It eliminates the friction of big infrastructure and gets right to the point. And it will let you change your plan in an instant, as you're working closely with those first customers telling you what the

That would be like putting a coke machine in a monastery.

Like most people, I had no idea what to charge for my service. So I went to the local record store in Woodstock, where they had some local musicians' CDs on the counter. I asked the woman at the store, “How does it work if I sell my CD here?” She said, “You set the selling price at whatever you want. We keep a flat $4 cut. And we pay you every week

Success comes from persistently improving and inventing, not from persistently doing what's not working.

You can't please everyone, so proudly exclude people.

After reading the whole thing, I felt like saying things my old voice teacher would have said: “OK, make a plan that requires only $1000. Go!” “Now make a plan for ten times as many customers. Go!” “Now do it without a website. Go!” “Now make all your initial assumptions wrong, and have it work anyway. Go!” “Now show how you would franchise it. Go!

Your business plan is moot. You don't know what people really want until you start doing it.

If you want to be useful, you can always start now, with only 1 percent of what you have in your grand vision. It'll be a humble prototype version of your grand vision, but you'll be in the game. You'll be ahead of the rest, because you actually started, while others are waiting for the finish line to magically appear at the starting line.