If your revenue is highly concentrated, as I learned at PayPal, the total number of customers matters less than the value of each customer. In that case, align the team around usage with a North Star (and pricing) that tracks usage. If your customers are all worth similar amounts, like users of a meditation app, small business accounting software,

Deliberation, execution, hiring, and delegation are all critical; no business succeeds without a healthy blend of those. However, in early-stage startups, these strategies consistently fail for one important reason: missing information.

Which of these, if it works, could have the biggest impact?

That’s why when we train people, we always have them conduct their first practice interviews with somebody else’s product. We just ask for a volunteer from the group who recently bought something big: a spin bike, a vintage typewriter, or three months of Lindy Hop dance lessons. Anything but the interviewer’s product. That way, they’re not attached

PayPal wrote a script to message eBay sellers, pretending to be a buyer, to ask if they would accept payments via PayPal. Sellers thought their buyers wanted PayPal, so they quickly added the payment option.

Einstein famously said, “If you can’t explain it to a six-year-old, then you don’t understand it yourself.” Consider this example: Do you know how a bicycle works? (Most people say yes.) But take a moment to draft an email to a six-year-old explaining how a bicycle works (and don’t forget to talk about why it’s easy to balance on a moving bike, but

Question 2. Tell me about a mistake you made recently.

JTBD says we don’t actually “buy” products or services, we instead hire them to help us make progress in a particular situation—the way we might hire a contractor to achieve a goal.

Try to find people who recently bought your product. New customers will remember the purchase journey best. And if they haven’t bought it yet, they won’t know the whole purchase journey, and they might not be qualified prospects.