“We raised our company as a community and with our community, slowly,”

All the market research Jen and Steph accumulated—all the comparison shopping they did on price, design, and purchase experience—it wasn’t so they could just collate it and regurgitate it back out into the marketplace to give people what they said they wanted. Rather, it was to build a foundation of knowledge on which they could leverage their

I had this epiphany. I asked myself, ‘Do I want to do this the rest of my life?’ And the answer came back: ‘No.’ And the corollary to that was, ‘Well, if I don’t want to do it for the rest of my life, I probably don’t want to do it tomorrow.’”

“All the money and all of the marketing savvy in the world cannot sustain a successful product’s growth in the long run. You need more than customers’ attention. You need their unflagging devotion.”

What Jerry and Janie were doing was using the absolute best ingredients they could find to make the tastiest burgers and fries possible. Not the cheapest, not the fastest, not the most complex. Just the best. And even more special, they let their kids decide what that actually meant.

Talking to Jen Rubio about the role that research plays for creators and entrepreneurs reminded me of how athletes talk about practice, or how actors approach rehearsal. It’s deep work and repetition that sear the fundamentals into your muscle memory. They help you understand how to do things and why you should do them in a certain way, so when the

Good ideas are hard to find and hard to get right. But once you find one, they are also very hard to turn away from.

How many sharks have you come across in open water? The number of shark encounters is so minuscule in comparison that their rarity turns them into mysteries, which then turn into uncertainty within ourselves. And most of us do not do well with uncertainty. We worry. We fill the gap in our knowledge with our worst-case-scenario thinking. We get

Someone goes looking for something that they are sure already exists—a product, a service, a TV show, even a video game, it doesn’t really matter—only to discover that it is nowhere to be found. So they start talking about it in casual conversation to whoever will listen—friends, family, Uber drivers, baristas, professional acquaintances—and they