Unfortunately, because customers don’t really know what they want, it’s easy for these entrepreneurs to delude themselves that they are on the right path.

We sometimes remind early-stage founders that, in many ways, they aren’t building a product. They’re building a tool to learn what product to build.

I would take more of a micro-view of it. Which is: Okay, how many great product pickers do you have, people who can actually conceptualize new products? And then how many great architects do you have, who can actually build it? Sometimes, by the way, those are the same person. Sometimes it’s a solo act. And sometimes that’s the founder.

Product creators often fall into the trap of thinking there is only one way to position an offering, and that we have no ability to shift that contextual frame of reference, especially after we have released it to market. We set out to build something (a new dessert or a new way of doing email, for example) and then almost unconsciously position ou

When you start a new company, the key product/market fit question you need to answer is whether you have discovered a nonobvious market opportunity where you have a unique advantage or approach, and one that competing players won’t see until you’ve had a chance to build a healthy lead. It’s usually difficult to find such an opportunity in a “hot” s

Trap 1: You are stuck on the idea of what you intended to build, and you don’t realize that your product has become something else.