In college, the author started his first startup, and it failed. Before launch, he didn't talk to customers, he fought with his cofounders a lot. He didn't know how to build working software or deal with tech debt. He read Eric Ries's Lean Startup after this experience and vowed to use it. Since the insurance CRM was geared toward tracking existing... See more

No more building. Just talk to customers. “We decided we weren’t allowed to build anything at all. We had to just talk to people—and talk to them until we had a lot of confidence and a mental model of customers, their jobs, the problems they might have and how we might solve them.” (For more here, check out Cacioppo’s write-up on some of her... See more