founder's mentality

You can be the best product for small market, build a real company, and then from a position of strength, either stay there or attempt to expand to adjacent markets. Or be undistictive in a huge market, out-advertised and invisible, never getting off the ground.

There is a filmmaker that worked for Pixar that put this beautifully, and he used the metaphor of doing anything difficult, but for your high purposes of building a company. He says, "If you're sailing across the ocean and your goal is to avoid weather and waves, then why the hell are you sailing?" You have to embrace that sailing means that you ca... See more

Get customers to talk about their problems, not your product.

Advertising adds value to a product by changing our perception of it. An example I love that is not mentioned in the book: for years, few people bought “death insurance.” Then some genius changed the name to life insurance and grew the industry by many billions of dollars. After all, life insurance sounds so much better than death insurance.