The most powerful ideas are the simplest—and in retrospect, the most obvious. But it’s the obvious ideas that are the hardest to see when you’re focused on the day-to-day activities inside your organization.

The Best Insights Come from Watching Customers Use Your Products

Get out there with your users. See the world from their perspective first, and then observe as they interact with your offering. Obvious improvements will become apparent when your product or service is viewed in the context of the customer’s life.

If you always look at something from the same point of view you won’t see anything new. Sometimes you have to change your perspective to see what is most obvious.
– The Startup Daily

Failure happens. Products fail, bad hiring decisions are made, and even the best leaders make mistakes. One of the best tests of an organization is what happens when people fail.

Is the organization able to openly discuss its failures, learn from them, and use those learnings to improve the system? Or do failures lead to witch hunts and placing blame, creating a climate of fear and discouraging people from taking risks in the future?

The Best Companies Don’t Avoid Making Mistakes, They Avoid Making the Same Mistakes

Learning from past failures is crucial to innovation. When you foster a climate of psychological safety that allows people to honestly discuss and learn from their failures, you can turn those failures into a competitive advantage.
– The Startup Daily

Not all customers are created equal. Find out who your very best customers are—the ones who buy the most, fastest, and most frequently—and then figure out what they have in common. Do they live in the same neighborhood, frequent the same websites, or share some other trait that you can use to find them. This is where your marketing budget is best spent.

Don’t Market to the Most Customers, Just the Best Customers

Marketing is about building top-of-mind awareness among your potential customers. It’s more effective to get your message in front of the same “dream customers” three times than it is to get it in front of three times as many customers just one time.
– The Startup Daily

Entrepreneurs live everyday with the fear that whatever they are putting their heart and soul into will fail completely. Will you have ruined your career? Will you bankrupt your family? What about your reputation? A scenario like this can seem unrecoverable when viewed in the abstract.

Disempower Your Fears by Vividly Imagining Your Worst-Case Failure, and the Process You Will Go Through to Recover from It

Write it out. Create a vivid picture of everything you will lose, and everything you will do to rebuild again.

One of the biggest sources of anxiety related to this doomsday scenario is fear of the unknown. When you play out the scenario in detail you will see that failure is not as bad as you imagine it, and that everything is recoverable.

Many of the most successful entrepreneurs and creatives have crashed-and-burned, sometimes multiple times, only to recover and come back stronger than ever.
– The Startup Daily

The first step in the Lean Startup approach is to determine your Minimum Viable product (MVP)—the minimum set of features that your customers will pay for.

However, this does mean you need to actually develop those features. Before committing any resources to development, you should make sure people will use the features that you plan to build.

Validate Your Market with a Concierge MVP

Simulate having a finished product by having your people manually deliver the solution to early customers. Members of the founding team can manually purchase and ship products, process payments, generate emails, and any other tasks that will eventually be automated.

Commit resources to automating the solution only when the workload becomes too great and you have successfully proven your assumptions.
– The Startup Daily

If you accept work that is outside your area of expertise the quality of your work won’t be as good as it could be, and you will set a precedent that is hard to break.

Prove to the world you are serious about what you specialize in and leave generalization to the competition.

Don’t Be Afraid to Turn Down Work that is Outside Your Area of Specialization

You might have a slower start, but when you stick to the work you are most passionate about you will build a stronger, more valuable business in the long-term
– The Startup Daily

Getting an accurate estimate of how long a project will take can be an exercise in frustration. The problem is that people are hardwired to be overly optimistic about their own abilities.

Most People Underestimate How Long it Will Take Them to Complete a Project

Yet people are fairly accurate at predicting how long it will take someone else to complete that same task.

To get an accurate estimate, ask how long they think it will take someone else to complete the task before assigning it.
– The Startup Daily

  You are doing yourself a disservice when you wait for the perfect idea, the perfect time to start, or for your work to be perfect before releasing it to world.

Perfection is unattainable. When you strive for perfection and don’t find it, you’re giving yourself an excuse to do nothing at all.

Instead of Trying to Do Perfect Work, Just Strive to Do Your Best

In most cases you would have found that perfect idea to be flawed anyway. Begin with something that is just good enough, and keep improving on it until you know you have done your best.
– The Startup Daily

Many great ideas first arrive before their time, only to fail and be forgotten. Some ideas fail and are reborn repeatedly before the world is ready to embrace them.

Yesterday’s Failure May be Tomorrow’s Blockbuster

Political, social, and technological changes ensure that yesterday’s markets are not the same as today’s.

Just because an idea failed in the past, doesn’t mean it should be discounted today, or in the future.
– The Startup Daily

As you work your way through your project milestones, you will generate a trail of checklists, old drafts, and other relics of your completed work. Don’t throw away this evidence of your progress.

Create a “Done Wall” to Celebrate Completed Tasks

Gather and proudly display these artifacts as a monument to your achievements. You will be more motivated to continue working when you are surrounded by a record of how far you have come.
– The Startup Daily