If you want to live with fewer regrets, it’s better to blunder forward in the face of uncertainty than to hedge your bets and do nothing.

People Expect to Regret Actions, but they Actually Regret Inaction

Our psychological immune system is better equipped to deal with an excess of courage than an excess of cowardice.

When people look back on their lives, the most common regrets are the relationships they didn’t pursue, the passions they didn’t follow, and the ventures they didn’t start. However, the failures are usually rationalized as learning experiences.

Try the thing you are unsure about. Take a chance, act, and live without regrets.
– The Startup Daily

To find disruptive insights, immerse yourself in the world of your customers. This doesn’t require expensive focus groups or market research consultants.

Innovation Starts By Observing Your Customers and Asking Questions

How and where do they use the current solution? What steps are required? What are their motivations? How are they feeling? Are they using any workarounds? The greatest opportunities are found in the least obvious areas.
– From The Startup Daily

Despite having a nearly perfect memory, Thomas Edison—like many of the world’s most creative geniuses—never went anywhere without a notebook to record his thoughts.

Great ideas are useless if they are forgotten to time. Don’t rely on memory alone to record and organize your ideas, insights, and observations.

Always Carry a Notebook to Capture Your Ideas

Record as many of your thoughts as possible, without censorship, the moment they occur. The very act of writing them down helps solidify your ideas.

Reviewing old notebooks can become one of your greatest sources of inspiration when you are facing new challenges.
– From The Startup Daily

Habits and routines make our lives easier but dull our minds. When we rely on existing thought patterns we operate without original thinking.

Deliberately Breaking Your Routine Stimulates Creative Thinking

Take an indirect route to work, read a book in a new genre, work different hours, or take up a new hobby.

Feeding your brain information and ideas from fresh sources gives you fuel for solving problems.
– From The Startup Daily

Louis Vuitton, Method cleaning products, Patagonia—customers use these brands to tell the world about themselves and their point of view.

Brands that Stand Out Have Made Themselves into Cultural Shorthand for a Set of Values

These brands use every detail and every interaction to reinforce a distinct point of view, and to stand apart from opposing viewpoints.

A strong brand cannot stand for everyone, some people will love people and others will hate it.

If you aren’t sure what your brand stands for, ask yourself “what would you rather go out of business before compromising on?”
– From The Startup Daily

You may not be able to afford to hire the most talented and polished workers, but that doesn’t mean you can’t have the great employees.

When hiring, look for evidence of the candidate’s character, not their skills. A strong work ethic, perseverance, and the ability to think like an owner cannot be learned, but almost everything else can be.

Hire for Attitude, Train Aptitude

Invest the resources you would have spent on high salaries creating training systems that allow your people to grow with your organization. Most companies seriously underestimate what their people would be capable of if their leaders invested in them.

Every act of creation is also an act of destruction. Something must be torn down or cast aside to make way for the new thing.

Pick a Fight, and Channel Your Defiance into Productivity

Pick a fight with the entrenched system, the rules, the way it’s always been done. Harnessed that aggressive energy. Adopt a warrior’s frame of mind and make your work an act of defiance.

As humans we want to believe in ourselves, each other, and the brands and companies in our lives. Don’t think about your product’s benefit, think about the statement it makes.

The Bigger the Statement You Make, the Bigger Your Brand Will Become

Whatever you do, someone else can do it better, faster, and cheaper. But you aren’t competing just on products, you are competing on conviction.

People want to believe in what you do, and why you do it.

– From The Startup Daily

Something offered at a discount and something offered for free occupy different places in our minds.

In a normal purchasing decision—even when the price is steeply discounted—we think about the upside and the downside of the transaction. When something is free, we ignore the downside.

Offering Something for Free Suppresses Loss Aversion

Free causes us to overvalue something, and to ignore the indirect costs.

People will spend hours waiting in long lines, put up with the inconvenience of heavy crowds, or purchase a different product they don’t need to get a free gift they never would have purchased anyway.

Customer reviews are powerful. A peer is putting their reputation on the line to stand behind a product. People put more faith in their peers than they do in advertising, which is why sales sites with reviews outperform those without.

But allowing customer reviews can be a frightening proposition. As long as you have a good product, don’t worry too much about loosing control the message.

A Few Bad Reviews Can Actually Improve Sales

Of course if most of your reviews are bad then you probably have a problem with your product. But as long as the majority are positive, a few negative reviews can make the good ones more credible.

Studies have shown that you will have a dramatic increase in sales when you have one bad review and nine good ones verses having ten good ones.

The other benefit of negative reviews is that they tell you exactly what to improve in your next version.