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One sentence about building things, taken apart

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Sentences about what gets built, and when it is ready to be seen.

60 essays, 2010–2026

A woman sketches on a flipchart in front of three colleagues at a meeting table

The lines in this section are about the thing being made and the people it is made for. The best known is Reid Hoffman’s claim that a first version which does not embarrass its founder went out too late, and several others pull the same way: ship a small core early, show it to the first users, improve it in rounds. Joe Kraus adds that a product in beta should bring its business model along for the test.

Other pages argue that speed is only half the job. Steve Jobs describes design as the way a product works, and Aza Raskin says that to the user the interface is the product. David Karp counts the upkeep every added feature costs.

A last group looks past the product to the market around it. Joel Spolsky wants founders listening to customers over competitors, and Gary Chou points out that a product can change direction while its users cannot be swapped for new ones. Each essay asks when its line is sound advice and when it is only a slogan.

Most read in Product

2026 1 essay

  1. No business plan survives first contact with customersBlank's line treats a plan as a list of guesses. The first month of conversations can break some of them, and a few it cannot reach at all.Steve Blank

2011 48 essays

  1. Fog Creek's marketing experiments, and the release that beat themAffiliates, coupons and catalog ads barely moved sales. A better version of FogBugz quadrupled them.Joel Spolsky
  2. Every feature keeps sending a billThe cost of a feature is small on launch day and grows every month after. Tumblr's founder priced that in; many businesses cannot.David Karp
  3. When the market sours, the business underneath is what remainsInvestor mood is weather. The line is right about that and wrong if market means the customers.Fred Wilson
  4. Built in the downturn, collected in the recoverySeveral of the companies people talk about in 2011 were started in the worst months of the last recession. The line explains why, as long as the recovery arrives before the money runs out.Jason Calacanis
  5. For the person using it, the screen is all there isUsers never see the architecture. They see buttons, words and waiting, and that is the product they judge.Aza Raskin
  6. Nothing is viral until other people decide it isWhether a thing spreads depends on thousands of strangers. Whether it is worth spreading is the part a maker controls.Peter Shankman
  7. The job behind the founder label is keeping the company aliveA startup tests an idea. A company has to pay for itself while it runs one.Spencer Fry
  8. Focus on the user, and know who paysFour words, and a common one in the industry. The difficulty begins when the person using the product is not the one paying for it.Adam Smith
  9. Put the business model in beta along with the productA beta that only tests features leaves the hardest question for launch day.Joe Kraus
  10. Profit follows customers and staff, when it follows at allChasing a number directly tends to corrupt the work that produces it. The ordering still leaves someone paying.Jack Ma
  11. A name matters less than what the company doesA sales executive once told Smart Bear that its name would scare off big customers. A large order arrived under that name anyway.Jason Cohen
  12. Build the core idea, test it, and only then add to itPownce launched doing four things at once. The lesson its co-founder drew is sound, with a couple of honest exceptions.Leah Culver
  13. Talk to customers, and the rival Stack Overflow was built againstA small company that watches its rivals ends up copying them. Spolsky's own best-known product still began as an answer to one.Joel Spolsky
  14. Research does not make products bland; bad questions doAsking customers to design a product produces an average of their guesses. That argues for better research, and the CrunchPad shows conviction is no substitute.Michael Arrington
  15. Showing a fixed product beats promising one, mostlyDuring a backlash, a working fix says more than any statement. In the same week, Facebook found that silence while building it reads as indifference.Mark Zuckerberg
  16. A product can change course; its users may not followA pivot either keeps the people and changes the product for them, or keeps the product idea and starts over with new people. Trying both usually fails.Gary Chou
  17. What a design education teaches that a business degree does notA designer's daily work is choosing among many acceptable options quickly, under constraints, and then defending the choice. Founders do the same.Biz Stone
  18. Starting got cheaper, the company part did notCloud servers and app stores made the first version cheap. Hiring, selling and managing cash cost what they always did.Sarah Lacy
  19. Solve the hard problem and keep the difficulty out of sightA laptop body cut from a single block of aluminum looks simple. The work that makes something look simple is exactly what the user is not supposed to notice.Jonathan Ive
  20. Each unnecessary question is a small failure of designEvery dialog box asks the user to stop and think about something. Most of the time the designer should have done the thinking already.Aza Raskin
  21. What A/B testing can find, and the hill it cannot see pastTesting climbs the nearest hill well. Choosing which hill to climb is a different kind of decision.Jeff Atwood
  22. An entrepreneur as someone who wants to make a thingTumblr's founder defines the job by the urge to build. The definition fits product people and leaves the business questions for later.David Karp
  23. More features, less weightSalesforce was built on the promise that business software could be as simple as a website. Twelve years on, the promise and the product have both grown.Marc Benioff
  24. Customers first, competitors a distant secondA small software company cannot win a feature race against a large one. It can win by making its own product better every day for the people who use it.Joel Spolsky
  25. Is the product a text box or a ribbon of commandsTwitter made a constraint its identity. Office had to fit thousands of commands on screen. Both designs were answers to their own problems.Bijan Sabet
  26. A company built to be sold sells for lessA buyer pays for the alternative the seller could walk away to. A company with no alternative has nothing to walk away to.Joe Kraus
  27. A chip on the shoulder drives founders, until it steers themFounders with something to prove work harder and care less about the old rules. The same drive can pick the wrong audience to prove it to.Mark Suster
  28. Start from a problem you have actually feltMint began with one engineer's irritation at managing his own money. The advice drawn from it is sound, and its promise is larger than the evidence.Aaron Patzer
  29. Simplicity as a way of finding the real problemOrnament can hide the absence of an idea. Take the ornament away and the idea has to carry the work, or visibly fail to.Paul Graham
  30. Stay committed to the problem, stay loose about the answerA team that loves its solution defends it past the point where customers have spoken. A team that loves the problem changes the solution and keeps going.Dan Greenberg
  31. Without interest in customers, a company shrinks into a jobA founder in love with the product keeps tinkering. A founder curious about the customer keeps finding more of them.Dan Martell
  32. Luck as a matter of attention and attemptsMore attempts and closer attention raise the odds of a break. Timing and circumstance still decide a great deal.Hiten Shah
  33. Mistakes are part of the job; some of them are still failuresAn early-stage investor expects mistakes and prices them in. That tolerance covers honest errors, not every way a company can go wrong.Jeff Clavier
  34. User experience measured by usefulnessThe line pairs two words that are often treated as rivals. A good experience, on this view, is simply the fastest route to something useful.Marissa Mayer
  35. When design outweighs the technologyWhen anyone can rent servers by the hour and build on free software, the hard part of a consumer product moves from the machine room to the screen.Dave McClure
  36. Hearing customers through what they doFrustrated users mostly leave without saying anything. The ones who do complain are not always the ones to believe.Chris Hughes
  37. Days spent away from the product, and the ones that payThe line sounds like a call to work harder. Read against Spolsky's own writing, it is more about what counts as working on the product at all.Joel Spolsky
  38. Luck arrives unannounced; noticing it is the skillTwitter came out of a failing podcast company and Square out of a lost sale. The skill is noticing such moments, which is easier to describe after they pay off.Jack Dorsey
  39. What being willing to be poor actually costsA founder who can live on very little can wait for the right product and turn down the wrong deal. Not everyone can live on very little.Sean Parker
  40. The problem people have is not always the one they can nameSome of the best products answer a need their users would never have put into words. The difficulty is that imagined needs look the same from the outside.Joshua Schachter
  41. Good work travels when people can pass it onJibJab's most famous video spread by email without any advertising. Its makers had also spent five years getting good enough to make it.Gregg Spiridellis
  42. Customer money buys time without selling any of the companyA paying customer funds the company, tests the product and gives up no equity. Some products cannot reach a customer without outside money first.Esther Dyson
  43. A product that needs its users to define it has not decided what it isA product should be clear about its job on first use. Tools that let users invent the job are the exception, and they need a different kind of patience.Marissa Mayer
  44. User experience decays unless someone keeps working on itA product that was simple at launch gets complicated one reasonable feature at a time. Keeping it usable is maintenance, not a project.Ryan Carson
  45. Spend the pitch on the problem, unless the problem is obviousFounders love their solution and tend to talk about it first. Listeners cannot value a solution until they feel the problem it solves.Dave McClure
  46. End users first, and the customer who pays secondGoogle's founders put the user ahead of the advertiser in writing. The promise is easiest to keep when both want the same thing.Larry Page
  47. Data describes the present, design proposes something elseUsage data records what people do with the product they have. It cannot record what they would do with one that does not exist yet.Aza Raskin
  48. Easy to explain and still hard to understandA one-line description can be accurate and still leave people with nothing to do. A single good example gives them a reason to try.Billy Chasen

2010 11 essays

  1. Design is how the thing worksThe line comes from a 2003 profile of the iPod. It is a useful correction to design as decoration, and an unfair one when it is used to wave away appearance.Steve Jobs
  2. Ask customers what they want, then watch what they doBlogHer began with a question about who was missing. Asking works best when the questions are about what people already do.Lisa Stone
  3. The builder who did not call himself an entrepreneurGroupon began as a side experiment on another product. Its founder describes himself by the work, not the title.Andrew Mason
  4. Let the product be famous and keep the founder privateA company whose public face is its product can survive its founder having a bad year. A company built on a personality often cannot.Sarah Lacy
  5. Launch small, listen closely, then go againA loud launch spends attention that cannot be spent twice. A quiet one keeps it for the version that deserves it.Jon Yongfook Cockle
  6. No company is one person's workCompany stories get told with one face on the cover. The people who built the thing rarely fit in the frame.Caterina Fake
  7. Keeping delight in view when the numbers are loudZynga measures almost everything its players do. Delight is the one thing its dashboards cannot quite see.Mark Pincus
  8. Solving problems with ideas before budgetsMoney buys more of what a company already does. It rarely buys a different way of doing it.Greg McAdoo
  9. Half the work is saying what the problem isKettering's starter motor came from restating the problem. Some problems can only be stated after trying to solve them.Unattributed
  10. If the first version doesn't embarrass you, it shipped too lateThe embarrassment should come from what is missing, never from what is broken. And it works best when few people are watching.Reid Hoffman
  11. Pirates, the navy, and who pays for the shipA small team inside a big company can move like a pirate crew. It still sails on the navy's money.Steve Jobs