Why you should listen to the customer

Designer Brandon Kowitz:

It feels great to launch fast. But launching also makes future changes much harder. So if you can invest a little energy to learn early, and then fix problems before launch, it ends up saving you a tremendous amount of time later. It also reduces the risk that you’ll launch something truly bad and get stuck backpedaling for weeks.

So replace the startup dogma of “launch early and often” with “learn early and often.” For me, it opened my mind to all the different kinds of ways startups can learn, and how valuable user research can be to the core mission of any startup.