Aditya Kothadiya's Blog

I totally agree with these points -

Your customers can tell you the things that are broken and how they want to be made happen. Listen to them. Make them happy. But they won’t create the future roadmap for your product or service. That’s your job.

- via Why You Should NEVER Listen to Your Customers by Mark Cuban

I’ve been arguing about this whole philosophy of “you innovating or inventing something” Vs “asking customers for what they want and building that” with my other friend who is a huge customer development and lean startup fan. Apparently I’ve different views about whole customer development and lean startup approach than his views. I think people are just taking extreme stance for these approaches and blindly following it since it’s kind of a buzz word in the web startup world. I don’t buy these approaches fully. I believe there are certain flaws with those approaches. I agree that it’s important to be lean, but I don’t want to stop innovating and thinking next interesting ideas and just build what’s needed today. I listen to all these lean startup and customer development theories, but I execute what makes sense to me, and ignore the rest.

I’ll write a detailed post on my experience while working with a lean startup approach, and also my experience with ignoring that advice, but for now read this post by Mark Cuban – which highlights my philosophy really well – Why You Should NEVER Listen to Your Customers.

I read this great paragraph from Paul Graham’s essay about why having MBA is not essential to start a technology business. I completely agree with this philosophy, so posting his thoughts again -

I found that business was neither so hard nor so boring as I feared. There are esoteric areas of business that are quite hard, like tax law or the pricing of derivatives, but you don’t need to know about those in a startup. All you need to know about business to run a startup are commonsense things people knew before there were business schools, or even universities.

If you work your way down the Forbes 400 making an x next to the name of each person with an MBA, you’ll learn something important about business school. You don’t even hit an MBA till number 22, Phil Knight, the CEO of Nike. There are only four MBAs in the top 50. What you notice in the Forbes 400 are a lot of people with technical backgrounds. Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Larry Ellison, Michael Dell, Jeff Bezos, Gordon Moore. The rulers of the technology business tend to come from technology, not business. So if you want to invest two years in something that will help you succeed in business, the evidence suggests you’d do better to learn how to hack than get an MBA.

via How to Start a Startup.

Again, the most important piece of advice – learn how to hack than get an MBA.

This is a fascinating post – You Can’t Do What You Want By Doing Something Else. Some thoughts from that post are as below -

There are lots of people who wanted to do one thing but then got “practical” and did something else “first.” The idea was that they’d be successful and sock away money doing the practical thing, and after that they could go back to the thing they loved. Bronson was sure that, among the hundreds of people that he interviewed, someone would actually have been successful with this strategy. It sounds so reasonable, after all.

But he encountered exactly zero people who pulled it off. Everyone who tried got sucked into the “practical” career and were never able to extract themselves from it. Too comfortable, too many expectations from friends and family, too easy just to keep doing what you’re doing.

Although we admire when someone can do something unique and creative, society is set up to resist such attempts. Your parents, with all the love and best intentions, will urge you to do something that “makes a good living.” Your friends and coworkers resist behaviors that might take you away from them, and will tell you stories of how this or that person tried and failed. And hardest of all, when you are ready to make your leap of faith, the temptations appear; the tremendous opportunities that for some reason only come out of the woodwork when you are ready to walk out the door.

There’s a quote that appears again and again in various forms: “close one door, another opens.” It seems like magical thinking until you see it happen. And it only happens when you don’t leave the door partially open, but instead firmly close it. For some reason, being certain that you’re ready to move on does cause some kind of magic to happen, and I don’t know why.

I’ve to admit that I’m in the exact same situation and I should be doing something about it. Coming from an Indian background, I can assert that most of the Indians fall into this “practical” and “society pressure” traps. Very few of us actually take a different route and explore their dreams. The rest of us just follow the herd. We’ll typically go for high-salaried jobs in Engineering, Medicine or Management profession. We hardly go for Music, Theatre or Sports career paths. Even in Engineering career, we’ll go for Computer Science and IT jobs – irrespective of if we really love that or not.

We hardly take risks. And we justify (read as give excuse) that we’re taking calculated risks by doing practical things now, and planning to take leap in future once we achieve some stability. On top of other social pressures, we immigrate to other countries for better career opportunities and loose our freedom and risk potential even more. We now also have visa and residency issues and we keep traveling other paths that we really do not want to. Everyday, we keep traveling away from our dreams. But we do it because everybody else is also doing the same. And we just keep doing it. Few days ago I posted a similar thought on Twitter -

But this article is a good eye-opener. I’m not sure even after reading this I’ll be taking corrective actions. You see, I’ve so many practical things to take care of first…

I think we often confuse efforts and results. Efforts and results are not always proportional. It’s a different story that we expect they should, but in reality, they are not. Why we confuse them?

When we confuse them, we tend to recognize efforts, and reward results. Instead it should be other way around. We should respect and reward people who are putting efforts, and recognize results if those efforts turn into good results.

We need to understand that results are not always guaranteed. They not only depend on amount of efforts put, but also on many other things, which are most of the times not under control of a person putting efforts. Irrespective of the amount of efforts put, results can go wrong because of bad decisions, bad ideas, bad timing, bad market, or bad luck!

Once again, don’t confuse the efforts and results. Reward efforts and recognize results. Not other way around.

You are disciplined when you…

• do things when there is no one watching you.
• do things when it’s no-more a task for you but it’s your habit.
• do things consistently and it’s not a once in a blue moon action.
• do things because you want to prove to yourself and not to somebody else.
• take extra effort because you want to improve your standard.
• don’t have to explicitly explain to others that you are disciplined because it will be evident from your actions.
• know it’s not a destination, but is a journey…

Seth Godin published this image on his blog Lonely, scared and bitter. Seth is one of the smartest person on the Internet space, and may be I’m the stupidest person. And that’s probably why I’m not getting that post. I get that image, but with a different title for that post. So republishing the same image, with my perspective – busy, happy and prosperous.

I can’t help it, my blood says B+ve. I strive for the top-right corner, so seeing only that on this image.

Have a great weekend ahead.