Product

“Basically, marketing moved closer to product because the product itself could become the growth engine.”

“Choose to architect your board the same way you architect your product.”

“Customers will lie to you and they'll say like, Hey, this is great. This is wonderful. And then not pay you money. But you should know whether your product is actually differentiated or not. And if a customer is not gonna kind of pay you money, they're sort of…”

“This is why I think people make it hard to buy their products, hard to take care of, because Like, we need some challenges in our life, and we feel like we have to work for it, it's worth more.”

“When it really is it, you just know, but when it's not quite it, you walk around unsure if it's it. And if you're asking like, is this it? Could it be it? It's definitely not it.”

“Development, sales, and marketing, if you want to learn them, like, I think there's curriculum out there, there's people, there's, you just go and dive in, you, whatever. I think they, In my opinion, are a little, there's intuition in all of them, but there's …”

“The needs of product and companies are extremely divergent unless you're taking a perspective three years out, at which point they kind of become to come to the same point and actually augment each other.”

“I think you know, products will get enormously cheap or purchasing power is going to go up like crazy.”

“I think that there will be 10 to a hundred times more changes that will be presented to products than ever before, because now There, the cost of testing something, the cost of changing is going to be much, much low.”

“Meanwhile, I think a lot of people going into product might be coming from design, might be coming from data science, might be coming from engineering because the ones that have judgment, the ones that can talk, the ones that want to stay current, they might b…”

“So I think I ultimately, my core investing thesis is that if there is not remarkable product, all the go-to marketing distribution in the world will not save you.”

“What becomes more important is your product as a channel, where you actually earn that trust that drives that word of mouth, that drives that likability, and what becomes less important is something across marketing, sales, like more old traditional techniques…”

“Whatever people are doing, if you can make that a little bit easier, then that's just going to be a much better product that people enjoy more. And this is just this principle of latent demand, which I think is just the single most important principle and prod…”

“Every category that I know of outside of engineering and product is at existential risk of shrinking seats.”

“So I think that the right investor can be a catalyst, but I don't think that you can take a product that would not otherwise be the winner and anoint them the winner.”

“At any given point, you have one question you're trying to answer, and you want to go get that answer. That's all that you need to make something work. Don't overthink it. The one question we have right now is not any of that shit. All we need to know is do cu…”

“There's all these interesting debates right now about like, Roles collapsing and product and marketing and so on. And I just really don't see these things as separate. I see product and marketing and, you know, it's the same thing.”

“And now when you extend this to more complex tasks, like a coding agent, which says that like, okay, I have fixed five of your linear tickets and here are the patches just to review them at the start of your day. So I feel that is going to be like extremely us…”

“It's not that okay in product by the way, but in marketing it's fine because let's say that this booth would have been the weirdest thing ever. Okay. I would have never done it again. And people would have rolled their eyes at me, but there's no harm there for…”

“And by telling people how your product is made, what goes into it makes them, it increases the value in the buyer's eyes.”

“Sales, marketing, product, and development. Those are the core four elements of building a SaaS company. And if you go on social media, or you listen to podcasts, or you see founders who are trying to succeed and failing over and over, usually they're missing …”

“The typical thing is that the founder needs to be the product person, right? By the way, it's a hundred percent true. I totally believe that. I think it's the most important thing in the zero to one stage.”

“There's a classic failure mode here where, you know, the FD implements something for one customer and you say, great, well, that's how you should do it. And you bring it directly into the product. And it turns out if you do that, you're building something that…”

“There are probably 10 times more products that you don't have access to because logistics is so broken, right?”

“Building a great product is one of those things that's necessary but not sufficient. And actually the separation is between those that build really great distribution.”

“It's not product that's king. It's distribution that's king.”

“Ironically, as a brand person, I would say products more important than brand right now. Products all that matters actually brand secondary.”

“You cannot navigate this AI transformation, or for the matter, any other transformation, if it doesn't start from the product.”

“But the twenty-somethings are often very good at content, and content is actually upstream of product.”

“Every new product has at its core, a hypothesis. They ha there is a founding hypothesis. It's just usually not explicit. It's usually hidden. And different people on the team may have different ideas about what it is. And because it's not explicit, it's very h…”

“It's also a big part of what informs my view that it's very unlikely for VCs to help in ways that have to do with the actual company or, like, the product.”

“I think that really that close, tight knit relationship between at any of these large model companies between post training and product is going to produce some really incredible stuff.”

“Cause I think in product, like I like to joke, there's no right answers, right? You're just, there's only wrong answers and you're just trying to execute well on like the least wrong answer that's available to you.”

“If you're repeating the same prompt weekly, that's a product in, in hiding in plain sight.”

“You can have a bad product or a product that's it's seeing improvements in great customer service, and you have a company, but if you flip that equation, you got a great product and bad customer service, you don't have a company.”

“But most of the value has to be in the products. Like, you know, we don't build infrastructure just for the sake of infrastructure. Like we build infrastructure so people can make product.”

“With our profit school system, we basically think there's really three functions in a business until you're at 15 plus employees. And that's offers products and systems.”

“But if you don't have a free version for me to at least try a little bit, just says your product's too hard to use.”

“There's going to be a whole move to onshoring lots of different products.”

“Services kind of have to be sold in that fashion along with a product.”

“We don't have to change actual product to deploy it in those other settings.”

“I don't care how good your product is. Because that's not what business is built on. Business is built on relationships. That's what business is built on.”

“Adjusting your sales or your marketing strategy is the easiest. Replacing the wrong people isn't easy, but it's within your control. The same thing with where your boat is pointed. A change in strategy or vision is painful, but it's within your control. And fi…”

“I believe that innovation or product is, is a conflict sport. It's like a, it's where you have to have arguments in order to be better. And every time you have an argument, it gets better.”

“Few great things have been created by committee, you know? And so if engineering is an order taking organization for product you can sometimes make meaningful things, but rarely will you create extremely well-crafted breakthrough products. Those tend to be sma…”

“Operations. The speed and cadence and types of problem solving is, is, is very, very different. And so it can be very challenging to all speak the same language on things that have a product or technical solution versus an ops based solution.”

“Pricing and packaging just briefly as the connective tissue between your go-to-market strategy and your product, and it's Really important, and if you get it wrong, you're going to have a bad day.”

“We want our product to feel like something that a single person made, like in the same way how any author tries to write a book that clearly reads as that it came from one mind, because people can see and spot this if this doesn't happen. It's like, it's, you …”

“There is almost no difference. We always have to add the word and services when we're talking about story brand, but there really isn't a difference.”

“You want to start every sales letter with the problem, and then you want to position the product as the solution to the problem.”

“But you really actually need product to live in the weeds with operations and intimately understand the challenges and the experiences and the frictions and the deficiencies.”

“Sometimes economics don't make sense. Like sometimes people have a beachhead of a business and what you're creating isn't a product. It's actually a feature. And I think you need to really really be honest with yourself and, you know, ask yourself those questi…”

“Often it's just before or just after the product that dramatically simplifies the offering for the consumer.”

“Your company's not your product, because your product, you have to make a bunch of judgment calls, and you're making stuff up, basically, as you go along, but your company, there is, you know, standards for that, or at least frameworks for it.”

“In technology companies, and this might be controversial because like, you know, this is like putting aside like all the other things that make these companies go. There is product. And then there is sales. Like, what drives technology companies and most busin…”

“There isn't the product and the salesperson. This is all the product. And so how you talk about it, how much you know about the industry, how much you know about the other customers is part of being a great sales rep.”

“It just became very clear that in our business, product meant mobile. Product meant moving money as seamless as possible and as reliably as possible. Having amazing customer support and that product always meant, you know, not just feature sets, but also funne…”

“So product sometimes is on this list. So one of the companies I worked at, like I mentioned, you know, product design product if that department does 10 X impact, then the company will succeed 10 X in the market. But it's, in my career, it mostly hasn't been p…”

“You have to have a go to market strategy and distribution strategy, you know, which is, you know, as important as your product in most cases sometimes even more”

“How to create a product people want. Number one, find inefficient markets. Number two, add a trust layer. Number three, build social. And number four, don't necessarily say it's crypto.”