Listening to an interview with Jerry Seinfeld he said something which sounded like good advice for Startup Entrepreneurs.
Here is what he said verbatim:
“Your write and you write, and you don’t know if it is any good. You have to get up in front of an audience to find out if this is any good. You always have to try things, and the audience kind of writes the act for you in a way. They say, keep this, get rid of that. And you use them as a judge. They are the judge.”
It seems success in most enterprising professions are about being guided by your audience or customers. Testing, refining and constantly iterating.
Startup blog says: Real market feedback, is the only way to test any written plan. It beats research every time.
Fun, effective analogy
Andrew
(@andrew_dick via twitter)
Of course it does depend on your production process. That rewrite process works great for standup (as it is very, very cost effective, and the audience can’t see what happened last time), but less so for television (waiting to see if the audience laughs when you have a large crew, lighting costs, actors learning lines etc is a whoel lot more dangerous).
It’s somewhat ironic that you’re quoting Seinfeld in the same month where his most recent TV effort has been getting caned…
Back to the analogy, scale of production hampers many firms from doing what you say…
But, it is very sensible advice to listen to your actual customers (i.e the folks who care enough to deal with your prroduct’s flaws) rather than market research (which typically focusses on the hypothetical wishes of possible customers)…
Seinfeld’s advice to standups applies equally to startups. http://bit.ly/b8XQeZ Well spotted, @Sammartino!
(via Twitter)