Gabriel Weinberg > Quotes

“Almost every failed startup has a product. What failed startups don’t have are enough customers.”
― Gabriel Weinberg, Traction: A Startup Guide to Getting Customers

“Poor distribution - not product - is the number one cause of failure.”
― Gabriel Weinberg, Traction: A Startup Guide to Getting Customers

“The faster you run high quality experiments, the more likely you’ll find scalable, effective growth tactics. Determining the success of a customer acquisition idea is dependent on an effective tracking and reporting system, so don’t start testing until your tracking/reporting system has been implemented.”
― Gabriel Weinberg, Traction: A Startup Guide to Getting Customers

“This is what we call the 50% rule: spend 50% of your time on product and 50% on traction.”
― Gabriel Weinberg, Traction: A Startup Guide to Getting Customers

“Many entrepreneurs who build great products simply don’t have a good distribution strategy.”
― Gabriel Weinberg, Traction: A Startup Guide to Getting Customers

“Avoid succumbing to the gambler’s fallacy or the base rate fallacy. Anecdotal evidence and correlations you see in data are good hypothesis generators, but correlation does not imply causation—you still need to rely on well-designed experiments to draw strong conclusions. Look for tried-and-true experimental designs, such as randomized controlled experiments or A/B testing, that show statistical significance. The normal distribution is particularly useful in experimental analysis due to the central limit theorem. Recall that in a normal distribution, about 68 percent of values fall within one standard deviation, and 95 percent within two. Any isolated experiment can result in a false positive or a false negative and can also be biased by myriad factors, most commonly selection bias, response bias, and survivorship bias. Replication increases confidence in results, so start by looking for a systematic review and/or meta-analysis when researching an area.”
― Gabriel Weinberg, Super Thinking: The Big Book of Mental Models

“The only essential thing is growth. Everything else we associate with startups follows from growth.”
― Gabriel Weinberg, Traction: A Startup Guide to Getting Customers

“Good customer support is so rare that, if you simply try to make your customers happy, they are likely to spread the news of your awesome product on that basis alone.”
― Gabriel Weinberg, Traction: How Any Startup Can Achieve Explosive Customer Growth

“High-stakes testing culture—be it for school examinations, job interviews, or professional licensing—creates perverse incentives to “teach to the test,” or worse, cheat.”
― Gabriel Weinberg, Super Thinking: The Big Book of Mental Models

“Campbell’s law) in his 1979 study, “Assessing the Impact of Planned Social Change.” He explains the concept a bit more precisely: “The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor.”
― Gabriel Weinberg, Super Thinking: The Big Book of Mental Models

“A related model to watch out for is the hydra effect, named after the Lernaean Hydra, a beast from Greek mythology that grows two heads for each one that is cut off. When you arrest one drug dealer, they are quickly replaced by another who steps in to meet the demand. When you shut down an internet site where people share illegal movies or music, more pop up in its place. Regime change in a country can result in an even worse regime.”
― Gabriel Weinberg, Super Thinking: The Big Book of Mental Models

“In fact, there is a mental model for this more specific situation, called the cobra effect, describing when an attempted solution actually makes the problem worse.”
― Gabriel Weinberg, Super Thinking: The Big Book of Mental Models

“sustainable competitive advantage.”
― Gabriel Weinberg, Super Thinking: The Big Book of Mental Models

“The implication is that when people realized they were being watched by their governments, some of them stopped reading articles that they thought could get them into trouble. The name for this concept is chilling effect.”
― Gabriel Weinberg, Super Thinking: The Big Book of Mental Models

“In the case of querymongo.com, RJMetrics built a tool that translates SQL queries to MongoDB syntax (two database technologies). This”
― Gabriel Weinberg, Traction: How Any Startup Can Achieve Explosive Customer Growth

“The general model for this impact comes from economics and is called path dependence, meaning that the set of decisions, or paths, available to you now is dependent on your past decisions.”
― Gabriel Weinberg, Super Thinking: The Big Book of Mental Models

“To be clear, splitting your time evenly between product and traction will certainly slow down product development. However, it counterintuitively won’t slow the time to get your product successfully to market. In fact, it will speed it up! That’s because pursuing product development and traction in parallel has a couple of key benefits. First, it helps you build the right product because you can incorporate knowledge from your traction efforts. If you’re following a good product development process, you’re already getting good feedback from early customers. However, these customers are generally too close to you. They often tell you what you want to hear.”
― Gabriel Weinberg, Traction: How Any Startup Can Achieve Explosive Customer Growth

“If you do engage, another trap to watch out for is the observer effect, where there is an effect on something depending on how you observe it, or even who observes”
― Gabriel Weinberg, Super Thinking: The Big Book of Mental Models

“Sayre’s law, named after political scientist Wallace Sayre, offers that in any dispute the intensity of feeling is inversely proportional to the value of the issues at stake. A related concept is Parkinson’s law of triviality, named after naval historian Cyril Parkinson, which states that organizations tend to give disproportionate weight to trivial issues.”
― Gabriel Weinberg, Super Thinking: The Big Book of Mental Models

“called utility values, which reflect your total relative preferences across the various scenarios.”
― Gabriel Weinberg, Super Thinking: The Big Book of Mental Models

“circle of competence.”
― Gabriel Weinberg, Super Thinking: The Big Book of Mental Models

“premature optimization, where you tweak or perfect code or algorithms (optimize) too early (prematurely).”
― Gabriel Weinberg, Super Thinking: The Big Book of Mental Models

“First principles is kind of a physics way of looking at the world. . . . You kind of boil things down to the most fundamental truths and say, “What are we sure is true?” . . . and then reason up from there. . .”
― Gabriel Weinberg, Super Thinking: The Big Book of Mental Models

“Jeff Bezos again, in a 1997 letter to shareholders: Given a ten percent chance of a 100 times payoff, you should take that bet every time. But you’re still going to be wrong nine times out of ten. We all know that if you swing for the fences, you’re going to strike out a lot, but you’re also going to hit some home runs.”
― Gabriel Weinberg, Super Thinking: The Big Book of Mental Models

“power vacuum. This mental model is an analogy to the natural concept of a vacuum, a space devoid of all substance, including air. If you make a vacuum, say by pumping air out of an empty container, and then you open that container, air will quickly rush into it, filling the vacuum, normalizing the air pressure. In”
― Gabriel Weinberg, Super Thinking: The Big Book of Mental Models

“An instance where sunk costs lead to an escalation of commitment is sometimes called the Concorde fallacy,”
― Gabriel Weinberg, Super Thinking: The Big Book of Mental Models

“Unfortunately, studies are much, much more likely to be published if they show statistically significant results, which causes publication bias.”
― Gabriel Weinberg, Super Thinking: The Big Book of Mental Models

“The secret to shareable content is showing readers they have a problem they didn’t know about, or at least couldn’t fully articulate.”
― Gabriel Weinberg, Traction: How Any Startup Can Achieve Explosive Customer Growth

“lock-in when customers are locked in to their services because perceived switching costs”
― Gabriel Weinberg, Super Thinking: The Big Book of Mental Models

“If you don’t simplify your assumptions, you can fall into a couple of traps, described in our next mental models. First, most people are, unfortunately, hardwired to latch onto unnecessary assumptions, a predilection called the conjunction fallacy,”
― Gabriel Weinberg, Super Thinking: The Big Book of Mental Models