Rework by Jason Fried, David Heinemeier Hansson Page B

who has to believe in it most. That way, you can say, “I think you’ll love it because I love it.”

    Let your customers outgrow you
    Maybe you’ve seen this scenario: There’s a customer that’s paying a company a lot of money. The company tries to please that customer in any way possible. It tweaks and changes the product per this one customer’s requests and starts to alienate its general customer base.
    Then one day that big customer winds up leaving and the company is left holding the bag—and the bag is a product that’s ideally suited to someone who’s not there anymore. And now it’s a bad fit for everyone else.
    When you stick with your current customers come hell or high water, you wind up cutting yourself off from new ones. Your product or service becomes so tailored to your current customers that it stops appealing to fresh blood. And that’s how your company starts to die.
    After our first product had been around for a while, we started getting some heat from folks who had been with us from the beginning. They said they were starting to grow out of the application. Their businesses were changing and they wanted us to change our product to mirror their newfound complexity and requirements.
    We said no. Here’s why: We’d rather our customers grow out of our products eventually than never be able to grow into them in the first place. Adding power-user features to satisfy some can intimidate those who aren’t on board yet. Scaring away new customers is worse than losing old customers.
    When you let customers outgrow you, you’ll most likely wind up with a product that’s basic—and that’s fine. Small, simple, basic needs are constant. There’s an endless supply of customers who need exactly that.
    And there are always more people who are not using your product than people who are. Make sure you make it easy for these people to get on board. That’s where your continued growth potential lies.
    People and situations change. You can’t be everything to everyone. Companies need to be true to a type of customer more than a specific individual customer with changing needs.

Don’t confuse enthusiasm with priority
    Coming up with a great idea gives you a rush. You start imagining the possibilities and the benefits. And of course, you want all that right away. So you drop everything else you’re working on and begin pursuing your latest, greatest idea.
    Bad move. The enthusiasm you have for a new idea is not an accurate indicator of its true worth. What seems like a sure-fire hit right now often gets downgraded to just a “nice to have” by morning. And “nice to have” isn’t worth putting everything else on hold.
    We have ideas for new features all the time. On top of that, we get dozens of interesting ideas from customers every day too. Sure, it’d be fun to immediately chase all these ideas to see where they lead. But if we did that, we’d just wind up running on a treadmill and never get anywhere.
    So let your latest grand ideas cool off for a while first. By all means, have as many great ideas as you can. Get excited about them. Just don’t act in the heat of the moment. Write them down and park them for a few days. Then, evaluate their actual priority with a calm mind.

    Be at-home good
    You know what it feels like. You go to a store. You’re comparing a few different products, and you’re sold on the one that sounds like it’s the best deal. It’s got the most features. It looks the coolest. The packaging looks hot. There’s sensational copy on the box. Everything seems great.
    But then you get it home, and it doesn’t deliver. It’s not as easy to use as you thought it’d be. It has too many features you don’t need. You end up feeling that you’ve been taken. You didn’t really get what you needed and you realize you spent too much.
    You just bought an in-store-good product. That’s a product you’re more excited about in the store than you are after you’ve actually