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Issue 5 > Eight startup insights inspired by Seth Godin.

Eight startup insights inspired by Seth Godin.

Dharmesh Shah considers 'I'm impatient and shamelessly unafraid of failing.'

I've had a really interesting and crazy week (crazy in a good way). As many regular readers of OnStartups.com know, I'm a huge Seth Godin fan. I've read most of Seth's books over the years and keep up with his blog. He's even been kind enough to comment on one of my prior articles ('Why your startup shouldn't hire Seth Godin'). But, until recently, I've never had the opportunity to actually hear him speak in person. This past week, I got to hear Seth speak.

So here are some of the ideas and insights I gleaned, and which I thought might be useful to other startup fanatics. Although the core insights were inspired by Seth, I put my own lens/spin on it from the perspective of a startup. All the really brilliant stuff is Seth, the mediocre stuff is mine.

1 Resist becoming 'average'. This is my favorite insight. At my startup HubSpot, we use the geekier term 'regression to the mean' to refer to this phenomenon.

Basically, the notion is that over time, the world pushes you towards becoming more average. Often this means doing what is 'tried and true' or 'proven. Or, as Seth says, 'creating average products for average people'.

For businesses in general, but startups particularly, regressing to the mean is a dangerous thing. Why? Because the 'average' startup is not successful. The only way to succeed is to not be average. You have to go to the edges and resist the pull to the middle.

2 Communicate directly with your customers. You're the founder/CEO/president/whatever of the company. You're doing your best to work on the company, instead of in the company (just like all those business coaches said you should).

You may think you're really important to the business. In fact, you may even be really important. It doesn't matter. Talk to your customers.

Whether you're in the backroom writing the next Facebook/YouTube/Google/whatever or you're more of an operations/finance person, you need to be having direct conversations with your customers/users. There is no substitute.

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