a principle I learned from Paul Buchheit: it's better to make a few people really happy than to make a lot of people semi-happy.

the success of a startup is almost always a function of its founders.

the main value of whatever you launch with is as a pretext for engaging users.

the hard part is seeing something new that users lack. The better you understand them the better the odds of doing that. That's why so many successful startups make something the founders needed.

Try making your customer service not merely good, but surprisingly good. Go out of your way to make people happy.

Most startups fail before they make something people want, and the most common form of failure is running out of money. So being cheap is (almost) interchangeable with iterating rapidly.

Though the immediate cause of death in a startup tends to be running out of money, the underlying cause is usually lack of focus. Either the company is run by stupid people (which can't be fixed with advice) or the people are smart but got demoralized.

Even if you get demoralized, don't give up. You can get surprisingly far by just not giving up.

Understand your users. That's the key. The essential task in a startup is to create wealth; the dimension of wealth you have most control over is how much you improve users' lives; and the hardest part of that is knowing what to make for them. Once you know what to make, it's mere effort to make it, and most decent hackers are capable of that.