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Comment by bloodcarter | Hacker News Reader

Henry Ford once said that, if he’d asked his customers what they wanted, they’d have asked for a faster horse.

That's not to say you shouldnt ask what they want. What you have to do as a visionary is to interpret their answers into what it is that they really need.

True. But here I agree with Fred Wilson (http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2011/02/mba-tuesday.html).

He says: "Early in a startup, product decisions should be hunch driven. Later on, product decisions should be data driven."

I talked to Jack Dorsey of Twitter about quite the same topic when he was in Russia last Feb. And he didn't tell me he asked people a lot before starting. He just built something around idea he had a strong obsession about and everything else is a history.

Agreed. I think we might be talking semantics here. It just depends what you consider to be asking the users. The Henry Ford quote is just meant to say that you can't take advice from users literally because they'll only tell you what they're already used to. To me, asking the users is not a literal asking, but rather, a questioning the shortcomings and potentials of the current environment.

In the UX community, it's well known that you don't ask people what they want, which is why they have all those clever UX research methods.

One of the most brilliant concepts and potential companies I've worked for failed miserably because 400 years of combined Wharton and Columbia MBA experience failed to ask the customer what they wanted.

We failed on the cusp of brilliance because we automated our customers out of their jobs.

Would you please stop signing your posts?

Yes, of course. New and all that.

But doesn't that tell you what his customers wanted? They wanted something faster. They just didn't know how. You always have to know what people want. Delivery in a way that they don't expect it is what converts the need into a "revolution"

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