I guess I'm a little bit different than many here.
I am TOTALLY guided by my customers. I wasn't always this way. I used to think that something would be so cool, so I would build it, and often, the project went nowhere. I was fortunate to have a co-founder at one time who insisted that we sell it first, then develop it. I never completely came around to his way of thinking, but now I understand where he was coming from.
My customers have never steered me wrong. They don't waste my time. They only spend energy describing things that they really need, and invariably, others need the same things.
The downside is that I never spend time working on my own pet projects. I KNOW I can build a better bridge game, fitness program, or home inventory program. I'd also love to blog. But all those things fall into the category of "No one else asked for it", so I simply don't spend time on them. Maybe some other time.
That's a great quote. It's important to understand that _listening_ to your customers isn't the same as having them design the product (which would be a mistake). In this case, the message that you should get from the customer is that "my horse is too slow".
That's probably a valid consideration, but whether you should take it into serious account depends upon your aims: Are you trying to shift the paradigm, and introduce something entirely new? Or are you simply trying to produce the best refinement of an existing process or technology.
Not every change is revolutionary, nor does it need to be. Constantly reinvent things, and you'll wear your market out. But customer-sensitive refinements are frequently welcomed by consumers (depending on what they cost), or at least accepted without complaint.
You can't simply blow your audience off, no matter how visionary Henry Ford might have been. Development of anything...a process, a product, an image, a brand, whatever...is a never-ending set of nested feedback loops from the target audience, or else it's eventually a failure.
Listening to your customers' needs is a great thing. But you should take this advice with a grain of salt in the early stages. If you only have a few customers and focus too much on building something they want, you risk becoming a consulting company instead of a product company. Get all the feedback you can, but use your judgment to decide whether to act on it.
I'm not saying that you should ignore this data or not release early. I have though, have seen customers be very wrong. I'd say they tend to see only short term goals, not long term. At worst, your product will become a design by committee disaster.
I am TOTALLY guided by my customers. I wasn't always this way. I used to think that something would be so cool, so I would build it, and often, the project went nowhere. I was fortunate to have a co-founder at one time who insisted that we sell it first, then develop it. I never completely came around to his way of thinking, but now I understand where he was coming from.
My customers have never steered me wrong. They don't waste my time. They only spend energy describing things that they really need, and invariably, others need the same things.
The downside is that I never spend time working on my own pet projects. I KNOW I can build a better bridge game, fitness program, or home inventory program. I'd also love to blog. But all those things fall into the category of "No one else asked for it", so I simply don't spend time on them. Maybe some other time.