Daymond John Quotes

The main professional responsibility of a person in business is business.

Relentless improvement of the product and upgrading of consumer tastes are the heart of mass merchandising.

Launch your product or service before you have funding. See how people respond to it before you have a PowerPoint and business plan - have something people can use, and go from there.

I believe there is not any big difference between any consumer business, whether it's a bank or insurance or vodka or chocolate, whatever it is.

My sweet spot is figuring out how to make a product that people love and how to refine it to make them love it more. All the rest is business noise.

My background was computer science and business school, so eventually I worked my way up where I was running product groups - development, testing, marketing, user education.

Business has only two functions - marketing and innovation.

To bring out a new technology for consumers first, you just had a very long road to go down to try to find people who actually would pay money for something.

If you make a really good product that people want and are willing to pay for, money will come.

Our business is about technology, yes. But it's also about operations and customer relationships.

I had to learn everything about manufacturing, patents and how to run a business, and eventually I came up with an prototype that worked.

Look, Pitbull is a product.

At a European auto show, I had someone from a German car company come up to me and say the Karma should cost $125,000, not $87,900, but our development process lets us lower the costs. I guarantee it's profitable.

Customers are a great way to finance a business for many reasons. First, customer financing is typically non dilutive. They want something from you other than equity in your business. Customers also help you fit your product to the market. And customers will help debug and improve the quality of the product.

I think that building any product that has a lot of user loyalty is a bit like making a sequel to a great movie or video game - people generally want 'more of the same thing, except better and different.'

I know only a few ways to take market share and drive new revenue. I can engineer better products and services, I can build better relationships with my customers and deliver a higher level of service, or I can give my customers a lower price.

Design has always been at the heart of our business.

All things can be done by every company in the world. Apple builds a phone, and so does Samsung. It's not about being different but about being better at what you do.

Face-to-face customer feedback refines or validates every component of the startup's business model, not just the product itself.

As you start building the product, don't assume that you know all the answers. Listen to the community and adapt. We had a lot of our own ideas about how the service would evolve. Coming from PayPal and eBay, we saw YouTube as a powerful way to add video to auctions, but we didn't see anyone using our product that way, so we didn't add features to support it.

If you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you've launched too late.

You could raise the price of, say, a bottle of ketchup to $1.03 instead of $1, and no one would know. Raising prices just 3% per product would add 50% to your pretax income. Why not do it? It's like heroin: You do a little and you want a little bit more. Raising prices is the easy way.

Frequently, crashes are followed with a message like 'ID 02'. 'ID' is an abbreviation for idiosyncrasy and the number that follows indicates how many more months of testing the product should have had.

If the business were a play, Act One is: Woohoo, bright and bushy-tailed. We're going to make something great! Act Two is: We're six months behind on back-end development. We're trying to raise venture capital. We're trying to figure out what furniture we should sell to make payroll.

Because startups often accidentally build something nobody wants, it doesn’t matter much if they do it on time and on budget. The goal of a startup is to figure out the right thing to build - the thing customers want and will pay for - as quickly as possible.