[makerops]

"A year ago, I was talking to a fellow start-up founder and I realized how much he likes to stick with his ideas.... I wondered: is this passion or simply stubbornness?"

The whole article is based on a false premise imo. There are a myriad of reasons why I would, or wouldn't listen to a suggestion from someone else.

The best I can do at least, is to listen to everyone, and try the often repeated suggestions, but if you are implementing every whim a customer suggests, you probably aren't operating optimally.

[namenotrequired]

I agree - he's right that you should "make something people want" but ignores the question of whether the people who want X are in your target audience or not. Simply implementing the most popular suggestions can easily pull you in many different directions and take you away from your goal of making something people want.

[cinquemb]

This might be a little bit meta, but for my start up we interpreted "make something people want" as make something that takes advantage of the behaviors people exhibit whether or not they explicitly say they want it or not. We get tonnes of feedback/complaints (that are very emotionally charged) about what we are doing every week that we don't respond to, but despite that, we keep growing.

I wish I could figure out how to turn this into a win(us)-(lose)them, into a win-win (because there could be an upside, like building a movement), but what people are demanding is in direct conflict of their behaviors (and our growth) so there little actualized incentive on our part except for maybe trying to exacerbate the issues more with a new feature in order to get more growth.