Seth Godin's best tactics for building remarkable products, strategies, brands and more

When you choose your smallest viable audience, what language they speak, how much money they have, what problem they're trying to solve, what their technical facility is, whether they're short-tempered, whether they're kind, whether they're going to stick with you, you have chosen everything that's going to go into the product and what your future is going to be like.

What it means to be a strategic thinker? It means to see the system. Systems serve a valuable function until they don't, because then the system starts doing things to support itself, to reinforce itself.

Tension is at the heart of every art form and every innovation. What we do when we launch a new product, we say, we have this thing that can do X, and now the person is imagining what their life might be like if that were true. If they fall in love with that possibility, now there's tension.

I define good taste as knowing what other people want just before they do.

Quality is not luxury. Quality is not perfection. Quality means meeting spec, and if you meet spec, you're done. If you don't think the spec is good enough, make a better spec.

If you don't build the network effect into what you are making, you are almost certainly going to fail. The question is, will this work better for my users if they tell other people about it? And if the answer is no, then why would they tell other people about it?

We weren't there to make perfect for us. We were there to delight the person who was buying the software. And our standards were untouchable. We said, 'If that person, the one we're describing is delighted with what we shipped, it's good. And if they're not, it doesn't matter what kind of excuses we have.'

The word remarkable means worth making a remark about. So I'm not talking about coming up with some viral video that's ridiculous in its gimmickry. I'm saying if you make something where the person's life gets better if they talk about you and you know in advance what you want them to say, then they are more likely to say it.