Jon Congdon Shares Insights to Product Development and Project Management

The Lifetime Value of a Customer: If we kept putting good products out, then our own consumers would be more likely to buy more stuff. Not only that, they'd be more likely to tell their friends to buy stuff from us.

Transparency: We made ourselves very transparent to our customers early in the evolution of the company, through message boards and other online communities.

Nothing is really that important: You can get really stressed out over the small stuff and the big stuff. But at the end of the day, it turns out that it's kind of all small stuff. If you realize that they're not that important, then you are better at making very critical decisions.

Like Who You Hire: We don't really want to hire anybody that we don't want to hang out with at our holiday party. I think that kind of goes for the vendors that we work with, too. Sometimes, you have a choice of 3 or 4 vendors that all qualify in that regard, and you just have to go on, Hey, who do I like?

Hire Optimists: If an optimist is faced with a problem, they know they can solve it.

Identifying Pessimists: Ask them about companies they worked for. If they keep talking about the companies as if they were stupid in the decisions they made and they weren't wise about this and they didn't do this right, and that's why each of the companies they've worked for has not succeeded in some way, and if it's always completely externalized, that means that the person is probably a pessimist.