Continue the art of listening

Once you've launched your project, don't stop listening and learning from customers. Let go of your idea and focus on the problem you are trying to solve.

Here's a short list of businesses that survived by letting go of their idea and listening to their customers:

• William Wrigley Jr. sold baking soda door to door giving a stick of gum away for free as an incentive.

• Odeo was a platform where you could find and subscribe to podcasts. When iTunes launched podcast listings they knew the end was near and decided to focus on "micro-blogging". They rebranded as Twitter.

• A failed video game called Glitch spawned the birth of Slack – an internal tool they had created to communicate better amongst their team.

• A cleaning product that removed the black coal residue off wallpaper (a remarkably common problem when coal was used in the home as a heat source) became Play-Doh