"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.
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.
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.
To be clear, the goal is not for the group to launch a product, it's to discuss mutually beneficial topics having to do with launching your own project.
I've owned a business, and Ive worked 9-5s, it's not an odd demographic at all, unless you buy into the macho bullshit about sleeping at your desk etc, by 20 year olds, who have never made a dollar themselves.
Can you do physical? I have found that carrying a pen, and a packet of sticky notes in my pocket at all times is the way to go. when I get home, Ill peel off the sticky, and organize it. I do it a little different though and organize things by "backlog", "Today", "tomorrow", "this weekend", "hold", because I find it suits the way I work as an individual (ie, I save stuff like washing the car for the weekend etc)
This isn't spam by any means; it manually collates the email addresses of thought leaders in your niche, and provides them to you. It's up to you to start a conversation.
It doesn't always though, with chef/puppet et al, you can write the code to throw up X (aapche w/ ssl etc), but unless you use a testing facility, there is no way to know for sure (other than manually checking obviously).
You can dictate that a service is running, and it will ensure that the service is running. You can also set up more advanced HTML checks in at least some frameworks[1] to ensure that the contents are being served correctly.
Writing code/recipes/etc for chef/ansible/puppet is no different to writing code for an application. Just because you think you have dictated (in code) that things should be a certain way does not mean that what will be executed or run.
It originates from a movie, and is also now a TV show.