Build your business by listening to your customers, rather than the VCs Everyone's got an opinion. So, learning who to listen to and who to shut out is an ongoing challenge. But if you're going to listen to someone when it comes to your business, for goodness sake - listen to your customer. This is the lesson that Dan Beltramo learned at his startup Vizu. "When we first started our company, we were thinking of it as an opinion-oriented community site on which we would conduct research," said Dan, in this "Lessons learned" segment. "What we found was that we were much more effective using our publisher network to gather information," he said.   This change in execution came from a blogger customer who picked up Vizu's widget and put it on ... [ Read more ]