Whom do you want to emulate ?

I don't use any of Apple's products but am still a huge fan of Jobs' approach, thought and emphasis on design. Simplicity is one of the hallmarks of their design which is mostly attributed to his Buddhist/Zen's principles. One of the inferences I made from this was that, the customers really don't know what they want. Design a product in such a way that when they do see it, they say "Aha this is exactly what I wanted." 

And so when we set afoot to build something cool it was on the premise that "yeah, we know better than the customers, so let's have a prototype first and I am bloody sure they will like it. Roping in more customers shouldn't be a big deal." When we did eventually have a prototype and started selling, I was surprised there were very few takers. Rightly so. I had overlooked one of the most important and fundamental principles of Business. Know who your customers are. Apple's customers are end users, consumers. Ours are enterprises and businesses and not end users or consumers even though it's built on a B2B2C model.

Lesson learnt - just because Steve Jobs is one of my heroes doesn't mean whatever he does or his company does can be directly applicable to what we do. When it comes to running business, carefully identify which is the company's business model you would want to emulate.

To add more, even if you are targeting a sector or a specific industry vertical, there are numerous categories and tiers into which you can classify customers. Figure out which are those. Are they the ones which belong to tier 1, or customers with sub 200 employees or the ones who would need API calls of 3 lakh a month. A decision here might have a huge impact on the architecture and scale of your products as well.