What the..? Do your own thing instead of listening to your clients huh? Sounds like bread winning advice!
Sarcasm aside, I agree to a certain degree with the parent post - We do work for individual clients and design selection is their choice, since, drumroll, thats what they are paying us for! You can definitely help them out with suggestions, but ultimately your job is to make the client happy - If you are running your own company (or consulting) servicing clients, I'd say that is doing your own thing.
Clients != Customers, which was precisely my point. Clients and consulting is a linear growth curve, and difficult to grow into much of a business: add more clients and you have to add more people to do work for them. Customers and products (ala 37signals) means a hyper-linear growth curve, and a nice business.
A "startup" as most people mean it here is not a consulting shop. Clearly, if you are a consulting shop, you need to listen to your clients.
Maybe what you should take away from this is that it's better to do your own thing, rather than be a slave to clients.