Not only because the product wasn't a great product, but remember it took us five or six years to ship it. Then we had to sort of fix it. That was what I might call Windows 7.
An actor's career doesn't feel like just one career to me. It feels like about five or six. Because every six or seven years, you look in the mirror and you have a completely different product.
Well, we don't take money from people and then show the product. It has to be a product that we like anyway, and that's true for all five of us, which is one of the really nice things about the way we make the show.
'Instagram' is an app that only took 8 weeks to build and ship but was a product of over a year of work.
If you think of the product as a service, then the separate parts make no sense - the point of a product is to offer great experiences to its owner, which means that it offers a service. And that experience, that service, comprises the totality of its parts: The whole is indeed made up of all of the parts. The real value of a product consists of far more than the product's components.
I've written, like, 450 comics, and 'Secret Six' was the first one I've had ship late, ever. So it took a lot to make that happen. So we had a little bit of a stop-and-start, and then we had Convergence, and then Issue No. 2 of 'Secret Six'.
Just because a product says 'As Seen on TV' and looks like my product doesn't mean it performs like my product or will sell like my product.
A great product will survive all abuse. Google Glass is a great product. How do I know? Every person I put it on (I did it dozens of times at 500 Startups yesterday) smiles. No other product has done that since the iPod.
I've always believed that the best way you combat intellectual property theft is making a product available that is well priced, well timed to market, whether it's a movie product, TV product, music product, even theme-park product.
Me and my family, we sort of had this plan to... once we had kids, we had a plan that about every six years we'd move to a new country. So, when we had kids, we moved to Bali for six years, then we went to Australia for six years.
Before product/market fit, your only job that matters is to build a great product.
I've been told I miss every pass made at me! It would be wonderful to have a partner, but in my mind, it has to be like making a product. The product has to be meaningful, impact people - it has to be a great product.
Here's how Apple does marketing in a nutshell: Make a great product, then let people know about it. That's it. Neither aspect of that is easy, but the important thing is it has to happen in that order. It all starts with a great product.
I basically took six or seven years off, but then I had another five or four of me not working at all because I was in school. It was really 13 years of me not working at all... I really couldn't even think about it.
What happened was I was a songwriter on Quincy Jones' publishing company, Qwest, for two and a half years before I gave him the song for Michael Jackson. He had a meeting with the songwriters. I think there were about six of us on the West Coast and we all had a meeting at his house where he sort of gave us an outline of what he wanted. To finish this BAD album Jones needed one more song to round out the album. I took notes and then I then took my notes to my writing partner Glen Ballard.
I call Alibaba '1,001 mistakes.' We expanded too fast, and then in the dot-com bubble, we had to have layoffs. By 2002, we had only enough cash to survive for 18 months. We had a lot of free members using our site, and we didn't know how we'd make money. So we developed a product for China exporters to meet U.S. buyers online. This model saved us.
You could place one product in a first-run telecast, a second product what that program is rerun, and a third product when the show goes into syndication, and another product when it goes on cable.