Thorsten Heins Quotes

Designing a product and understanding how it filters through into the market and into the rest of the company is very important to me.

I purposely got involved in the American market, as I'm really interested in it. I find the way they do marketing there really cool.

Most big companies work in stealth until they think they have a consumer product ready to go.

Betting all your funds on the belief that you know what consumers want and are willing to pay for is like jumping into a river to test its depth - you'll need a lot of luck to stay afloat. To have a truly successful product launch, the conversations with your customers must start long before you write your first line of code.

I understand the highs and lows of building a global business from the ground and taking that initial product idea all the way to the market.

If we launch a new product, we have to time it right. It's not about how soon you can do it but how well we can do it.

Consumer habits are key to understanding how to launch a product.

One of the people who most influenced me was Ben Shapiro, a marketing professor at the business school. He used to rant and rave and pound his fist: 'It's all about the customers!' And he was right. He was also right that, at that time, retailing was devoid of really talented people; he urged me to go in that direction.

And what we did with this new company in 1985 is we did start focusing on PCs instead of video game machines, because we learned the hard lesson about bringing a product to market in a consumer world where it's very expensive to build a brand and get distribution and so forth.

I can't understand the conditions of a corporate product being designed and getting millions. I admire it, it's great, but I don't know how to do that. I have to have the wheel.

I enjoy building something good and having a successful product and making money.

The only way anyone's going to succeed is to build the product.

If your plan is to put a product out there that people can see and understand, then by golly, we're going to get along just fine.

Certainly, the human race can be fickle, and times do change, but overall, the barriers to bringing a product to market - and understanding what 'the market' wants - have remained unchanged.

You can always change your branding or hire lawyers, but it's critical that you figure out if you have product market fit, and if you don't, figure out how to course-correct without getting stuck.

Launching a successful product or startup has little to do with luck. Any business that gains traction on the market is the result of very careful strategizing and market analysis, not to mention the development of an original product or service.

It's incredibly important to be - once you do have a product - acutely observational about the trends.

As an entrepreneur and public company CEO, I've dealt with dozens of rollouts, and when unveiling a new product, the operating approach should be, 'Hope for the best but prepare for the worst.'

I knew that if I could create a quality product and find the proper retail outlets, it would be a great company.

It's all about producing products people want.

When you're starting your own business it's really important to think through your plan: what's the idea, why is it relevant to the market, how much money you are going to invest, how are you going to tell people about it.

I think my sister and I just focus on working hard. We started off working with Wal-Mart on our first clothing line as an extension of our personal brand when we were 12, and we got to learn about being aware of what was in the market and what wasn't.

If you're doing business, not that simple to only buy. You have to create something. You have to create something that never exist for the future.

When you let travelers vote with their clicks, and you put that at the center of your decision-making, you build the product they want, and ultimately, their business will follow.

The goal of a private company is, first, zero to one: Get past the product-market fit; figure out whether people actually care about what you're trying to build and someone will pay you money for that. That's the zero to one problem.