Stewart Butterfield Quotes

With 100 million people, somebody is using your product in some interesting way. If you change it... you're going to break some use cases.

One thing matters more than anything else for a dating product, and that is the quantity and quality of the people who use the product. It's really freaking hard to get critical mass.

It's definitely going to be harder than it sounds to acquire millions of users in the U.S. It's going to be a lot of work, and you can't make light of that.

One of the top causes of startup death - right after cofounder problems - is building something no one wants.

Bebo has an opportunity to prove its products and services. Bebo plays in a very competitive space; it has big market share in specific countries. An AIM profile vs. a Bebo profile are very different experiences.

Build something 100 people love, not something 1 million people kind of like.

Forget 'branding' and 'positioning.' Once you understand customer behavior, everything else falls into place.

Generally, our approach with products at Google is to first develop the right user base and then to figure out what's the right experience for the ads.

For most companies, the hard thing is making the product work well enough to convince a single person at a time to switch to it.

The fundamental truth for developers is they will build if there are users.

At Netflix, we realized that we weren't in business with the Toshibas and the Sonys of the world. We were in business with the guy sitting at home trying to find a DVD to watch. If we had the courage to focus on him, everyone - movie studios, electronics companies, Netflix itself - won.

One day I went to the manager and I asked him whether his model was working and he said, "Well, haven't you seen how many customers we have in this store?" And yes indeed I had. I mean it was definitely attracting a lot of customers, even attracting tourist buses that would land up at this store and people would go through the store and marvel at all the options, even sometimes take photographs of the various aisles.

You have to measure your success by the way your audience responds to your games. No matter how small that audience is, it's yours. Your game is part of the lives and the memories of those people in a way that WordPerfect or Lotus 1-2-3 or Windows can never be.

Confusion sets in when you're not sure if your product or service is bought or sold, or worse, if you are a salesperson just waiting for people to buy.

And by the right thing, I mean that whatever step we take next, the first criteria we should consider is the people who have been loyal to us, thus far, which is primarily our audience.

We realized we weren't really using Odeo, we weren't investing our own time creating podcasts. We were building a tool that was a great idea for some other people. That's a dangerous way to go because if you don't actually use it yourself and love it, then you aren't going to be as fully invested in it from the start. That's what leads you to doing side projects.

The Internet is such a tough marketplace because everyone is a click away from going back to a cat photo, or going back to whatever else they were doing. You have to win them over, and do it quickly, and do it by making something people actually want.

If you think your users are idiots, only idiots will use it.

I'm a writer-director-actor, which I've always kind of enjoyed. I compared it to the Olympic biathlon. "Not only can he cross-country ski, but he's a terrific marksman as well." I want people to say, "You mean that writer performed a tracheotomy?" That's right, I do everything.

You must match your music to the kind of people God wants your church to reach.... The music you use 'positions' your church in your community. It defines who you are.... It will determine the kind of people you attract, the kind of people you keep, and the kind of people you lose.

What we do know is that the planet is going from 7 billion people today to 9 billion. More people want to live like us, drive American- size cars, live in an American-size home, and eat American-size Big Macs. What does that mean? It means that energy demand is going to be going up.

As it is the nature of a kite to devour little birds, so it is the nature of some minds to insult and tyrannize over little people; this being the means which they use to recompense themselves for their extreme servility and condescension to their superiors; for nothing can be more reasonable than that slaves and flatterers should exact the same taxes on all below them which they themselves pay to all above them.

[Sigmund Freud] just made people feel so neurotic about their lives. I mean, if you dreamt about a lampshade, it meant you wanted to be whipped by the local vicar or something.

In ability choice education finance majorities people understanding voting A lot of voters always cast their ballot for the candidate who seems to them to be one of the people. That means he must have the same superstitions, the same unbalanced prejudices, and the same lack of understanding of public finances that are characteristic of the majority. A better choice would be a candidate who has a closer understanding and a better education than the majority. Too much voting is based on affability rather than on ability.

The moment you can learn to deal with homosexuality in art, it's quite an exciting moment, just as in a sense when people 'come out' it's quite an exciting moment. It means they become aware of their desires, and can deal with them in a remarkably honest way.