Gabe Newell Quotes

People are in such a hurry to launch their product or business that they seldom look at marketing from a bird's eye view and they don't create a systematic plan.

Back when we started, people didn't even know what a submarine sandwich was. The product was only sold in a few markets.

Our first product was Quicken, which is personal financial management on a PC. It had a tough start, and we ran some tracking surveys to understand who was using it. Half the users claimed to use it in some sort of office environment. We ignored that. I thought it was meaningless.

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.

Greatest risk is not development of new product, but development of customers and markets

I think running a business, doing what I've done for the last - since 1996, has taught me so many things because I started from just an idea and then had to figure out how to make it, market it, every single thing from soup to nuts on how to get a product done and out there.

Successful entrepreneurs develop products that inspire their passion. They have to. It's that passion that gets them through the long, arduous, uncertain and frightening early days of a start-up.

It was very early, and we were still like beta or alpha stage, and so we started receiving a ton of download. The server became overloaded, and that's when I realized that this had a huge market.

When you say we're bringing a product to market, you make sure you execute.

One of the beauties of B2B is that there is a finite number of customers. So the marketing costs are much different. You don't have to take out Super Bowl ads or plaster the New York subway system.

It will work. I am a marketing genius.

You need to make certain decisions to expand your market.

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

The real challenge in this line of work is being able to weed the productive ones from the chaff, to decide which you're going to spend the next six to nine months turning into something that people will pay for.

I'm in the process of brainstorming with my marketing team and all that stuff, trying to come up with a concept for a late-night restaurant for people in Birmingham.

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

The public relations phases of this campaign call for the same careful planning and strategy as you and your staff employed in setting up the invasion of Normandy, and the same careful planning that we, in our business, employ in order to insure the successful introduction to the public of a new product or service.

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.

A big part of the accelerator is to help scientists become entrepreneurs. I like to think about each business being built on three major areas: creating the value, creating the product, and extracting the value. We provide help in each of these areas.

If you haven't created the time as an owner to understand why people are choosing your model over your competition, then you are only managing the business that comes in the door, not actively seeking it out.

No matter what, once the doors are open for business, the entrepreneur has no choice but to be directing multiple attacks at once - raising money, writing software, prototyping, selling, collecting, training, and marketing.

Marketing is the obverse of programming.

Even though Traf-O-Data wasn't a roaring success, it was seminal in preparing us to make Microsoft's first product a couple of years later.

Steve Ballmer never used to be someone who let facts speak for themselves. In the 1990s, he was the hyper-energetic Microsoft exec yelling 'Developers! Developers! Developers!' at an all-hands meeting in Safeco field.

My sister and I had a lemonade stand - with a two-drink minimum.