@Jason Stoddard, I'd like to ask you a "quick" question:
What's—roughly—the ratio of products that you guys start working on in total versus those that actually end up in production?
And I mean actual products, not just prototypes. Prototypes that don't work out happen in any business. When it does, you start over with either a variation on the theme or a whole new prototype for the same basic product idea, and you repeat that process until you get to a point where you have something that can work in production. But to let go of an entire product or concept is a whole different ballgame.
I'm curious about Schiit's willingness to simply let an idea that just doesn't quite want to work out die a dignified death instead of dragging it along just because you've already invested a lot of time, money, and effort (or blood, sweat, and tears) into it.
Background: As I am typing this, I'm sitting in a telco with one of my clients who refuses to understand that what they're trying to do won't work. It hasn't worked for about four years (Yes, four. And not months; years.) of them trying, and there's no logical reason to assume that it could ever work the way they expect and need it to work. Yet they keep dumping more and more time and—somewhat fortunately for my business partner and myself—money into this thing, even though it would be cheaper for them in the long run to just scrap the concept, write off the money and time they've already spent on it up to this point, and start over with a different, more realistic approach to the problem they're trying to solve.
(If they even still remember what the original problem was. It sometimes feels like to me that they're in so deep that they might actually have lost track of why they're even trying to do what they're trying to do in the first place.)
Looking at Schiit's product lineup over the past couple of years, it seems like you guys take very little issue in just axing an idea that—during the R'n'D phase—turned out not to work the way you guys expect or need it to work. Everything that ended up in production seems to have been worth it. Maybe not always financially (Sol comes to mind), but at least from a technological or aural perspective.
But then there's cases like Folkvangr and Tyr, where you wrote in their respective chapters about multiple instances during those products' development processes that you ran into one wall after the next, yet you kept going. Sometimes you decided to let things sit for a little while, but you never fully wrote them off as not worthy of further development. Luckily for everyone, they both ended up sounding fantastic, and in that regard they clearly turned out after the fact to have been worth to keep on trying. At least in those two cases, you must have had a moment along the way where you realized that it should be worth to keep working on them. Either that, or you're actually somewhat incapable of letting things go yourself, and you keep trying until something works and we've just not seen the cases that failed because you're more or less still busy kicking those particular cans down the road, amassing more and more of those "cans" to kick down the road as you go along.
