Schiit Happened: The Story of the World's Most Improbable Start-Up
Oct 26, 2022 at 5:02 PM Post #101,866 of 145,656
Things I learned today.

Yggdrasil and Ragnarok 2 don't stack on top of each other perfectly/symmetrically. Rag 2 is just a tad deeper.

Schiit double boxes Yggy, which helps prevent damage to the inner box and Yggy itself when that outer box gets abused en route.

Yggy is very heavy.

Yggy sounds great, even when cold.

Things I reaffirmed today.

@FLTWS takes great care of his audio equipment.

FLTWS is generous (thanks for the extra cables)

It's fun to get new audio gear. Especially new Schiit.

Life is unpredictable, especially with kids in the house.

*******************

I was fortunate to receive a Yggy from FLTWS, whom I am happy to consider a friend. In his honor I will be breaking Yggy in with some classical music.

Looking forward to the new presentation of Yggy OG A2 Gen 5 and Ragnarok 2.

So many albums & songs await to hear again for the first time.

Impressions and comparisons to Bifrost 2 and Gumby A2 to follow.

Happy listening folks.

It may be frowned upon, but I stack Yggy on top of Rag 2.
 
Oct 26, 2022 at 5:30 PM Post #101,867 of 145,656
Quick answer: a surprising number of them. Maybe as high as 90%. But sometimes they sit for years, as we figure out what to do with them. There's a number of things coming that have been in the "sit and think" pile for quite some time.

Of course, this is very different from your situation, because our internal dev is largely sunk; it doesn't matter too much if I'm chasing a stupid idea, since I can work on other things that need to get done for real (as in, we are gonna be shipping them.) That's today in a nutshell. Working on two...er, I mean 4...products soon to launch, done deal, working on stupid things like firmware tweaks and production ramp up, sending units out to photography, etc. Also working on two silly things which may or may not ever happen. Or sit on a shelf for a good long time.

But yeah, probably worth a chapter on "when to stop?"
Up to 90% of rejected projects is a lot more than I would have expected, but it definitely sounds like heaven to my ears at this point.

A "when to stop?" chapter would indeed be fascinating. Maybe not for a whole lot of people, but certainly for some.

Thanks for the reply!
 
Oct 26, 2022 at 5:33 PM Post #101,868 of 145,656
Up to 90% of rejected projects is a lot more than I would have expected, but it definitely sounds like heaven to my ears at this point.

A "when to stop?" chapter would indeed be fascinating. Maybe not for a whole lot of people, but certainly for some.

Thanks for the reply!
Oops, reverse--90% make it through to completion. Ish. But may be delayed for several years.
 
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Oct 26, 2022 at 5:45 PM Post #101,869 of 145,656
Oops, reverse--90% make it through to completion. Ish. But may be delayed for several years.
I looked forward to the business card amp that never quite made it. :ksc75smile: I definitely had fun with the Coaster amps.
 
Oct 26, 2022 at 5:46 PM Post #101,870 of 145,656
Oops, reverse--90% make it through to completion. Ish. But may be delayed for several years.
Ah, ok. I misread that, sorry. Thanks for correcting me!

A 90% survival rate is even more stunning to me. That tells me that you guys are pretty smart about rejecting "dumb" ideas before you even start working on them, otherwise your product lineup would be full of duds given this rate.

Kudos.

But that also means that a "when to stop?" chapter should be even more interesting.
 
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Oct 26, 2022 at 5:55 PM Post #101,871 of 145,656
Ah, ok. I misread that, sorry. Thanks for correcting me!

A 90% survival rate is even more stunning to me. That tells me that you guys are pretty smart about rejecting "dumb" ideas before you even start working on them, otherwise your product lineup would be full of duds.

Kudos.

But that also means that a "when to stop?" chapter should be even more interesting.
Welp, it also might say something about the market they face. Because they offer high value (and relatively low price) products in a market that is dominated by high price competitors, and where objective comparisons are possible but not everything (read ASR, especially not to those on this forum), and while tooling cost is high, they tend not to have a ton of working capital until they know that a product is a hit, it may just be more rational to have a lot of shots on goal in the market. I mean this business looks lots different than what I've worked most of my career in (SaaS & consumer services; things where ARR is meaningful).
 
Oct 26, 2022 at 5:58 PM Post #101,872 of 145,656
+1 For wanting to read a "when to stop" chapter
 
Oct 26, 2022 at 7:35 PM Post #101,874 of 145,656
Someone gets it!

The non-negotiable Prime Directive for everything I agree to work on:
Keep it simple, stupid.

One, because it always, without exception, makes for a sexier product and a better user experience.
And two, because I’m „lazy.“ Complexity always creates additional annoyances for me down the the road as the product inevitably grows and ages. I’d rather work on something interesting than to waste my life (and frankly, my talent) away trying to maintain a house of cards and to keep artificially created code rot at bay.

Most customers don’t get it, though. The bane of my existence.
And if you stray from that prime directive, your database slows down because of all the new schtuff you've added willy nilly to it. Not that THAT's ever happened to anyone...
 
Oct 26, 2022 at 7:43 PM Post #101,875 of 145,656
+1 For wanting to read a "when to stop" chapter
Yep, heard. I probably will be working on that. As of right now, next week we'll have another chapter, already done.

Off the top of my head, as far as "when to stop," I see at least three critical signposts:

1. If it negatively affects your business. As in, if the two wild-butt-hair projects I was working on today were eating so much time I didn't have time to stop and pay attention to the real, scheduled products—especially the ones that we've already bought parts for, built boards for, have chassis for—that's baaaaaad. That's when the playing needs to stop. Or at least be shelved for a good long while. Because a lot of our stops don't end up being a full "throw it away, give it up, never gonna happen" kinda deal. Hell, I still have a tube phono preamp on my desk upstairs that Mike and Dave did about 8 years ago. Is it dead? Yeah, probably. Don't get too excited. I'm not. More on that later.

2. If your realities change. If you've been working on the most amazing $800 doo-dad for, like, 6 years, and in that time the market has delivered an amazing $500, $300, and $200 doo-dad, then you need to open your eyes and face reality. If you can't deliver something compelling, if your market has changed, or if your market has disappeared, you need to acknowledge that, and stop. This is one reason I despise benchmarking. You're always just chasing your competitor's past, rather than looking at the future.

3. If you just ain't excited about it. Remember I said I wasn't excited about a tube phono pre? Don't discount excitement as a prime mover. If you're excited about something, you have infinite energy, you can work 20 hour days, you can accomplish the impossible—and it'll seem fun and easy. If you're not excited about something you're working on, ask yourself why. And, even if you can't say, 100%, "this is why I ain't big on this," it's probably time to stop. Because you aren't going to give it your best. It'll be a phone-it-in exercise at best. Sad. Just stop.
 
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Oct 26, 2022 at 8:10 PM Post #101,877 of 145,656
Yep, heard. I probably will be working on that. As of right now, next week we'll have another chapter, already done.

Off the top of my head, as far as "when to stop," I see at least three critical signposts:

1. If it negatively affects your business. As in, if the two wild-butt-hair projects I was working on today were eating so much time I didn't have time to stop and pay attention to the real, scheduled products—especially the ones that we've already bought parts for, built boards for, have chassis for—that's baaaaaad. That's when the playing needs to stop. Or at least be shelved for a good long while. Because a lot of our stops don't end up being a full "throw it away, give it up, never gonna happen" kinda deal. Hell, I still have a tube phono preamp on my desk upstairs that Mike and Dave did about 8 years ago. Is it dead? Yeah, probably. Don't get too excited. I'm not. More on that later.

2. If your realities change. If you've been working on the most amazing $800 doo-dad for, like, 6 years, and in that time the market has delivered an amazing $500, $300, and $200 doo-dad, then you need to open your eyes and face reality. If you can't deliver something compelling, if your market has changed, or if your market has disappeared, you need to acknowledge that, and stop. This is one reason I despise benchmarking. You're always just chasing your competitor's past, rather than looking at the future.

3. If you just ain't excited about it. Remember I said I wasn't excited about a tube phono pre? Don't discount excitement as a prime mover. If you're excited about something, you have infinite energy, you can work 20 hour days, you can accomplish the impossible—and it'll seem fun and easy. If you're not excited about something you're working on, ask yourself why. And, even if you can't say, 100%, "this is why I ain't big on this," it's probably time to stop. Because you aren't going to give it your best. It'll be a phone-it-in exercise at best. Sad. Just stop.
I use a tube phono pre-amp and would always entertain another.😉
 
Oct 26, 2022 at 9:22 PM Post #101,878 of 145,656
If you just ain't excited about it. Remember I said I wasn't excited about a tube phono pre? Don't discount excitement as a prime mover. If you're excited about something, you have infinite energy, you can work 20 hour days, you can accomplish the impossible—and it'll seem fun and easy. If you're not excited about something you're working on, ask yourself why. And, even if you can't say, 100%, "this is why I ain't big on this," it's probably time to stop. Because you aren't going to give it your best. It'll be a phone-it-in exercise at best. Sad. Just stop.
I'll gladly take a 'mail-it-in' tube phono preamp from Schiit as I suspect Schiit's 'mail-it-in' is far better than most companies' 'Groundbreaking 100%'. :wink:
 
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Oct 27, 2022 at 2:23 AM Post #101,879 of 145,656
Schiit made it to 9Gag... https://9gag.com/gag/amA9gzy

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Oct 27, 2022 at 9:06 AM Post #101,880 of 145,656
@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.

I obviously have my own opinion on the whole issue, and it's probably surprising to no one here that my own approach to axing something that shows clear-ish signs of not working out is rather—shall we say—ruthless. For my own projects, I prefer to fail early and hard—and then move on.

But I'd really love to hear your perspective on it, too. If it doesn't already exist and I missed it, this would of course make for an interesting chapter. At least for me it would be. But a short and simple paragraph about your and/or Schiit's approach to this, and what this magical "sign of worthiness" looks like to you that you keep an eye out for during development, would already be very much appreciated.
sounds like they have an advantage giving you money :) assuming they are not stupid :wink:
 

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