The guidance by my boss has helped shape my philosophy now that I am the founder of a startup, and it’s something I preach to the people that work with me.

Your mental and physical health directly relate to the health of your startup. When you burn out, your company burns out…

Also, replying to Bill… the methodologies they use in device design are limited to certain measurable and predictable degrees of user freedom around the product. So, it’s kinda binary when it comes to realizing what a user may or may not adopt. And it’s a style that a great visionary can understand over time.. if at least his/her first product has succeeded in the market. Steve Jobs hasn’t gone ahead and tried to build a car after succeeding in iPod. So, once you trap a user and learn his experiences in that domain, it gets kinda like pattern matching.

While, on the web, it is wild wild west. The modalities of usability and possibilities of pissing off a user are enormous. Hence, the challenge is different and in fact astronomical. Experimentation and JSIO (Just S*** it Out) works best. No idea is unique on the web. So faster you experiment and fail and rebuild, there is a chance that you may hit the target over a tangibly measurable period of your lifetime.

IMHO, truly indelible branding can be achieved by tapping into the core of one – or all – of four distinct socio-psychological motivators. Fear, lust, love or greed.

For example:

Fear: Use this brand or you will look fat/old/disrespectful/uncool/cheap/ignorant/evil/boring etc
Lust: Use this brand and others will look at you like they look at (insert hot model, car, house etc)
Love: Use this brand to show your love/fanaticism/adulation/desire etc
Greed: Use this brand to get more/save more/own more/be more etc

Take these motivators and (if and when by fluke or foresight you manage to penetrate and hook into them) you then relentlessly and mercilessly exploit them to engender a viral referral, recommendation or retribution effect that self-populates like an asexual pathogenic amoeba. Fed by those motivators, the brand amoeba morphs into a life of its own and will invariably give life to sub-amoeba brands, due as much to the pervasive presence of its parent as to the sycophantic demands of the consumers who have fed it.

Take your brand and thrust it deep into the gut of a socio-cultural psyche and watch your brand name grow like a virus.

I’m not sure I agree with you. First, Apple and Nintendo are primarily hardware companies. Their software is intrinsically linked to their hardware. And, this post is not about hardware products. They have different user experience profiles and requirements, and I can’t speak to that development process with any authority. It seems likely that they must do a lot more up-front UX planning, given the nature of their products.

Second, I don’t know that Steve and Shigeru would disagree with my statement that it’s cheaper, easier, and more reliable to measure experience than it is to predict it. Frankly, I think that statement is pretty hard to dispute. I’m not a big fan of focus groups either. I don’t know that much about Apple or Nintendo’s product release methodologies, but I bet they involve a lot of putting products in front of people and seeing what they think. That’s sure what it sounds like from what IDEO says about their process, and I think they do a lot of work for Apple. If you have more specifics about this, I’d love to hear it.

As for “owning” the quality… I think that sounds a lot like “owning” user experience. In that, I agree with you. That’s the trick in our day and age. But I don’t think of it as “crowdsourcing” at all. I don’t advocate getting innovation from the crowd. If you read the post above, you’ll see that I even say that users can’t tell you what they want.

The way I see it, Steve and Shigeru are so successful due to their insight. They’re preternaturally good at understanding what people want. And they’re willing to take risks on it. But that’s not to say that they don’t heavily test their insights; I bet they do. And I think you’re doing a lot of entrepreneurs a disservice if you’re suggesting that everyone out there should act like Steve and Shigeru. I’m not sure they are good proxies for most people out there.