Run focus groups. Do whatever you need to do to get 8 to 10 people together in a room and put your product in front of them. Ask them how much they would pay for it and whether they would pay for it. It's really important to get user validation early and often.
The growing influence of focus groups means we are all in danger of being excessively cowed by their feedback.
When it went on the air, the sales department hated it. It was the highest advertising pullout show in the history of NBC. At the early focus groups, people were saying, 'Who are these people? Why should we watch them?
And the inner dynamics of Hollywood are like politics. Say you give a script to a group of executives - they all sit around, afraid to voice an opinion, saying nothing, waiting to know what the consensus is. Just like focus groups, opinion polls or a cabinet.
Half the stuff I have done which has been successful would never have been made if it had been shown to focus groups.
Women in my focus groups, they say a bald man is trustworthy. He has nothing to hide.
While the other parties look at polls and focus groups to decide what they stand for, and pander to every special interest group, we follow our principles.
My philosophy was that I never had focus groups.
Big-time directors and the studios that bankroll them prefer to dwell in the comfortable, familiar center, where mammon is God and the only divine word comes from focus groups.
My career, I look at it in a Darwinian framework. I'm going to do exactly what I want, and I'm going to survive, or I'm not. I'm not going to pander. I'm not going to change things. I'm not going to do focus groups. I'll live and die by the sword. I don't care. Because I couldn't live with myself.
