【Lesson #2 - Don't fall in love with your product】
Anyone who’s read Eric Ries’ “The Lean Startup” (and even those that didn’t) is all too familiar with the concept of a minimum viable product (MVP)—except when they’re not. Oftentimes through a perfectionist attitude or perhaps inherent fear of failure, founders create products that are more viable than minimum. That was the experience for Kevin Wong, the Co-founder/CEO of Origami Labs (AW#15), when they were creating their first product, a smart ring called ORII. According to Kevin, it was because he had such an attachment to this vision in his head, and anything short of that vision just felt like a concession. He’s since learned to accept a more iterative approach to product development and applying that lesson to his current product OFLO which enables smartphone-level comms in an audio wearable designed specifically for frontline staff.
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After establishing Origami Labs in 2015, we spent several years in R&D to create our first product ORII, a voice assistant smart ring that uses bone conduction technology to allow users to check new messages on their phone, control music, and complete other everyday tasks by simply holding your finger to your ear. This simple, intuitive finger-to-ear motion was what we loved so much about the product and what made it so easy to catch on and talk about. Our kickstarter campaign blew way past the initial goal in a matter of weeks. We became the first HK startup to place in TechCrunch Battlefield’s top 5. Press coverage was coming at us left and right and orders were coming from over 50 different countries. A lot of that, however, turned out to be false momentum.
In retrospect, ORII probably should have never been able to sell as well as it did. A lot of founders through sheer passion, grit, and willpower alone can build up early traction without breaking a sweat. But can someone 2 to 3 degrees away from them sell their product? That’s where founders really get measured in success. At some point, the product should be able to stand on its own two feet and speak for itself.
ORII could not. That elegant finger-to-ear motion that we were so enamored with ultimately became its achilles heel. It turns out, in 95 percent of the scenarios, you wouldn’t want to lift your hand to your head, especially in this wireless/hands-free age. We effectively fell in love with our product and stopped really listening to our customers. We thought it was perfect and became blind to any signals that said otherwise. I still remember going to visit Eric Migicovsky, YC partner and founder of Pebble watch, at his house. I showed him some of our early prototypes and he basically said “that’s cool, but it won’t work,” drawing upon his own experiences with hardware. Sure enough, after the initial media frenzy died down, orders started to visibly slow down. The final nail in the coffin was when Amazon released the echo loop (smart ring tied to Alexa), which mimicked our product feature-for-feature but better in every way.
As a founder, what you want to build makes so much sense. You see it with so much clarity that it’s almost unfathomable why someone wouldn’t understand. But innovation has to be an iterative process, as the market can only accept so much change. You need to put out a product that’s in some way necessary for people today, that gets some people using it on a frequent basis, and only from there can you practically grow it into something that you envisioned.
Applications for AW#22 are now open to founders targeting SEA, AI/IoT, or Blockchain/Defi -> https://bit.ly/36v9k8D
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