Came across this news article today about some of the people working at Humane (an AI-based wearable pin) starting something new and getting funding and have some thoughts about rapid development and deployment.
Former Humane execs secure $25 million valuation after departing AI hardware startup – NBC 5 Dallas-Fort Worth (nbcdfw.com)
The wearable
I remember when Chat GPT and generative AI reached a fever pitch a couple of years ago. It was awesome. I remember using it for all this stuff and thinking it was going to change the way I interacted with tech. Right away, I wanted an easier way to interact with Chat GPT in a hands-free and sort of “always-on” way. I thought it would be awesome (privacy concerns aside) from listening to my conversations and both recording what I talked about during the day and keeping action items for things I’ve agreed to do.
Enter the wearable. Clearly, lots of other people had the same idea but actually did something about it. Rabbit, Tab, Rewind, and of course, Humane, all started to come to the market with their ideas and products. So far, though, there have been significant problems with the ones that were first to the market.
So?
In the VC world, who cares. You take some money, spread it across 100 different ideas, and hopefully one of them makes it big. Most of them are going to zero, but some are going to shoot off to the moon. VC firms all over the place are looking for these, especially in the AI space, so there’s tons of money available. Clearly, you can fail majorly in one effort (see Humane) and still find people to try again with you and a new product idea. I think that’s pretty cool.
The downside to this, though, is that the market takes a bit longer to forget. Every time someone comes out with a product that’s similar to Rabbit or Humane, potential buyers might be gun-shy and especially skeptical. The same goes for your business users in a software implementation.
How do this have anything to do with business applications?
You get a single chance at a first impression with each person. If you have a great idea or awesome solution to a problem that the business really wants to solve, you need to be thoughtful about how you deliver it.
Making little proofs of concept or minimally viable products are a great way to quickly see if your solution is on the right track. They can also help you flesh out your estimates and better understand what it’s going to take to deploy. Obviously, when you come up with an MVP, you need someone for the business to take a look and do some sanity checking. Be careful who you involve here.
As I mentioned above, you get one chance at a first impression. You need to be extra careful when you get a shot at showing your feature to an executive or someone in management. The first thing they see is going to be the only thing they remember.
Use your internal team first, and then involve your customer’s project team, and THEN, only after there’s some tacit acceptance that you’re on the right track, show your MVP to the business users. Nothing stops a project faster than perceived inefficiencies because you haven’t ironed out all the clicks yet or haven’t considered all their use cases.
As Eminem says, you only get one shot, do not miss your chance.
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