Hu.ma.ne.
That’s the name of the company behind a new, AI-powered pin. It’s a small, sleek device you wear on your clothes with a magnet. Without a screen, you’re left to make in-air gestures, speak to it (ChatGPT listens and responds), and fall-back on a small touchpad if needed.
Before I get into the meat of this analysis, let me pause to make one quick disclaimer – this sounds so cool I can hardly stand it. Look at this thing:
That being said, I’m not here writing about it because it’s cool. I’m writing about it because there’s a raging inferno of a debate about whether it will be successful. And the crux of the debate basically boils down to this – who gets to decide what products get built?
There are two schools of thought – 1/ builders decide or 2/ users decide.
Builders
These are the teams that make products. They have accumulated a set of experiences and opinions over time about what to build and how to build it, and they use their technical skills to do just that.
Users
These are the customers… the people that will (hopefully) use the products. They have a wide range of needs, and an equally wide range of opinions about how those needs can and should be met.
Who is right?
In truth, you need both.
Building a great product requires knowledgeable builders, with a deep understanding of their users, who listen to those users during the product development process.
In product management (my day job), the building process you follow looks vaguely like this:
Understand your user and their needs. Interview them, collect data about them, think deeply about them.
Go back and do #1 again, until you feel like you are literally falling in love with your user.
Package those user needs into themes, and piece together situations (or stories) where your user might use a product (ideally your product) to meet those needs.
Meet with software engineers (or switch yourself into coding mode) to talk about what the users need and get engineering feedback on what might be built… and how.
Ignoring the restraining order, go back and do #1 again, getting your users’ feedback about your early ideas. If you have a prototype or a dummy version of the product you can show them, even better.
Get back to talking to yourself (or the coders), tweaking the prototype/product based on feedback.
Proudly return to the customer with your final product. Pump your fists, cry a little, and then leave. Then do it all over again, tweaking the next version to make it even better.
What if you only do what the builders want?
Well, that tends to not work very well, and has led to some epic product flops. The cautionary tale that gets floated pretty often recently is Quibi…
They had a bunch of former Disney execs and tried to build a short-form mobile video platform, with mini TV shows (5-10 mins) that you could swipe through on your phone. If you’re thinking that sounds a lot like TikTok (but worse), then you’re not wrong.
Quibi raised an eye-popping $1.75B from investors, launched in April 2020, hit #3 in App Store downloads that week, and then started fading into oblivion. They closed six months later.
What happened?
Basically, users hated it. Like we said, it was TikTok… but instead of having your users generating ever-more dancing and cooking content for free, you essentially say to them “we know best what you should watch”… and you buy-up low quality short-form ideas from studios… and you then charge your users $5 a month for the privilege of taking a peek (or $8 if they want to take that peek ad-free).
The gap between what was built and what users wanted was immense.
What if you only do what the users want?
I’ll let Steve Jobs talk you through this one.
Some people say give the customers what they want, but that's not my approach. Our job is to figure out what they're going to want before they do. I think Henry Ford once said, 'If I'd ask customers what they wanted, they would've told me a faster horse.' People don't know what they want until you show it to them. That's why I never rely on market research. Our task is to read things that are not yet on the page.
Back to the Pin
With all that pre-amble, let’s get back to the pin. This Humane Pin is just the latest excuse for Monday morning quarterbacks (or, in my case, Wednesday evening ones…) to cast yet another vote for their favored side – the builders or the users. And to needle the other side.
So what’s my take? Humane should’ve gotten more user feedback. Hear me out.
The Pros
Team – if you’re trying to build a delightful hardware product, former Apple designers are a good bet.
Timing – AI is (as we all know) so hot right now. Incredible ideas can fail if there’s no market momentum, and horrible ideas (ex. DOGE) can thrive if they’re part of the right wave. The pin’s timing is right.
Category – wearables are a known, crowded category in general, but pins are… not that. It’s a ripe opportunity for somone. Honestly, if you told me the only pins in the US were wavy American flags for our politicians, I’d believe you.
The Cons
Cost – Even though I think it’s cool, I (and other users too, probably) will definitely not pay $700 for the pleasure of then paying $24 per month to keep it running. Especially if I still need my smartphone. Which brings me to…
Functionality – Other than being connected to ChatGPT, it can’t really “do” anything. It’s like a smartphone where the only app is AI. While I like the idea of eventually taking apps out of the equation and relying on voice to just do what I ask, most of today’s world is built on apps. And giving app developers the opportunity to build for your platform (and sell to your users) is how things get done. Our AI models aren’t powerful enough to fill those gaps and replace all those apps (yet).
For me, the cons outweigh the pros, and I don’t think this iteration of the device will work. Hopefully it only flops a little, and isn’t a full-blown Quibi. If it can last through some tough user feedback cycles, I think the next one could be pretty interesting.
Bonus Bullets
Quote of the Week:
There are at least a thousand times more people that have good ideas than people who are willing to do the kind of work it takes to turn a great idea into a great company.
— Sam Altman
Quick News Reactions:
The hackings will continue… until morale improves. Maine is the latest target, where 1.3M individuals had their personal info exposed. Hacks of states aren’t quite as interesting as casinos (wrote about here), but the principles are the same. Defend yourself!
User generated 3D content… is going to make platforms like TikTok 10x more addicting. Apparently the Apple Vision Pro is getting rave reviews for 3D videos that have been recorded on iPhone 15’s. The headset isn’t out to the public until next year (as we’ve discussed), but I still can’t wait.
Tumblr stumbles… and CEO Matt Mullenweg (yeah, the guy that bought the Texts app) has re-deployed ~139 staff from the struggling social media site to other areas of the company. Change is hard, but it might honestly be a relief for those folks to be on more impactful projects…
Tech Jobs Update:
Here are a few things I’m paying attention to this week:
Big Tech Job Posts: LinkedIn has 10,259 (+11.8% WoW) US-based jobs for a group of 20 large firms (the ones I typically write about — Google, Apple, Netflix, etc.).
Graph: Layoffs since covid (Source: Layoffs.FYI). Note that this is showing in-progress Q4 numbers.
