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Key Takeaways
- Speed without restraint doesn’t create momentum — it quietly builds fragility.
- Products win by being trusted daily, not applauded briefly.
Founders naturally worship speed. Move fast. Ship more. Keep the roadmap full so everyone knows you’re “building.”
I bought into that, too, until I watched “fast” turn into fragile.
Most startups don’t die because they moved too slowly. They die because they tried to do too much too soon. They stack ideas faster than they can validate them, and they wake up one day with a product that is harder to use, harder to explain and impossible to love.
I learned this while building a consumer tech business in smart glasses, a trend-heavy space where hype is constant and big platforms have the loudest megaphones. In categories like this, there’s always a new “must-have” feature and a new voice insisting you’ll be irrelevant without it. While yes, the pressure is real, so is the trap.
What saved us was a shift in habit. We started saying no more than we said yes. Not because we lacked ambition, but because we wanted adoption, not applause, and a business that could survive the cycle of trends.
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Build for utility, not applause
There’s a specific kind of pressure founders rarely admit out loud. It’s the pressure to look like you’re winning even before the customer has decided you are.
Investors want a bigger story. Industry hype wants you to match the market’s loudest assumptions. Competitors want you to play their game. And in wearables, that game often comes with the same predictable “innovation” checklist. More data collection. Deeper platform lock-in. More content. More engagement loops. More reasons for the user to stay inside someone else’s ecosystem.
Those things tend to serve everyone except the person wearing the product, who usually just wants a flexible platform that suits their day-to-day computing needs.
We felt that gravity at our company because it’s easy to confuse “what people are talking about” with “what people will use.” We spent the first two years of the company working towards AR features that sounded inevitable for the category, then realized we were building complexity that didn’t improve the everyday experience. It added friction. It blurred the purpose. It created more to explain, and less to trust.
So, we put AR on ice and focused on audio and optics. And the result? The most wearable smart glasses on the market today are delighting thousands of customers around the world.
In the wearables market — specifically smart glasses — if a device is perceived as a data-harvesting tool rather than a utility, adoption becomes a trust crisis. Unlike hardware, a trust deficit cannot be patched in a “v2.”
Building less turned out to be the smartest move we made, because it forced a simple question to become our standard: Are we building for applause, or are we building for use?
If it creates friction, cut it
Every startup needs a filter stronger than excitement. Otherwise, every new idea gets masked as “opportunity.”
For me, I only think about whether that helps someone today or not. That test kills a lot of “cool” ideas quickly because they’re only valuable for a pitch and not for the customer.
We had technical ideas that would have made us look more like the biggest tech companies in the space. They would have given us new talking points. They also would have made the product harder to trust and harder to use.
So, we anchored our product in utility. Made sure it’s easier to listen to music, easier to take phone calls and easier to handle mobile tasks. Most importantly, easier to ask AI something without pulling out your phone. We made it work with whatever phone and watch our existing and potential customers already own, rather than forcing them into a single ecosystem.
If you want to stay customer-first, make usefulness a standard that must be earned. Put every idea into a real-world scenario. If it adds steps, adds confusion, or adds reasons for the user to distrust you, it doesn’t belong, even if it looks impressive in a demo.
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How a single “no” can beat the giants
Founders love to talk about focus as if it lives in strategy decks. In reality, focus lives in leadership. It’s how you respond when the world tries to hand you a new “priority” every single day.
Treat attention with the same rigor as a CAPEX budget. If it doesn’t yield a strategic return, then the answer is no.
Especially in a small company, attention becomes the constraint long before talent does. Ten people can build something extraordinary, but ten people can also drown. The difference often comes down to decision-making. Every yes can splinter context, increase coordination and drain energy that should have been reserved for more important project execution.
That mindset shaped how we grew. We didn’t win by out-featuring giants like Meta. Our wins are built on a refusal to let industry hype dilute our product’s core purpose. That clarity, combined with focus on actual utility, propelled a small Florida-based team from an oversubscribed crowdfund to a Nasdaq IPO in just two years.
Ultimately, say yes only when it makes the product sharper, simpler and more useful. Say no to everything else. Your users will feel the difference. Your team and business will, too.
Key Takeaways
- Speed without restraint doesn’t create momentum — it quietly builds fragility.
- Products win by being trusted daily, not applauded briefly.
Founders naturally worship speed. Move fast. Ship more. Keep the roadmap full so everyone knows you’re “building.”
I bought into that, too, until I watched “fast” turn into fragile.
