To make matters worse, in January, a team came back from China with troubling news. They'd hoped the earbuds would to get 4.5 hours of battery life with augmented hearing, or three hours of music streaming. But because of a Bluetooth chip drawing more power than expected, Here One was lasting barely three hours of AR, and less than two for music. Apple was promising five hours on a charge for AirPods, which made Doppler look even worse. "We focused so much on size and compactness with Here One that we kind of compromised battery life," Lanman says.

Right before the product launched, Kraft gathered the team and told them to expect reviews that praised the technology but slammed the battery, which is precisely what happened. But then users started reporting problems with the charging case. Hall, a longtime Microsoft marketing exec initially hired to help Doppler scale and sell Here One, was suddenly thrust into triage mode. The product was already late in getting to folks who pre-ordered, and Doppler wanted to keep supply promises to retailers and partners. "We made the choice to keep going," Hall says. "That was a mistake, in retrospect."

Kraft and Hall watched sales numbers trickle in for the next couple of months, and by May, realized Here One was a flop. They'd originally planned to make and sell a few hundred thousand models, but only sold 25,000. Another 15,000 sit in a warehouse somewhere. Even with all the people who love Here One, those sales numbers turned Doppler from hot-shit startup to virtual impossibility. Here One was Doppler’s only real chance, and they'd missed it.

But it's not that simple. At one point during our conversations, I ask Kraft if he thinks that Doppler could have succeeded, if it had done everything right. No delays, no product issues, everything out as promised. He thinks about it for a long time, then answers simply: "No."

When you get right down to it, Kraft says he made one mistake that sticks out above the rest. "We fucking started a hardware business! There's nothing else to talk about. We shouldn't have done that."

Back in 2013 and 2014, when Kraft and Lanman first raised money for Doppler, the gadget industry looked ripe for startup disruption. Pebble, Jawbone, and Xiaomi looked like burgeoning behemoths. Beats got $3 billion from Apple, Oculus $2 billion from Facebook, and Nest got $3.2 billion from Google. Founders and investors alike believed that thanks to smartphones, and the giant supply chain they wrought, a new breed of consumer tech was coming soon. Gadgets were back.

Now, however, the hardware world is full of cautionary tales. Juicero conned investors out of more than $118 million, while Jawbone lost nearly $1 billion. Pebble was stripped and sold for parts to Fitbit. And let's not even get into Lily Robotics, Electric Objects, Hello, Pearl, Zeebo, Zano, or the dozens of other hardware companies that have failed for one reason or another in the last few years. A study by analytics firm CB Insights found that while it's still relatively easy to get early funding for a hardware company, only 24 percent of those companies will raise any more money at all, and 97 percent will essentially turn into nothing. "As hard as it is for all tech startups, it’s even more difficult for consumer hardware companies," the survey concludes.

Despite the odds, Doppler spent the summer of 2017 pursuing every imaginable way to save the company. They started looking to raise another round of financing, a Series C, meeting with current investors and potential new ones. Hall calculated that Doppler needed at least $35 million to finish development of the next product, which became a line in the sand. With Here Two, and a new focus on the hearing aid industry, they thought Doppler had a shot. With any less funding, they'd be transplanting blood without closing the wound. They could get a few million to keep going, and even had $4 million in the bank that would at least pay people until about the end of the year, but that didn't feel right. Hall, Kraft, and Lanman didn't want to lose any more money than they already had. If Doppler couldn't make a real go of it, it would end things the right way. It was $35 million or bust.

Doppler co-founder Fritz Lanman wears a (very) early prototype of Here One. Doppler Labs

Unfortunately, $35 million is a big number. They've raised too much money to be be considered an early-stage venture, and don't have enough sales or momentum to merit a growth round. "People said, 'Look, we're not going to write $40 million checks for businesses that don't have real revenue,'” Kraft says. Doppler had meetings with more than 60 investors, and none panned out. It was the same feedback as before: great tech, great team, great demo, no checkbook.