Colinng -

colinng: colinng: It’s rare that a team would develop a product so well and fix all the issues, so that it is becomes a category killer. Not to flatter, but TextBlade is that. You have one, you can ditch all your other keyboards, and your laptop’s built-in keyboard is deadweight, and you really wish Apple would put Xcode and other serious apps on iPad, or just move over all the great macOS stuff.

That’s really the point of doing this extra work right now. When you dial it in right, it becomes obvious to the mass consumer that it’s better across the board, and you rapidly drive mass adoption. To be a category killer, you have to do a crazy amount of testing, as we have been doing in treg.

One example of a simple but crucial quality point is how you manage the battery for longevity and reliability. A few users out of hundreds in the field noted some anomalies with batteries, where they might not fully charge on certain power sources, or other edge case defects. We’ve logged and studied the data from those few cases with great interest, and we’ve acted on it.

Based on that data, part of the new infrastructure firmware we’re coding right now dramatically increases the precision and resolution of the battery management, to achieve reliability well above what’s practiced for smartphones.

Turns out that people really depend on their keyboards, so reliability even better than a phone isn’t dumb overkill, but in fact desirable. This is especially true when users rely on TextBlade for multiple host machines, like their phone + tablet + laptop + desktop. That’s 4X the performance demand compared to other keyboards.

Re - bike helmets - you can think of the market as divided into two strata -

riders who consistently wear helmets for safety

riders who won’t (for style or hassle reasons)

Those strata really need to be addressed by two distinct products -

An automated safety device that improves survivability of riders who don’t use helmets An advanced helmet, that automatically gets much larger when needed, for 10X protection

The Hovding is going after #1 right now, for people who should wear a helmet but don’t. (Not smart user behavior). For them, in relative terms, hovding is better than no helmet. Quite a bit better.

But hovding should quickly add a separate product for segment #2. A helmet with classic protection, but with an airbag supplement to protect the neck, and a much thicker dynamic shock protection zone to prevent head injury. A smart helmet would capture a whole additional segment of consumers who are already cognizant of the risk, and want max protection.

A helmet + airbag would make an easy comparison to helmet only, and that would engage a much larger audience of users.

Managing those features and benefits when introducing new technological capabilities, is the subtle skill required when driving mass market acceptance. And that’s exactly why we sweat bullets over all the odd edge cases and diverse needs for TextBlade. Time consuming, but it really works.

In the hovding case study, they lost you because they didn’t think to offer two distinct products preemptively. The helmet + airbag version is actually much easier to do than the no-helmet version.

So they get resistance from riders like you who are safety-cognizant, which raises questions about their whole proposition. If they instead segmented into two offerings at the starting gate, they would have gotten vociferous support from the most safety conscious buyers, and it would have accelerated their adoption. But they didn’t, so now their message has to overcome the dissonance from those who have legitimate doubts.

Helmet + airbag is demonstrably safer than helmet alone, and that’s an easy conclusion for buyers. At the risk of sounding comically graphic - it’s a no-brainer.

They should answer your valid concern with a combo product, and then hesitation will turn to thrust.

$300 extra to add an airbag would look like very cheap insurance vs. just one visit to the ER.