Who doesn’t like a good content marketing campaign? (NB this post is not about content marketing - it’s just my interesting segue)

For me, one of the most memorable content marketing campaigns of all time was by a blender company (Blendtec) posing the hilariously entertaining question of “will <insert object clearly not made to be put in a blender> blend?”

If you get nothing else from this, I encourage you to watch this video and indulge your inner evil child in the YouTube rabbit hole of will it blend - trust me!

Putting aside that inner childhood delight of watching an expensive blender destroy things, what made this content campaign so indelible for me was how it answered a critical product question:

Is this super powered product claim really vaporware?

In truth, I think there’s nothing wrong with vaporware (at a stage). Great concepts need “paper prototypes” - the ability to share the full power of the product possible to get market, investor and other feedback - to truly help hone and refine what the product will be and what it can do. Vaporware is a tool to be leveraged!

But… (of course there’s a but coming)

Earlier this year one of my VP’s ran into me after the GTC Conference. They had encountered a startup that had truly blown them away - great backing, brilliant founder, amazing pitch, and meaningful progress in engaging telcos. Paraphrasing what I know of the pitch - the startup Brain Technologies, Inc. - was creating an AI-powered app-less interface, that allowed a user to engage with it in natural language and it would crawl/engage/interface with other apps/services/repositories/etc. to bring back the answer to the user’s needs. Even if you’re not a geek, that sounds cool!

They had an iOS app you could try out (chuckle!) - so naturally, with that kind of intro, I had to try it out. It didn’t impress me (in that the bugs I encountered made its answer to me generally unusable) - but in candor I thought nothing of it. Whether we call it a “paper prototype”, a technology demo, or a proof of concept - I simply considered the “app” an approach the company was using to facilitate the right feedback for their product development. I walked away (ok, I deleted the app for an app-less interface from my iPhone) and thought nothing of it.

Until a couple of months later a colleague based here in the Valley, working for an Asia-based telco reached out to me. My colleague was leading an innovation outpost focused on AI and had had discussions with Brain Technologies and wondered if I’d ever heard of them. Imagine my surprise! They too were blown away (way to go startup!) but had a critical question - will it blend? (the question was actually “was it real?”… but I obviously have to tie this back to my title)

Frankly I didn’t know… I still don’t! I gave them the advice on what I myself have done countless times when engaging in business development or product partnership. Prove it!

Create an experiment

A challenge that can only be accomplished if the product can do what it claims to do - time bound that challenge (we’re trying to prevent cheating here!) - and ask the company to use its product to achieve that challenge.

  • If the company can’t do it… you learn something
  • If the company won’t do it… you learn something
  • If the company does it… you learn something

But no matter what, the approach allows you to advance your knowledge of the product/company in question.

The power of vaporware

While I can’t tell you how the Brain Technologies story ends - I haven’t followed up on how my colleague proceeded as it might stray into confidentiality territory - what I can do, is share some more thoughts on vaporware.

As someone with a lot of experiences working on “product concepts” - communication of the amazing vision you have in your head to others can be a challenge. Generally two people can align on big problems to be solved - but explaining how a product can do so, how one interacts with it, how it changes a usage or behavioral paradigm can be exceptionally difficult. The prototype concept - whether real or imagined - has ALWAYS been a helpful technique for me to bring the audience truly into the story and engage them. I generally like to slap some duct tape on a prototype (yes I’m serious) to make it really clear that it’s a prototype… maybe it does the thing… maybe it does the thing sometimes… maybe its 100% vaporware… but unequivocally the prototype lets you advance your dialogue with your audience.

But like the Spiderman comics say - “with great power comes great responsibility”… and there’s always a line where faking it goes too far - the problem is, that line isn’t always clear.

We can probably acknowledge in retrospect that Theranos-like behaviors, of saying you can do automated blood testing, then entering into commercial agreements, and providing medical services to patients, when you can’t actually do so is a step too far.

But what about an older product example, of taking a business card picture (for “automated” recognition and information extraction), that’s really just sent to a person somewhere to discern and type out the info… isn’t that a highly intelligent (and generally low cost) vaporware-approach to learn about the value a product can bring?

If there’s a moral to this story, it’s about how powerful the will it blend question really is… and that vaporware is a valuable tool in your toolkit… until you’ve crossed that line!