Augmented Reality continues to be a money hole for Mark Zuckerberg. Much like Microsoft's HoloLens and Google Glass before, the Quest just isn't resonating with customers at a level that justifies spending. What's going on here?
Simply put, the product still isn't compelling. The majority of people who try AR and VR products are temporarily wowed, but aren't motivated enough to go out and buy their own. And the people who do buy their own end up shelving it, greatly limiting the viral potential of the hardware.
(I say this as an owner of an Oculus DK2, HTC Vive and Meta Quest 2, none of which have seen the light of day in six months or more.)
This is the product owner's dilemma at a massive scale.
Quite often, a startup's MVP launches to crickets. And far too often, the "product" person on the team thinks, "we just need to add a new feature -- social sharing, or AJAX, or a mobile version, or AI."
Each of these features makes the product more complicated without ever changing or improving the core value proposition. It's the same product that didn't work, only, well, more. It's more expensive to manage and maintain, and it's much harder read user signals (i.e. why they aren't using it).
When you launch an MVP and it doesn't work, step one, push on it for a while. The product might be perfect and it's your sales motion that's not working. And if you finally decide that you product isn't correct?
Counterintuitively, start removing features. Burnish your MVP down to a single use case that does one thing perfectly well. And if the market still doesn't love it, maybe it's time to try something else.
Zuck has the benefit of running one of the biggest tech companies in the world. He can continue throwing money at this for another decade or more. Most founder don't have that luxury.
Don't scale your product (and expenses) until you truly have something that people care about.
#augmentedreality #meta #productdevelopment