The Humane AI Pin has launched, crashed, and burned, with founders already looking to sell the company just one month after launch. How bad does it have to be for founders to want to exit the company? The report says, “As of early April, Humane had received around 10,000 orders for the AI Pin, a small fraction of the 100,000 that it hoped to sell this year, two people familiar with its sales said.” At $700 each, if all of those orders were filled, that’s around $7 million in revenue, plus whatever the subscription retention is. The two founders apparently “Preferred positivity over criticism, leading them to disregard warnings about the AI Pin’s poor battery life and power consumption. A senior software engineer was dismissed after raising questions about the product, they said, while others left out of frustration.” After that software engineer was fired for questioning if the AI pin would be ready for launch, the report describes a staff meeting where the founders “Said the employee had violated policy by talking negatively about Humane.” It’s hard to make a good product if you can’t honestly talk about the negatives and positives for fear of retaliation.

Source: How to build a DOA product: Humane AI Pin founders banned internal criticism