I canvassed door to door today and I feel lost

There are two types of muscles: Fast-twitch muscles and slow-twitch muscles.

Fast-twitch muscles are responsible for movements involving bulk strength coupled with quick reaction times. A punch is an example of a fast-twitch movement.

Slow-twitch muscles are responsible for sustained and predictable movements at a lower maximum strength threshold. Your legs in a jog are examples of slow-twitch movements at play.

Genetically, I gain fast-twitch muscles easily. I am no different at work. I drive large movements in the company. And sometimes we move so fast that I can't help but to look back and force myself to regroup.

Canvassing

I have always wanted to canvas door to door because it is hard and tedious. And the best salesperson is the best because he or she powers through the dirt. With our announcement of Sapiengraph CCTV last week, I had to gather market feedback on the product quickly. Will people buy? So I set the sales team out today for door to door canvassing.

Why CCTVs?

It is much easier to give away CCTVs with built-in smarts than to convince an existing place to integrate their CCTV with our systems. So we are giving away CCTVs on top of the installation, support, warranty, etc.

And yet the deeper I dived into the CCTV product in our canvassing exercise today, I cannot help but feel detached from what I set out to do -- to liberate a ton of public information about individual on a population level with facial recognition technology.

The product has evolved from

  • A pure software play of a face search engine...
  • to that of an API for a human knowledge graph...
  • to retail analytics...
  • to offline to online remarketing...
  • and now CCTVs.

The drawback of moving fast

Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook says to move fast and break things. But this is terrible advice for products because products require a wholesome formula for it to work. The formula requires complementary parts on distribution channel, a viral growth formula, a sound pricing strategy, and of course a product that people want and is willing to pay for.

With each hop, I sought out to solve a singular problematic aspect and no more. This is a personal misstep.

Committing with guns blazing

With that said, hey! We are not changing anything with the CCTV product.

We commit when the company publicly announce a product, and in this exercise of introspection, I am forcing myself to balance the wholesome product equation with the CCTV product as a static variable. In other words, I am figuring out the distribution channel and viral growth formula for the CCTV product. That is all.

Steven Goh | CEO
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