Chapter 5: Finding the People Who Needed This Before They Knew It Existed

It was a cloudy, windy morning in March and the three of us were crammed into a meeting room that was meant for two people.

That was the whole office, really. Twenty people sharing a space that kept shrinking as the team kept growing. Edo, Elisa, and I sat in there with a whiteboard and a question we hadn't been able to answer cleanly yet. What is our brand story?

The Question in the Small Room

It sounds like a marketing question. It isn't. It's a question about why you exist, who you're for, and what you actually believe. Simon Sinek put it plainly in Start With Why: most companies know what they do and some know how they do it, but very few can articulate why. The ones that can are the ones people follow. The ones that can't are just selling products.

In Shenzhen, the dominant answer to that question has always been: it doesn't matter. Move fast, put the product on Amazon, optimize the listing, run the ads, figure out the story as the money comes in. That works. A lot of companies here have built real businesses that way. But it produces something functional rather than something loved. A brand people choose because it's available, not because it means something to them.

We wanted to build something different. Memoket wasn't a product we were manufacturing for someone else's brand. It was ours. We were it and it was us. If we didn't know why it existed, no one else would either. So we sat in that room and started trying to find the why. And we quickly hit a wall.

Everyone Needed the Product in Their Hands

The problem was simple and a little embarrassing once I saw it clearly. I was the only one in the room who knew the product well enough to talk about it honestly. Not because Edo and Elisa hadn't tried, but because we barely had any working samples. The Gem existed in prototype form. The app existed. But getting your hands on a unit that actually worked, that you could wear through a real day and record real conversations and see the synthesis come back, that wasn't available to most of the team. People were working on something they'd seen in presentations and demo videos. They knew the product the way you know a city from a map.

That's when the first real insight of this chapter arrived, and it came not from a framework or a strategy session but from watching Edo reach for something that wasn't there. I remembered something from when we'd worked together before, at Anker, years earlier. Edo had joined to lead the PR team and within the first few days he'd come to me asking for product samples. Not review units, not demo devices: samples to actually use.

He wanted to know how loud the speaker got at maximum volume. Whether the power bank kept working if it got wet. What happened to the charging cable if you dropped it off a desk repeatedly. Questions the product managers had never thought to ask, because they were working on the product without living with it. Everyone in the tech world here works in a vacuum to some degree. You build the thing, you test the specs, you photograph it, you present it on slides. But you don't always stop and ask: what does the person who buys this actually do with it?

I told the product team to get samples into the hands of every single person in the company. Not the leadership team. Everyone. The engineers, the operations people, the designer who was working on the packaging. Everyone who was building Memoket needed to actually use Memoket.

The Product Reveals Itself Over Time

A few days later, Edo, Elisa, and I sat back down in that same meeting room. And things were different. We were speaking the same language for the first time. Not the language of specs and features and positioning documents. The language of experience. We all knew what it felt like when the Gem captured a meeting and the synthesis came back clean. We all knew the moment, which is the real moment, when Memoket stops being impressive and starts being necessary.

That moment isn't the first recording. Any note-taking device can capture a conversation. The first recording is useful. What's extraordinary is what happens after the fifth, the tenth, the twentieth. When Memoket starts connecting the dots across time. When it surfaces a conversation from three weeks ago and says: you're talking about this topic right now, and here's what you concluded about it before. When a week of fragmented customer calls becomes a single coherent brief. When the context you'd been carrying in your head, imperfectly, incompletely, starts living somewhere reliable instead.

That's the product. That's the why. And it told us immediately that traditional advertising wasn't going to work. You can't show that in a fifteen-second video. You can't demonstrate it in a banner ad. The power of Memoket is experiential and cumulative. It reveals itself over time, to people who are paying attention. We needed to find those people, not shout at everyone and hope some of them were listening. We needed to build a community.

Edo introduced Discord. Elisa brought up Slack. We decided to run both, because the people we were looking for were in both places, and because our motto at that point was: try everything. What we were doing was unusual for a hardware company in Shenzhen. Building a community before you have a product to ship, investing in relationships with early adopters rather than conversion funnels, treating your first users as co-builders rather than customers: none of that is in the standard playbook here. The standard playbook is to sell first and talk later. We were talking first, on purpose, because we believed the product we were building required it.

Finding Early Adopters

The question then was how to fill those communities with the right people. We didn't have the budget for a major influencer campaign, and more importantly we weren't sure the ROI would be there. Influencer marketing works when you're selling something people already understand. We weren't. Elisa suggested newsletters. Not our own newsletter, not yet: the newsletters that already existed, serving communities of people who cared about technology, AI, productivity, the future of how knowledge workers do their jobs.

These were people who read carefully, who thought about tools and systems, who would recognize the gap Memoket was closing because they'd felt it themselves. We started reaching out, getting Memoket in front of those audiences, and pointing them toward the Discord and the Slack. It worked faster than we expected. The right people started showing up. Not in massive numbers, but in the right numbers: curious, engaged, the kind of early adopters who ask good questions and tell you things about your own product you hadn't thought to articulate yet. We wanted 100 founding member beta testers. We surpassed that number by 48% in the first 48 hours. The community wasn't just a marketing channel. It was a signal. It was telling us the PMF was real.

But we needed to test it in the wild too. Talking to people who had sought you out is one thing. Watching strangers encounter the product for the first time, with no context and no reason to be generous, is something else entirely. In May 2026 we took Memoket to Pepcom Spring Spectacular in New York, a media event where journalists, industry analysts, and technology professionals move through a room full of products, spending a few minutes with each one, deciding quickly whether something is worth their attention.

Testing in the Wild

It's a high-pressure environment for a product like ours. The power of Memoket takes time to reveal itself. You can't demonstrate weeks of accumulated context in a three-minute booth interaction. What you can do is show the synthesis. Show someone what a conversation looks like after Gem has processed it. Let them hold it, feel the weight of it on their wrist, understand what it's doing and what it isn't doing. We watched people get it. Not everyone, not immediately, but when they did you could see it happen in their face. Something would shift. The polite-journalist expression would give way to something more genuine.

One of the moments I keep coming back to happened with the paramedics working the event. They came by the booth the way event staff do, curious but professionally detached, expecting to move on quickly. One of them picked up the Gem and started asking questions. Within a few minutes he was describing a use case we hadn't fully mapped ourselves: every call a paramedic runs involves a stream of observations, interventions, patient responses, times and dosages and decisions made at speed in the back of an ambulance. All of it needs to be handed off accurately to the nurses and doctors at the emergency room. All of it lives, currently, in handwritten notes and fallible memory. He saw the Gem and immediately understood what it could do for that handoff. We hadn't built it for him. But he found himself in it anyway.

That's what a real product does. It exceeds the use case its builders imagined. We also had lawyers at that event who saw it clearly. Consultants. Founders. People across different industries who shared one thing: they lived in conversations, and they were losing context every day, and they'd been carrying that cost so long they'd stopped noticing it until we put it in their hands and they remembered. The PMF wasn't a hypothesis anymore after New York. It was something we'd watched happen in real time, with real strangers, in a room full of competing products.

The last test was Product Hunt. Edo had brought it up weeks earlier as something worth trying. We'd considered Kickstarter at one point, the way most hardware companies do, and decided against it. The more we looked at how crowdfunding campaigns actually work, the more we understood that the game there is often won not by the best product but by the biggest advertising spend, or worse, by campaigns that inflate their own numbers. It rewards the loudest, not necessarily the most real.

Product Hunt and Finding Our People

Product Hunt is different. It connects you with genuine early adopters, people who are there because they actually want to find new things, who vote based on whether something matters to them, not because an ad told them to. For a product in a new category, trying to find the people who would recognize it before the broader market caught up, it was exactly the right arena. We launched on May 13, 2026.

We had set a goal of 50 founding member signups for our second beta round. We received over 150 applications in 24 hrs. Nearly half of the people who signed up were SMB owners, exactly the audience we'd identified as our core. On Product Hunt we finished number one product of the day.

The number isn't what I remember most. What I remember is reading the comments. People describing the exact frustration Memoket was built to solve, in their own words, unprompted. People who had never heard of us twenty-four hours earlier writing things that sounded like they could have come from our own early whiteboard sessions.

That's the feeling you're looking for when you're building something new. Not the validation of a number, but the recognition that the people you built it for have found it, and they know it was built for them. We'd found our people. It had taken a cloudy morning in a cramped meeting room, a decision to put the product in everyone's hands, two community platforms, a newsletter strategy no one in Shenzhen was running, a media event in New York, and a Product Hunt launch that kept us up through the night. But we'd found them.

Memoket Gem captures your conversations so you can stay present in them. See how