Chapter 7: The Devil's in the Details
Rule five: solve the problem people won't say out loud.
Before Memoket was a company, before it was even a properly fleshed-out idea, I spent a long time using other people's note-taking devices.
Some of them were genuinely good. The companies building in this category had thought carefully about transcription quality, about AI summarization, about the software side of the problem. I respected the work. I still do.
But there were two things I could never get past.
The first was the physical burden of carrying another object. A pin, a recorder that clipped to my phone, something I had to remember to bring, remember to charge, remember to have on me when the meeting started. I am, by nature, a fairly organized person. I still forgot it constantly. Not because I didn't care, but because the human mind doesn't naturally make room for one more small object to track through a busy day. You're already carrying your phone, your wallet, your keys, your laptop bag. Asking someone to add a dedicated recording device to that list is asking them to change their habits in a way most people, including me, simply don't sustain.
The second was the awkwardness. I'd written about this before in this book, the way a visible recording device changes a room. People speak differently when they can see the thing that's capturing them. The conversation gets smaller, more careful, less honest. The very thing you're trying to preserve, the real exchange, the unguarded moment, gets compromised by the act of preserving it.
I thought about these two problems for a long time before Memoket existed in any real form. And as I started researching the category more seriously, I noticed something that surprised me. I wasn't the only one noticing.
Journalists covering these devices complained about the exact same two things. YouTubers reviewing them, the people whose job is to live with new technology and report back honestly, kept circling the same frustrations. Forgetting to bring it. Forgetting to charge it. The way it changed the room when it came out.
It struck me as strange that something this consistently observed, this widely felt, hadn't been solved. Multiple well-funded companies, smart engineers, real investment, and yet the two most basic friction points of the entire category remained essentially untouched.
That pattern held when Memoket went out into the world.
Once we had real customers, real founding members, we started doing what every company should do and too few actually commit to: we asked people why. Not why they liked Memoket in the abstract, but specifically why they had chosen to pre-order a product that required a one to two month wait, when they could have bought something else off a shelf the same day.
The same two reasons kept coming up. Almost word for word, from people who had never spoken to each other, across different industries, different countries, different reasons for needing the product in the first place. They didn't want to carry one more thing. And they didn't want a device that made the people around them feel watched.
It still surprises me, honestly, how something this obvious could be missed by companies with far more resources than we had. But I think I understand why now. The note-taking category is new enough, and still misunderstood enough, that most companies approach it the way they'd approach any other hardware category: design a good device, make it as small and elegant as you can, and assume people will adapt their behavior to accommodate it.
That's backward. The lesson, the one I keep coming back to, is that the technology has to adapt itself to the way people already live. Not the other way around.
This is where the co-wear decision stopped being a clever form factor choice and became something closer to a conviction.
We offer a pendant. We offer a clip. Both are good options for people who prefer them, and we built them because not everyone wears a watch, and we wanted real choice. But the demand for the Apple Watch co-wear strap, consistently, overwhelmingly, told us something specific. People didn't just want a smaller recorder. They wanted something that disappeared into a routine they already had. Something that didn't ask them to remember anything new, because it was already attached to the thing they were already wearing, already charging, already trusting with the rest of their daily life.
People need the context from their meetings and conversations. That part of the demand was never in question. What they needed equally, and what the existing products in this category had consistently underestimated, was for that need to be met without intrusion. Without a visible reminder sitting on the table. Without a flashing light or a bulky shape that turned every conversation into a small performance about the fact that it was being recorded.
It's a different experience to glance at a small red light on someone's wrist, barely noticeable unless you're looking for it, than to watch a rectangular device sitting on the table between you, impossible to ignore. The first fades into the background of a normal conversation. The second becomes the conversation, at least for a moment, every time someone in the room remembers it's there.
Our community proved this to us again, the same way it had proven the original product decisions. Messages started arriving in Discord and Slack, from people who didn't wear Apple Watches but wanted the same experience. Garmin owners. Samsung Galaxy Watch owners. Google Pixel Watch owners. People telling us, unprompted, that they wanted Memoket to fit into the life they already had, not a life redesigned around an Apple ecosystem.
We're working on that now. Expanding the co-wear strap beyond Apple Watch, into the other wearables people already trust and already wear. It's not finished. I don't want to oversell where we are. But the direction is clear, and it came from the same place every good direction in this company has come from: listening closely enough to hear what people weren't quite saying out loud, and taking it seriously when we did.
Lesson: don't ask people to change their lives to fit your product. Build the product that fits into the life they already have.
It sounds simple when I write it down. Most good rules do. The hard part was never understanding it intellectually. The hard part was resisting the instinct, the one every hardware company feels, to solve a problem by adding something rather than by getting out of the way.
We're still learning how far that rule extends. But every time we've followed it, the room has gotten quieter and the truth has gotten louder. People don't want another thing in their life.
They want their life to finally make sense to the tools that are supposed to help them live it.
