We recently read an article about an interesting new wearable, the Pulse Mindfulness ring (and we quote from it later in this post), and it got us thinking about why this new smart ring could disrupt this wearable category.
The Oura Ring and its competitors try to be the best at measuring and monitoring health and well-being signals. They compete by adding sensors, collecting more information, and presenting users with increasingly detailed scores and dashboards.
Pulse has taken a wildly different approach.
Its ring doesn’t track sleep, activity, readiness, heart rate, or other biometric information. In fact, it’s not much of a tracker at all! Instead, it vibrates at selected moments to remind its wearer to pause, breathe, slow down, or become more present.
You can see that the Pulse smart ring is simple from this image from its store:
They say on LinkedIn:
“We’re pioneering a new path, one that moves away from data tracking, constant notifications, dashboards, and information overload.”
So, rather than adding more or different features and functions, they’re differentiating themselves by removing their competitors’ usual features. Rather than asking how to create a more advanced version of an existing smart ring, the founders questioned an assumption that most of the industry appears to accept: that wearables must collect more data to provide more value.
Market research revealed a new product category
Pulse conducted market research, largely through meta-ads, to validate a few hypotheses about potential customers rather than getting people to sign up for a pre-launch mailing list, which allowed them to discover a large unmet need.
The pre-launch advertising tested 3 different use cases:
- Meditation and breathwork,
- Productivity and focus, and
- Habit formation.
Half of the people who registered were primarily interested in meditation, while the other half were split between productivity and habit change. They also revealed the expected selling price during this research, so any subsequent registrations could be seen as a stronger buying signal.
This market research demonstrated to them that some people do not necessarily want another device measuring them throughout the day. It looked like there was a market for wearable technology that helps users improve their behavior without creating more information to review.
Their marketing copy makes this clear:
“No subscription. No sensors. No dashboards. Just a pause, when you need one.
What would it feel like to wear something that wasn’t watching you?”
Experience (and good program management) reduces expensive mistakes
The founders understood clearly that hardware is unforgiving, a line we often tell people coming from the software world.
As Pulse founder Johan Matton put it, “You can’t change anything once it’s out.”
Unlike software, physical products that have already been manufactured, packed, and shipped are much more difficult to correct. A design problem, unreliable component, inappropriate material, or poorly controlled manufacturing process may require products to be reworked or replaced. That’s almost certainly time-consuming and expensive.
To reduce this risk, Pulse hired experienced team members, including operators with previous wearable-product and supply-chain experience, and management such as the former COO of Oura. The fact that it also raised millions of dollars in funding also gave it the ability to cope with any delays and challenges (an almost inevitable part of bringing new hardware products to market).
The soft launch may be the most important lesson we can take from Pulse
Pulse built a waiting list of more than 15,000 people, but it did not immediately promote the product to all of them. It also held back its larger press and influencer campaign until later, which is quite innovative.
Instead, the company wanted to “learn from the first 500 users.”
Those customers were sent the product and received direct access to the founder, being encouraged to report bugs, request features, and provide feedback about the ring’s vibration patterns and daily use.
As well as honing the product, the soft launch gave Pulse the ability to launch properly with a solid online footprint. The founder said of the soft launch that it was a way to cultivate super-users who loved the product:
“We have a good reputation right from the start, good testimonials. Then slowly, in a couple of months, we’re going to start to use all of our outlets.”
That’s a smart approach, because inexperienced startup founders tend to over-promise, accumulate delays and setbacks they did not foresee, and enter a race to deliver as many units as possible to their early customers or crowdfunding backers.
The last word
At Agilian, we see the same pattern repeatedly. Strong hardware startups do not treat manufacturing as the final execution step after the product has been designed. They use prototypes, pilot builds, testing, and early production runs to learn before committing to scale. A controlled launch of 500 units may reveal issues that no amount of internal planning could predict, while those issues can still be corrected without creating thousands of unhappy customers. The objective is not simply to manufacture quickly. It is to build a product that can scale and sell well in the future.
