Defining a product before the technology existed

Dream It Get It (later renamed Visii) was an early-stage startup exploring a new approach to semantic image search.

When I joined the team, the founders had a bold vision.

Rather than searching images using keywords, they believed it should be possible to navigate them based on their meaning and similarity. Two engineers were working to bring that vision to life while I explored what the product itself might become.

The technology had potential applications across everything from fashion and online shopping to interior design, art and image search. The challenge wasn’t choosing between good ideas—it was working out which problem was worth solving first.

Normally I’d start talking to potential customers as early as possible.

On this project, we couldn’t.

The technology was still being developed and was being protected through the patent process, so there was nothing we could demonstrate. At the same time, there wasn’t an obvious analogy that helped explain the vision. We couldn’t point to an existing product and say, “It’s like this, but…”

Without either of those things, customer conversations quickly became abstract. People weren’t reacting to a product or even a believable concept—they were reacting to our description of an idea.

That made it surprisingly difficult to learn whether we were solving a problem people actually had.

Curious how experiences like this have shaped my approach?

Many of the principles on my Approach page were shaped by projects like this, where reducing uncertainty sometimes meant first finding a way to make an idea tangible.