My first reaction to Marques’ review of Humane’s Ai Pin was that’s harsh. It was obviously based on the thumbnail he used. I probably would not have done that. But that’s also one of the reasons I don’t have 18M followers. And a media empire to serve them.

My issue with people complaining about the thumbnail is that they are questioning a business decision of which they are not part of. If you are running a YouTube channel, what thumbnail you use matters a lot. You might say a guy like Marques doesn’t need to rely on such tactics anymore. And I will have the same answer. You are not running a successful, entirely bootstrapped media company like he is.

(I am using big words like media company and empire to describe him, which might seem an exaggeration but it’s really not. You should watch some of the behind the scene videos he does from time to time.)

As for as the review is concerned, I think it’s remarkably balanced. Feels pretty honest. If you watch till the end, even the thumbnail feels justified. I didn’t feel like he had a bias against the team behind the product. And that’s what matters. I don’t watch that many YouTube product reviews except for rare cases like Ai Pin, where I just had to know how it was doing. But I do watch Marques’ almost every time. Some times I don’t agree with him. But I never felt like I can’t trust him.

Can a bad review kill a product? Maybe it can. What a guy like Marques says does have affect on users’ decisions. But why he needs to compromise his product because someone else worked hard on their’s and fell just short. Plus, he also said lots of good things about the build quality and the ambition behind the Ai Pin. 

In my opinion, the product is just too serious and ambitious in what it is trying to do. Modern day smartphones are where they are because of a 17-year old process of evolution. You can’t just aim to replace them. Well, you can but you can’t target them head on.

To quote Chris Dixon, Humane didn’t build a toy. And for a new category, building a toy, more often than not, is a pre-requisite.