AUTHOR

Alex Westner


Hardware or software?

Last week somebody asked me after hearing my pitch if I thought Xander was a hardware company or a software company. After some thought, I believe...

Graduating to solution testing

For months I had been digging into customer problems and searching for signals that would point to solution ideas and concepts that might help them....

Scratching surfaces

The surface of the Product, the surface of Fundraising, the surface of the Team, the surface of Competitors, the surface of Customers, and the...

Customers are inspiring

To help keep me inspired and motivated, I made a PowerPoint deck with customer notes like these—each slide has the person’s name, what they said, and...

Augmented Reality Audio from Facebook

Very interesting work from the Facebook Reality Labs Research team with a path towards improving our hearing, which they refer to as “perceptual...

Filing a provisional patent

After a successful customer test, and an extensive patent search, I’m moving forward to file a provisional patent. The patent work I’ve been doing...

When the supply chain is thin

There’s just a handful of companies creating this one fundamental component, another handful of companies who’ve built shippable modules around this...

Nobody wants a hearing aid

The World Health Organization estimates that 466 million people worldwide have disabling hearing loss, and yet only 17% of them actually get hearing...

Patent Potency

The next time I have to go through this process I might take it on with more zeal—it’s a great exercise for a Product person.

Testing with customers—remotely

How do you casually approach and talk to customers during lockdown, when everyone is remote? I pinged Rob Fitzpatrick, author of The Mom Test, and he...