My Blog

The "Loneliness Economy" is projected to be one of the defining market opportunities of the next decade. However, the current wave of hardware solutions—epitomised by the device "Friend"—represents a fundamental failure in business design. This forensic audit argues that "Friend" is not a product failure, but a business model failure. In this article, I outline why intimacy cannot be sold as a one-off hardware transaction.

$1.8M for a domain name. $0 for common sense. 💸 The "Friend" AI launch is a masterclass in vanity over value. It forgets your name and acts like a bad roommate. I break down how a simple Fake Door test could have saved investors $10 million and spared its founder viral humiliation.

The excitement around launching an AI-powered product is infectious. The marketing promise—a powerful brain, low maintenance, and negligible operational cost—sells itself. You look at the API pricing for the latest GPT-4o mini or a similar model, see the rate for a million tokens, and think: "We've got margin for days." But that's an illusion. Let me explain.