You forgot:
- Skirt round or ignore existing regulations and call it disruption.
And, without oversights in place to keep the company accountable, like state requirements for clinical supervision...
“My experience is the self-consciousness goes away very quickly,” she said. “People live their lives and forget we’re there.”
That is probably the core lesson, the rest was all known. That line however, tells you everything that you need to know about the future of privacy.
These Cognition Builders people are following every single rule of technology startups:
- Charge more / move upmarket
- Target a niche and own it. Don't do spray'n'pray marketing, but make sure your niche can find you.
- Do things that don't scale (initially)
- Use technology to your advantage, but not as a gimmick.
Given how much they charge, I imagine they are profitable. And given how their customers' houses are covered with cameras and microphones, I imagine they are collecting some amazing datasets about human nature.
The folks at Cognition Builders are absolute geniuses, and I wish I was able to come up with a business like that.