But First…Cool, if Real

Who needs a tape measure when you have an Apple Vision Pro and a smart pencil?

Scroll to the end of this newsletter to see.

Becoming Dauntless

scal·a·ble

/ˈskāləb(ə)l/ The ability to increase revenue without a proportional increase in costs.

To Scale Your Product, Sell Services First

When Airbnb was still in Y Combinator, founders Brian and Joe did something off-script: they went door-to-door offering free professional photography to hosts. Unscalable but ultimately critical to Airbnb’s success.

Why? Getting that close to customers revealed insights about what they wanted (host profiles, peer reviews, support needs) that shaped everything that followed.

Investors love citing this story. "Do things that don't scale." It’s great advice, if they give you the runway and air cover to execute it. Spoiler: most don’t.

We took a different path.

At Dauntless, we bootstrapped by turning unscalable work into an advantage. We sold R&D services and custom engineering that funded our scalable products. Pre-AI, this was survival. Post-AI, with agents handling operational lift, this hybrid model isn't just viable, it's strategic.

Services accelerate product companies:

Services put you inside your customers' hardest problems. You spot patterns, pain points, and opportunities that pure product teams miss. That proximity becomes competitive intelligence.

For bootstrapped founders, services can be your growth engine. You can't afford to do everything at scale anyway (and if you have, let us all know how), so why not turn that constraint into an edge?

How we built our AI-enabled services division:

1. Find the highest-leverage problem. Locate that expensive, complex operational challenge crushing revenue or retention.

2. Build a proprietary methodology. Create a defensible approach to solving it.

3. Capture exclusive data. Develop unique data collection methods that become your moat in a world where everyone has access to the same AI tools.

A warning: Don't just spin up a generic AI agency. The market is flooded with identical offers making impossible promises. The best defense? An IP and brand offense. It takes longer to build, but if you know how to ship products, you can figure this out.

The companies winning long term aren't choosing between products and services or scalable and unscalable. They're using non-scalable services to build better scalable products while using AI to make that model sustainable.

Tech News to Make You Smarter

• RealWear Launched Arc 3 Lightweight AR Headset (Remix Reality). It's like if Hololens 2 and Google Glass had a baby. The device is also available as a "subscription," which, back in my day, we called a rental, that includes repairs, upgrades, and customer support.

• More news in headset land. (Magic Leap). Magic Leap and Google revealed an unnamed pair of augmented reality glasses at the Future Investment Initiative (FII) in Riyadh. The prototype combined Magic Leap's optics with Google’s Raxium microLED light engine. The goal is a smart glasses design that you can wear all day. The launch was...awkward and not in the signature Magic Leap style. Here's hoping we see something more on-brand at CES.

• Unity Announced a New Custom Gesture Package. (LinkedIn) This is good news for anyone who dislikes using controllers in XR. More gestures = easier metaverse navigation.

Saved on Socials

The posts, memes, job postings, and videos that caught my attention this week:

• Humble But Cool (Instagram)

• There’s no such thing as bad press (Instagram)

Recently Played >

What we listened to this week

• 🌠 3I/ATLAS (C/2025 N1) LIVE: Real-Time Path and Position of the Interstellar Comet (YouTube). Just in case it is aliens.

• What Is Actually Happening With 3I Atlas (YouTube). The internet agrees that this is the best explainer video on the comet.

Overheard on Slack

Enter the chat. What our devs are talking about…

• "Not everything needs a mobile app. Web apps are not evil." - Don't make me download another app if we can use a website instead. Looking at you, Public School system.

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📸 This is real. The app is called Doppl and was being demonstrated at Eclipse Automation. This application of XR tech makes more sense when you need to measure things a tape measure isn't practical for, like the volume of a giant pile of gravel, or the height of a building.