Was it really the wrong timing?
Most "ahead of its time" stories are actually stories about weak value propositions and poor product-market fit.
You might have heard founders describing their failed idea or product by saying, “It was the wrong timing” or “It was too early”.
It’s something that has always confused me.
The first time I heard this was when I had just graduated and was talking to a colleague who was a bit older than me and had a very similar background. She was explaining why the startup she founded after university had failed. She said:
“We were ahead of our time.”
I remember thinking, Huh, is that a thing? So you didn’t only have a good idea, but it was even ahead of its time. And that’s the reason it failed? How is that even possible?
Years passed, products came and went, trends changed.
Today, I find those statements really hard to believe.
As long as a product has product-market fit and serves what people actually need based on the market at that time, it cannot be early.
I know why people think that way. We see a lot of ideas launch, fail hard, and then, a couple of years later, another company launches something similar and suddenly it’s a huge success. Then people look back at the first attempt and say,
“It was too early.”
Early for what?
Let’s not make it complicated. I think this happens in two different ways.
1. The products look like the same idea, but they only share the same concept. They are not actually offering the same thing or creating the same value for users.
2. The products are actually similar, but what they are offering wasn’t a real need or an urgent problem to solve when they were launched. They simply misread the market.
One example I find really interesting today is smart glasses.
Remember Google Glass back in 2013? It was expensive, looked futuristic, and immediately raised privacy concerns. On top of that, it wasn’t clear to consumers what the value proposition actually was. There wasn’t a compelling daily use case, and the social cost was huge, so huge that the term Glasshole was born to describe people wearing them because they were perceived as not caring about everyone else’s privacy.
The product was essentially asking users to wear a weird-looking computer on their face without giving them something indispensable in return. There simply wasn’t enough value to justify changing people’s behavior.
Fast forward to today and look at the partnership between Meta and EssilorLuxottica, Ray-Ban.
First of all, Meta didn’t ask users to change their behavior dramatically. People already wear sunglasses. Check.
It’s a very different approach from Google’s attempt during Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week in 2012, where they seemed to be saying, “This is the new look” by putting Glass on runway models.
More importantly, the product now offers things like live translation, hands-free communication through voice commands, smart navigation, and AI assistance. The value proposition is much clearer, while the trade-offs in terms of appearance are much smaller.
One thing to note is that it’s still too early to say Meta has succeeded, despite selling more than seven million pairs. It’s also fair to assume Meta learned a lot from Google’s mistakes. Still, they are already facing some of the same privacy concerns Google did. People have started complaining that they were filmed by Meta glasses without realizing it. There are also growing concerns about how much visual, audio, and contextual data the glasses collect and how that data is used to power Meta’s AI features.
This makes Google’s return to the smart glasses market even more interesting.
Why?
Did it suddenly become a good idea? Did the problems they had because of the so-called "timing" disappear?
I don’t think so. If anything, people may be even more sensitive to privacy today.
So why now?
Most importantly, the ecosystem (AI, smartphones, chips, and software) is finally mature enough to create real value for users.
So yes, you could argue that Google was "too early". But not because people weren't ready to adopt smart glasses. It was because the technology wasn't yet capable of delivering a compelling enough reason to wear them every day.
Without that, the product is just a cosmetic gadget that doesn’t solve anything people really need.
Let’s not blame time for that.
People love saying products fail because they were "ahead of their time". But that’s often a comforting explanation that keeps product people from confronting something much harder:
Which assumption behind the idea was actually wrong?
If you have to change the technology, the use case, the design, the price, the social acceptance, and the ecosystem before a product succeeds, can you still say the original product was "ahead of its time"?
Or was it simply the wrong product?