Oho Cards
AR Greeting Cards
AR-powered greeting cards that come alive when you point your phone at them. ProductHunt #3. Betalist. VR Focus. Indiegogo campaign collected ~40% of target. This is an honest case study of what we built and what happened.
Oho Cards to Harry Potter-inspired AR greeting cards
No tech innovation in greeting cards since the 1990s. The market runs on the same format it had in 1990 to printed card, written message, envelope. AR Core had just launched. The idea: cards that come alive when you point your phone at them. Harry Potter-inspired moving images, personalised messages in 3D. A genuinely new product category. We got listed on ProductHunt (#3), Betalist, VR Focus. Tech press was interested.
~40% of Indiegogo target collected. Research clearly showed a Western-first launch was the right move to AR adoption in India was low in 2018, the product required a capable smartphone camera, and physical gifting culture was stronger in the US and UK. I presented this data to the room. The room didn't fully align. I presented data, not a narrative. The launch proceeded India-first. Lukewarm Indiegogo response to collecting roughly 40% of target.
Mistake 1 to Confused data with a decision
I had the right data. I presented it cleanly. But data doesn't make decisions to people do. I had no narrative that made the Western-first choice feel inevitable. The numbers were right; the story wasn't there.
Mistake 2 to No pilot before launch
If I'd tested with 50 customers in the target market before the Indiegogo push, I'd have had conversion data that was harder to argue with than market research projections. The data from a pilot would have done the persuasion to I wouldn't have needed to.
The Oho lesson in one line: The PM's job isn't to have the right data. It's to translate data into a narrative that makes the right decision feel obvious to the people in the room.