(12) Prelaunch Industry Board Newsletter: Monthly Innovation & Insights

Dear Industry Board Members,

August was the month machines started keeping score against humans. A robot broke Usain Bolt's 100-meter world record, then needed a stretcher to get off the track. Dyson strapped a camera to a toothbrush and called it innovation, and PlayStation's most loyal customers staged a week-long blackout over a disc slot most of them stopped using years ago.

A few things I couldn't stop thinking about this month:

Key Trends in Consumer Tech

Dyson's toothbrush now has a camera. For $500. 🪥

Dyson's new CameraJet packs a camera and water tank into one toothbrush, combining brushing, flossing, and rinsing. A model trained on 470,000 dental images spots the gaps between your teeth and fires a cone-shaped jet to floss them mid-brush, reacting within 100 milliseconds.

It costs $499, about $100 more than the nicest Sonicare or Oral-B out there. Dyson's answer, as always: you're not paying for a toothbrush, you're paying for the fluid dynamics research behind it.

A toothbrush that watches you brush is either the most Dyson product ever made, or proof there's no appliance left AI hasn't touched. 🤖

Apple's next iPhone folds into an iPad. Nobody asked; Apple's doing it anyway. 🍎

Bloomberg's Mark Gurman reports Apple's foldable iPhone is rumored to open to a 7.8-inch inner display, basically iPad mini territory, with a tweaked iOS said to add real split-screen multitasking. If the leaks hold, expect a price north of $2,000, sitting above the Pro line entirely.

Apple usually waits until a category is boring before it enters. Samsung's been folding phones for six years. Apple's answer is a hinge engineered to be tougher and a crease market-leading enough to make you forget foldables were ever a compromise.

This week also marked the end of Tim Cook’s era at Apple, who somehow turned the company into a bigger financial empire without really inventing a major new product category.

Now Apple fans are placing high hopes on John Ternus to invent something new again.

Google's watch wants to know your body better than your doctor does. ⌚

Google's Health Guardian, landing on Pixel Watch and Fitbit Air, quietly tracks insulin resistance, blood pressure, and sleep breathing quality in the background, no blood draw, no cuff. The model behind it was trained on a trillion minutes of sensor data from five million people who opted in.

Roughly 40% of adults don't know their insulin resistance is trending up until it's already a problem. Google's bet is that a watch that never stops watching can catch it first.

The line between wearable and early warning systems just got thinner... and I'm not sure everyone wanted it to.

PlayStation owners are staging a mutiny over discs, and it's not going great. 🎮

Following Sony's decision to end physical game production by 2028, which we flagged here last time, the community group DoesItPlay called for a week-long PSBlackout, no logins, no purchases, no PSN, from August 23 to 30.

It landed during Gamescom week, when half the hardcore audience was already elsewhere, and most commenters on the protest itself said a week does nothing. Meanwhile, a separate leaker calling themselves Cyberleek dumped GTA VI gameplay and map files specifically to protest Sony's push toward digital-only pre-orders.

A boycott with an expiry date isn't a boycott. It's a press release... and Sony knows it. 😬

Key Trends in Robotics

A robot just beat Usain Bolt. Then it hit a wall. 🏃

At the World Humanoid Robot Games in Beijing, Honor's humanoid Lightning ran 100 meters in 9.32 seconds, faster than Bolt's 9.58-second world record, before a separate robot named Tiangong Ultra overtook it near the finish at 9.39 seconds. In the standing high jump, a humanoid cleared 2.88 meters, well past the human record of 2.45.

More than 2,000 humanoid robots competed. Neither winner could stop moving after the finish line; both needed to be carried off on stretchers.

I first thought this was a stunt... Then I saw Unitree's stock jump fivefold on its Shanghai debut the same week, putting the company at a $50 billion valuation. China isn't racing robots for fun; it's pricing an industry in real time. 🤯

Key Trends in CPG & Health

A meat stick brand just outgrew half of America's convenience stores. 🥩

Chomps crossed 65,000 retail outlets this month, adding Starbucks, Costco Canada, and Home Depot to a list that already includes Sam's Club, 7-Eleven, and Marriott. Distribution has doubled year over year, and sales in tracked channels are up 81%.

The chicken stick line launched this year and became the number one brand in the category within 12 weeks, at 43% dollar share. More than a third of those buyers were brand new to Chomps entirely.

Protein snacking stopped being a niche a while ago. Chomps just proved it's now a distribution war, and they're winning it in places that have nothing to do with the snack aisle. 😎

Scientists grew a muscle that exercises itself, so you don't have to. 💪

Researchers built self-contracting, vascularized muscle implants that survived at least 81 days in mice, improving muscle mass, strength, bone density, and even cognitive performance in aged and obese animals, without the animals doing a single rep.

The implants also normalized a hormone deficiency in the test mice, hinting these could work as a delivery platform, not just a muscle substitute.

Exercise has always been the cheapest longevity drug we have... This is the first serious attempt at bottling the effect for people who physically can't take the dose.

Mac and cheese got a new noodle shape, and that's somehow news. 🧀

Goodles launched Twirly Mac, a twisted noodle built specifically to hold sauce differently than its classic macaroni, in three flavors including an Alfredo variant spiked with white miso. Same nutritional pitch as always: 14g of protein, 7g of fiber, Clean Label Certified.

It's a small move; a new noodle shape isn't a new category. But it's a reminder that even in a shelf as commoditized as boxed mac and cheese, brands are still finding R&D angles nobody else bothered to chase.

Sometimes the innovation isn't the ingredient list... It's the shape. 😅

A tea brand just picked a fight with energy drinks 🧉

Saint James Tea spent five years selling only iced tea. Its first-ever product extension isn't a new flavor. It's yerba mate.

The brand's yerba mate can pack 150 milligrams of caffeine, double what most yerba mate on shelves carries, and about a cup and a half of coffee. Co-CEO Brenden Cohen said they wanted something with real energy that still fit the "better-for-you" shelf. Yerba mate was the only category that let them do both.

Here's the part that's actually interesting. This isn't a lone bet. The global yerba mate market is sitting around $2 billion and growing 5-6% a year, and RTD is the fastest-growing format in it. Guayaki rebranded as Yerba Madre this year and grew distribution 35%. Saint James is entering a category that's already moving, not one it's hoping catches on.

Energy drinks sell the crash. Yerba mate is selling the "no crash." Watch this shelf.

🚀 What's New at Prelaunch.com

In early October, we'll be at TMRE in Denver, Colorado.

We have 3 complimentary passes to extend to our network... those of you interested in joining us there, just reply, and we'll send over the code to redeem them.

We continue to get really strong feedback on Prelaunch Screen, our new approach for helping brands validate early-stage ideas before investing heavily in them.

Social Ads

We don’t use panels. Instead, we run targeted ads on Instagram, LinkedIn, Google, and other channels, reaching real potential customers at scale. They see a concept naturally in their feed and decide whether to engage with it.
That makes the signal much closer to real market behavior.

Landing Page

Each concept gets a dedicated Prelaunch page designed to track behavior. People can sign up if they’re interested or tell us why they’re not. Either way, we learn much more than we would from simply asking, “Would you buy this?”

Qualitative Insights

Both interested and uninterested visitors can then talk to Frank, our AI interviewer, and explain what caught their attention, what confused them, what they liked, and what stopped them.

When you run this at scale across 20+ concepts, you can quickly identify which ideas have genuine market pull and which ones should probably be killed before significant time and money are invested.
That helps brands focus their resources on the products people actually care about.

If this sounds interesting, let me know.

Until next time,

– Narek