The first time I saw obsolescence masquerade as traction, the charts looked flawless. Units shipped were up, repeat purchases appeared strong, and support tickets were still manageable. Then the quarter closed. Returns doubled. Referral traffic slowed. A lead customer in Johor called to say their procurement team had blacklisted the brand because the product failed right after the warranty window. What looked like healthy demand was actually a replacement cycle that trained customers to expect disappointment on a schedule.
I have sat with founders who inherited this logic from bigger players and tried to shrink it into a startup. They copied the short warranty, shortened the update cycle, and celebrated the first wave of reorders. On paper it worked. In the office it felt brittle. Engineers shipped patches they did not believe in. Sales promised upgrades that quietly admitted the original was never meant to last. The team carried the emotional tax of knowing their work would age poorly, which is the fastest way to burn out good people.
Planned obsolescence had a time and place. It paired well with cheap capital, hypergrowth narratives, and customers who lacked alternatives. That market is gone. Customers can measure durability through reviews, teardown videos, and repair communities. Procurement teams now track total cost of ownership in a way that exposes weak materials, flaky software support, and inventory waste. Regulators inch toward right-to-repair rules. Investors have become more skeptical of revenue that spikes without corresponding service reliability and margin health. The game changed. Founders who keep playing the old one teach their users to leave.
The moment of clarity shows up in quiet numbers first. Contribution margin compresses because returns and replacements eat what marketing brought in. Cohorts that looked sticky reveal churn hidden by upgrades that fix yesterday’s defects. Support headcount grows faster than active users. Warranty costs keep creeping, not because you are unlucky, but because the offer itself incentivizes decay. When a business model is wired for replacement rather than reliability, every department picks up a piece of the mess.
The alternative is not a romantic story about craftsmanship. It is a hard, commercial shift toward value creation that compounds. That shift begins with what you decide to promise. A durable promise forces different design choices. It changes pricing, it changes roadmap sequencing, and it changes how you speak to your board. It makes your product slightly slower to ship in the first sprint and much easier to defend in the twentieth month.
Start with retention as the north star, but define retention the way your customer would. Retention is not time inside your app or months on a plan. Retention is the user still choosing you after something breaks, an alternative appears, or their budget tightens. If that is the standard, design for serviceability. You can build a device that opens with ordinary tools. You can publish a parts list and make spares available without friction. You can design software so that security and stability updates continue for older versions even when you roll out a new release. You can price extended coverage as a fair, productized service that underscores confidence instead of selling fear.
When you monetize outcomes, the way you recognize revenue changes. You stop rewarding your team for creating new failure points that push upgrades. You start rewarding them for reducing the gap between your promise and the user’s reality. A small IoT startup in Klang Valley learned this the hard way when they tried to juice quarterly numbers with a pro tier that fixed basic reliability issues. Customers paid once then told their peers to avoid the entry model entirely. The rebuild came when they rolled those fixes into the base product and charged the pro tier for measurable operational gains. Churn dropped, referrals returned, and support cost per active user finally fell.
Pricing is where many founders lose courage. A trustworthy device or enterprise workflow tool will cost more to build. That is fine if your model acknowledges it. You can price higher with a clear value guarantee and make the math visible: lower downtime, fewer replacements, and a credible repair path. You can introduce a buyback credit that keeps devices circulating through your own refurb channel rather than dumping value into the grey market. You can offer a long-life subscription that includes periodic refurbishment and predictable upgrade options. These choices do not weaken growth. They change its texture from bursty to compounding.
Team design follows the promise. When you commit to long-life value, you hire product managers who can say no to cheap complexity. You give engineering time to instrument durability and failure modes, not just feature adoption. You ask customer success to feed failure data into design sprints rather than treating support as a wall that catches everything the roadmap throws over it. Your marketing stops telling a seasonal story and starts telling a stewardship story. None of this is fluffy. It is an operating system decision.
Manufacturing and supply chain leaders will ask about cash flow, and they are right to worry. Durability front-loads costs. There are practical answers. You can finance inventory against warranties that are structured with real actuarial discipline. You can run preorders that align build volume with verified demand rather than vanity forecasts. You can partner with repair networks that reduce your fixed overhead. You can configure vendor agreements so that quality lapses have consequences upstream, not only downstream on your brand. The point is not to absorb all the risk. The point is to place the risk where it can be controlled.
Founders in Saudi, Singapore, and Malaysia often tell me they need fast cycles to outpace incumbents. It is true that speed is an advantage. It is also true that speed without integrity leaves a smell that buyers now recognize. A hybrid approach works better. Ship fast on learnable layers like UX and data views. Move slower where failure creates e-waste, safety problems, or regulatory exposure. Your roadmap can reflect that dual cadence. You do not need a perfect device or perfect system. You need a product that admits its own evolution without sacrificing the trust you will need in year three.
There is a cultural shift inside the company when you end the replacement mindset. Teams stop hoarding knowledge because the work is no longer about heroics in the last week of a cycle. Roadmaps start describing fewer things with more clarity. Leaders start talking about the next thousand days. Salespeople find it easier to stand behind the contract because they believe the product will not embarrass them nine months later. You will feel it in the hallway conversations first. Confidence shows up as patience that does not relax standards.
Ending Obsolescence is not a slogan. It is a sequence of choices that create a durable relationship with the people who keep you alive. The sequence looks like this when it is working. Customers stop asking your team to escalate routine issues because routine issues were designed out. Support tickets get quieter and more specific. Unit economics improve because every device or seat lives longer and contributes more margin per month. Your secondhand or refurb channel develops an audience that treats your brand as a safe entry point, which becomes an on-ramp to your newer lines. Your board discussions shift from revenue headlines to the shape of that revenue and the cost of defending it.
If you are early, build your first version with repair in mind even if you do not publish that capability on day one. If you are already shipping, find one failure pattern and solve it at the root rather than turning it into an upsell. If you have a refurb idea that feels like a distraction, write the math and see how many replacements you can avoid by keeping assets in circulation under your own quality bar. If your warranty language reads like you are preparing for battle, rewrite it so it sounds like you plan to be around.
None of this requires lobbying for new rules or waiting for a certification to be invented. It requires leadership that aligns incentives around durable value. You can measure that leadership by asking a blunt question at the next product review. If this feature or batch ships as designed and fails at the rates we can already guess, who pays for the mess, and what does that do to our margin, our talent, and our reputation. If the answer is the customer pays, the support team pays, or the future version pays, then the product is lying to you.
Founders do not have to choose between growth and integrity. You have to choose between a growth story that cannibalizes itself and one that earns the right to compound. The first one burns bright and then burns trust. The second one looks modest in month three and obvious in year two. If you are staring at a release that exists to hit a quarter rather than to keep a promise, step back and rebuild the promise first. Your future users are already reading the reviews that your current users will write. Build something those reviews can praise without asterisks.
If you take one step this week, take the one that makes your product easier to repair. Put it on your homepage without drama. Tell buyers what you guarantee and why. Tell your team what you will no longer ship. Then hold that line. Value creation is not a tagline or a slide. It is what remains when the upgrade emails stop and your product still does the job it promised to do.
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