All we had, as far as we could

Hello everyone,

This is Karthik from Envision, and it’s been a while since you heard from us. So here’s a transparent version of what’s been going on.

When we started Envision back in 2017, it was just two of us, Karthik and Karthik. I was still a student, naively optimistic that sheer grit and perseverance could bring about a positive impact in the world. When we decided to focus on building tools that bring frontier tech to assist people who are blind or have low-vision, many tried to deter us. Accessibility is old-fashioned, they said. Hardware is hard. Global distribution is complex. Insurance and reimbursement are a nightmare.

We didn't let any of that stop us, and thank god for that.

Through that sheer grit and perseverance, we built an app that touched nearly a million people around the world. We launched the very first AI glasses for the blind in 2020. We partnered with giants like Google, Meta and Microsoft. We won the awards. We went head to head with a unicorn competitor on a shoestring budget and outsold them (remember Messi?). And most of all, we built a community of people who care about cutting-edge tech as much as they care about accessibility. 

I think the two naive Karthiks from 2017 would be proud of what we built, and how far we’ve come in these past nine years.

On the surface the business was doing well, we had stable revenues that perhaps many would be satisfied with. But on the inside, there were two things that were slowly becoming concrete. 

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The first was about our business model. We started as a free app that covered all the essential features, and a pro version for more advanced ones. And it worked well enough: around 15,000 paying pro subscribers at our peak. But each new subscriber cost more to acquire than the last. So when we launched the glasses, we made the app free and let hardware carry the business. That worked for years, but glasses are a one-time sale with no recurring revenue, and we knew it couldn't last. Consumer smart glasses were coming, and once they arrived at scale, they'd be as cheap and common as smartphones. Our plan was to build deep expertise in software for glasses so that when that moment came, we could go back to what we do best: building and distributing software. That's what Ally is. A freemium app, built to run on any general-purpose smart glasses on the market.

The second was about the ceiling. As we refocused on Ally, we noticed a pattern we'd seen before. The first 100,000 users come easily. Every user after that gets harder, until somewhere around a million, growth slows to a crawl. We did the math, compared notes with others in the field, and found the same ceiling everywhere. On paper, 300 million blind and low-vision people is a big market. But for the majority of them, the problems that come first are ones technology can't solve yet: poverty, lack of basic access, unemployment. That's why even products that are cheap or free struggle to get past that million mark, and paying users are a much much smaller slice of that.

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So the combination of these two realisations explains the situation we were at: our short window to move our business model from selling glasses to selling software + a market with a hard ceiling of about a max million reachable users worldwide (paying users a fraction of that).

At this point, we tried everything we could think of to find a resolution. At first, we tried a different business model, where instead of selling to customers directly we sold to businesses (B2C to B2B). We had some real wins, with companies like Unilever buying from us and several museums running paid pilots. But it was hard to scale, because businesses want big numbers, and ROI matters to them as much as impact. We also realised it wasn’t exciting to us. Karthik and I love building for real people, engaging with them, learning their pain points and solving problems directly. Doing that for business and their layered stakeholders didn’t seem as fun and it just wasn’t our thing. 

We also tried reaching beyond blind and low-vision users, expanding to older people. That went fairly well too. But serving a different audience with different needs means building a different product, and we couldn't do both well.

That led to some very hard and necessary conversations, with our team, our shareholders and with ourselves. We reached the conclusion that we have given it our all and brought Envision as far as we could with our nimble efforts. There’s still so much potential for this product and business to grow, but realising it needs someone who can take it in a new direction, whether that's a new audience or a different business model. We're in conversations with a few partners about that. And if you know someone who could carry Envision forward, we would love to hear from you. But before anything else, we wanted to give you, the community that has stood by us all these years, some much needed clarity.

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Here’s what it means for our users:

If we haven't found a partner to carry Envision forward by the end of this year, active development of our products will stop on December 31st, 2026.

After that, the online features of the app will begin to wind down. We don't have an exact date for that yet, and we will give you clear notice before anything stops working.

Before then, we will release a final update that brings as many features as we can offline, onto your device. That version of the app will stay available to everyone, for free. The offline features will keep working, but it will no longer receive updates or support.

If you have an active subscription, it will be cancelled before the online features wind down, so you won't be paying for anything that no longer works. You will keep access to the free version with everything that works offline.

We'll share more specific details for each platform as we get closer, and we'll sit down for a longer conversation about all of this soon.

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We want you to know this has not been an easy decision for us. Karthik and I spent a whole decade, most weekends and more holidays than we'd like to admit building Envision. Figuring out how to conclude it is a strange feeling that hasn't fully sunk in.

But I don't want to end on that note, because it's not the whole story. What I want to hold onto are the stories: the little bits of independence, the small moments of joy that Envision made possible over the years. If you have one of those, please share it with us. We'd love to sit with those memories together.

If you're building in accessibility, or thinking about it, please don't read this as a reason not to. When we started, people told us we'd be lucky to reach a few thousand users. We reached a million. We couldn't figure out how to get past that, but that doesn't mean nobody can. Maybe it takes a different business model, a different way of reaching people, a different bet than the ones we made. Take the ceiling as a challenge, not a warning. We'll be rooting for you from the sidelines, and we're only ever a message away.

And if you're blind or have low vision, I want you to leave this feeling more hopeful, not less. The biggest thing to happen for accessibility in the last few years isn't any one company, ours included. It's that AI is making software accessible by default, in ways we couldn't have imagined in 2017. We've seen it on the web, on phones, and most of all on smart glasses. Keep pushing for the tools everyone uses to work for you too. That will do more for this community than any single product ever could, and we'll keep pushing alongside you.

Whatever happens next, we are not going anywhere. This community is ours too, and we will stay in it as friends and supporters.

So once again, thank you for all your love and support. 

Yours truly, and always,

Karthik and Karthik, from Envision