Not everything I build is software. Pastel Protein is launching after two years of R&D, and I’m an equity owner in the company. Building a physical consumer product — where you can’t hotfix a bad batch and there’s no “ship it and iterate in prod” — taught me things about product discipline that make me a better technologist, not just a better founder.
Two years is a feature, not a bug
In software, two years of R&D would be a red flag. In consumer products, it’s often the difference between something people buy once and something they come back for. Getting the formulation, the taste, the texture, and the nutrition right — and doing it consistently at scale — is genuinely hard. We took the time because a protein product that tastes like a chore doesn’t earn a second purchase, no matter how good the macros are.
Patience on quality is the same instinct I bring to engineering: don’t ship the thing that technically works but isn’t actually good. The market punishes “good enough” faster than founders expect.
What consumer product R&D actually involves
When people hear “two years of R&D” they picture a lab and leave it there. The reality is broader, and it’s why consumer products take the time they do. R&D isn’t just inventing a formula — it’s proving that formula survives contact with reality.
There’s the formulation itself: balancing taste, texture, and nutrition, where improving one dimension often degrades another. There’s consistency: a recipe that works once in a small batch has to produce the same result across full-scale production runs, every time. There’s ingredient sourcing and the supply chain behind it, because a formula you can’t reliably source is a formula you can’t sell. There’s shelf stability, packaging that protects the product and communicates the brand, and the regulatory and labeling work that consumer goods require. And there’s the loop of making something, testing it honestly, and being willing to go back when the answer is “not yet.”
Each of those is a place a product can quietly fail. Two years isn’t slowness — it’s the time it takes to close every one of those gaps before you ask a customer to trust you with a purchase.
And the gaps interact, which is the part outsiders underestimate. Fix the taste and you might hurt the texture; solve the texture and you might complicate sourcing; simplify sourcing and you might dent the nutrition. It’s a constrained optimization problem where the variables push against each other, and the only way through is iteration — make a version, test it honestly, learn what broke, and go again. Software people will recognize the shape of that loop immediately; the difference is that each turn of the loop in the physical world costs real time and real materials, which is exactly why you want to be rigorous about what you test and why.
How to build a consumer product that earns a second purchase
The whole game in consumer products is the repeat purchase. A one-time buy is a marketing win; a repeat buy is a product win, and only the second one compounds into a business. That reframes what “done” means. You’re not shipping when the product is novel enough to try — you’re shipping when it’s good enough that someone reorders without thinking about it.
That standard is why the R&D is worth it. Every shortcut you take on taste, texture, or consistency shows up later as a customer who tried it once and didn’t come back. You rarely hear from those people; they just don’t reorder, and the business slowly starves. Getting the product genuinely good — not adequate — is the only durable acquisition strategy, because a product people love does marketing you can’t buy.
What building a physical product teaches a CTO
A few lessons carried straight back into my technical work:
- Irreversibility forces rigor. You can’t roll back a manufacturing run. That constraint makes you plan, test, and validate the way the best engineering teams do before a high-stakes deploy.
- The whole system has to work. A great product with broken fulfillment, or a great formula with a bad supply chain, still fails. Founders — and CTOs — who only optimize their favorite layer lose. You own the whole path to the customer.
- Brand and experience are product. How something looks, feels, and reads is not separate from whether it works. That’s as true for a landing page and an onboarding flow as it is for packaging.
Shipping is the hard part
Two years of R&D only matters because it ends in a launch. Plenty of products die in perpetual refinement. Knowing when it’s good enough to ship — and then actually shipping — is a skill, whether the product is a protein snack or a compliant health-tech platform.
The trap on the other side of “good enough” is real: teams that fall in love with refinement can polish forever and never test their thing against an actual customer. The discipline is holding two ideas at once — a high bar for quality and a bias toward shipping — and knowing which one the moment calls for. Pastel earned its launch by clearing the quality bar, and then we shipped.
Why I invest across software and consumer products
People sometimes ask why a CTO has equity in a protein company. The honest answer is that great products rhyme across categories. The discipline that makes a health-tech platform trustworthy and the discipline that makes a consumer product repeatable are the same underlying muscle: define what “good” really means, refuse to ship until you’ve hit it, and own every layer between you and the customer.
Being an equity owner rather than a hired hand changes how you think, too. When your outcome is tied to the product’s success over years, you stop optimizing for the demo and start optimizing for the reorder — for the customer’s second, third, and tenth experience. That long-horizon view is exactly what I try to bring to the companies I work with, whether the deliverable is a codebase or a product on a shelf.
Pastel is a reminder that the fundamentals travel. You can’t hotfix a protein bar, and that constraint made me sharper about the software I build, not just the food we ship.
Frequently asked questions
Why does a consumer product take two years of R&D? Because so many things have to be right at once — formulation, taste, texture, nutrition, consistency at scale, sourcing, shelf stability, packaging, and labeling — and each is a place the product can fail. Two years is the time it takes to close every one of those gaps before asking a customer to trust you with a purchase.
How is building a physical product different from software? You can’t hotfix a bad batch or iterate in production. Manufacturing runs are irreversible, so the rigor has to happen before you ship, not after. That constraint forces a level of planning and validation that, honestly, makes you better at software too.
What’s the most important thing in a consumer product launch? The repeat purchase. A one-time buy is a marketing result; a repeat buy is a product result, and only repeat buys compound into a business. That’s why the standard for shipping isn’t “novel enough to try” — it’s “good enough to reorder.”
How do you know when a product is ready to ship? When it clears a genuine quality bar and further refinement stops meaningfully improving it. The failure mode is perpetual polishing, so the discipline is holding a high quality bar and a bias toward shipping at the same time — and knowing which one the moment calls for.
The takeaway
I build and own real companies across software and consumer products — PracticeRank, SmileShape, and Pastel Protein among them. That range is exactly what I bring to founders as a fractional CTO: not just how to write the code, but how to build something people actually want, get it right, and ship it.