<ul><li>Pono, a digital music player and service launched by Neil Young, failed to make a lasting impact and was discontinued in 2017.</li><li>Pono had several avoidable mistakes: assuming expertise in one field translates to product design, ignoring the data, guessing what users want, skipping user testing, not understanding the technology, and outsourcing the core of the product.</li><li>Neil Young bet big that people would pay $400 for a dedicated audio player, but the blind test revealed that regular people could not tell the difference between Pono's uncompressed format and an iPhone's AAC format.</li><li>Outsourcing a critical component of the product to Omnifone proved to be a big mistake, as Apple acquired Omnifone, leaving Pono's online store defunct.</li></ul>

The Rise and Fall of Pono: 7 Product Lessons from Neil Young’s Audio Dream

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