Hey, it’s Marek.
I just got back from Poland yesterday morning, and immediately experienced the perfect real-world validation of this week’s newsletter topic. A massive hailstorm hit Brisbane on Sunday: trees down, no power at home for the past 24 hours and counting. I literally couldn’t record this podcast in my usual spot (a tiny room under the house) because, ironically, I’d just written about technologies that fail when the internet goes down.
So here I am, recording from my university office instead, about to head home with a chainsaw to deal with fallen trees. But first, let’s talk about beds that forget how to be beds.
The Core Pattern
This episode introduced The Cave Test, a framework for product design that asks: what job could humans do before your product existed, and still must work when servers go down?
Eight Sleep customers woke up at 3 am, trapped in $2,000 beds turned saunas because AWS went down. Ring doorbells went dark during an attempted arson. My IKEA bulbs kill romantic dinners mid-firmware-upgrade. We’ve accidentally made sleeping, seeing who’s at the door, and turning off your car all internet-dependent.
The pattern is simple: separate the offline job (the fundamental function) from the online job (the smart features). Build the cave-proof part first. Then add the cloud intelligence. Never let one hold the other hostage.
Personal Footnote
Recording this reminded me of the time my kids were late to school because my car decided to apply a firmware update I’d been delaying. Forty minutes of waiting anxiously while the update cycled through. Try explaining that in a note to the school.
And speaking of cave tests: my podcast recording would technically work in a cave with spare battery packs, but I couldn’t upload it. Hence, recording from the office before heading home to deal with storm damage.
What offline job in your life now requires a server in Virginia?
Stay curious!
