Leadership is asking: are we getting value from AI? Which tools are worth the spend? Where are we exposed? Right now, most teams have no idea.

Harmonic Security Usage Explorer changes that.

You get a complete picture of how your organization uses AI, automatically categorized into custom tasks and use cases.

You’ll see the projects being worked on, who’s using what tools, where AI investments are driving value, and where employees are engaging in risky behavior.

CIOs can rationalize spending and cut wasted licenses. CISOs can pinpoint where risk exists and neutralize it. AI committees can show exactly how their efforts are paying off.

See it in action

A startup can spend years perfecting its product and still lose to something that simply looks similar.

Not because the competitor is technically superior. Sometimes it isn't.

The difference is that customers rarely experience a product as a collection of objective features. Before they ever sign up, they've already encountered its reputation, website, founder, reviews, pricing, design, customer stories, social presence, and whatever other people have told them about it.

Together, those signals create another product in the customer's mind.

Call it the perceived product.

And whether founders intentionally build it or not, every company has one.

Think about everything a potential customer may encounter before actually using your product.

A Google result.

A LinkedIn post.

A recommendation from a friend.

A Reddit thread.

Your homepage.

A customer review.

A founder interview.

Each interaction adds another piece to the picture.

By the time someone clicks "Buy" or "Start Free Trial," they may already believe your company is innovative, trustworthy, expensive, complicated, cool, risky, premium, or outdated.

The actual product hasn't changed.

Its perceived value has.

This is why brand isn't something layered onto a product after it's built. Brand becomes part of the product customers believe they're buying from day one.

Consider what Liquid Death actually sells.

Water in an aluminum can.

Are you kidding me?

If customers evaluated the company strictly on functional utility, there wouldn't be much separating that water from dozens of alternatives, including probably good old tap.

But that's only Liquid Death's first product.

Its second is an irreverent, rebellious entertainment brand built around the absurd premise of "murdering your thirst."

The skull-heavy packaging, outrageous advertising, merchandise, social content, celebrity collaborations, and intentionally ridiculous voice all reinforce that perception.

That second product has created real economic value.

Liquid Death reportedly surpassed $340 million in retail sales in 2025, remarkable for a company whose underlying product exists in one of the world's oldest commodity categories.

The water matters.

What people believe they're buying matters too.

The same principle works in a completely different category.

For decades, Volvo consistently invested in safety. The company developed safety technologies, talked about safety, demonstrated safety, and repeatedly made it central to its identity.

Eventually, something interesting happened.

Safety stopped being simply a collection of product features.

It became a perception attached to the name Volvo itself.

Other automakers could introduce comparable safety technology, and many did. But replicating a feature didn't instantly replicate decades of accumulated association.

Volvo had built two products: the automobile customers could drive and the idea of safety customers carried in their heads.

The second made the first more valuable.

Here's where things get dangerous.

The product your company builds and the product customers perceive aren't guaranteed to remain aligned.

A startup might believe it has become an enterprise platform while the market still sees it as a tool for freelancers.

A company may dramatically improve its product while customers continue associating it with problems from three years ago.

Or a startup may position itself as simple while successive product releases gradually make the experience complicated.

This creates what we might call a perception gap.

And improving the actual product doesn't automatically close it.

If customers don't know something changed, their perception doesn't change with it.

Founders have sophisticated systems for building their first product: roadmaps, sprints, customer research, and analytics.

Your second product deserves attention too.

Start by asking customers:

“What three words come to mind when you think about our company?”

Then compare their answers with the three words you want them to say.

That gap is your brand roadmap.

If you want to be known for simplicity, your messaging, product experience, and customer stories should demonstrate simplicity. If you want to own trust, provide evidence of trust. If you want to be seen as innovative, consistently show customers something genuinely innovative.

You can't simply declare a perception.

You have to give people enough evidence to believe it.

At your next product meeting, try running two reviews.

The first should be familiar:

What are we building?

What features are improving? Where is the product weak? What do customers need next?

Then run another:

What are people believing?

Look at customer interviews, sales calls, reviews, search behavior, social conversations, support tickets, win-loss analysis, and referral language.

Then ask:

The goal isn't to manipulate perception.

It's to make sure the market understands the value you've actually created.

Founders obsess over improving the product because the product feels tangible.

You can ship a feature.

Fix a bug.

Improve a workflow.

Perception feels less controllable.

But customers ultimately buy both.

They buy what your product does and what choosing your product means.

So build your first product relentlessly.

Just don't forget to put almost as much attention into building the one that lives in people's heads.

Best,

Edwin