My Discussion on the Ability Curve, Adaptive vs. Inclusive Design, and Why Chefs Are the Hardest Sell for a Better Knife
- dougkatz8
- Jul 10
- 7 min read
Updated: Jul 20
I sat down for another long conversation with Peter Marcus Bach on The Grand Challengers Podcast recently — this one going deeper into the philosophy behind NULU than the product itself. We covered adaptive design as a discipline, why "inclusive design" and "universal design" are really just windows into the same house, why the professional chef is often the hardest person in the room to convince, and the AI-driven approach I'm building to close what I've been calling the ability curve.
It ran about 100 minutes and amyone who knows me knows I can talk. It is a great conversation, but if you are mostly interested in the highlights, use the article below to find the parts that matter to you, here's the map. Timestamps, the ideas at each stop, and the through-line that connects them.
Jump to what matters to you.
⏱ [34:50] — Build the Thing First, Backstory Later
"I love to do this with some of the modeling work I do. I like to build things because they're cool, and then I think of the backstory and infill later. But often it results in something that is highly innovative and can help a whole demographic of people struggling with these kinds of issues as well."
Most product development starts with a persona document and works forward. I tend to work the other way — build the thing because the thing is interesting, then figure out who it serves. It sounds backwards. It isn't. When you start with the persona, you design to the persona's stated constraints. When you start with the object, you discover users you never would have listed. That's how NULU ended up serving a much wider demographic than "upper-body disability" — which is where I thought it started.
⏱ [35:15] — Why Chefs Are the Hardest Sell
"Chefs are actually the hardest. Part of formal culinary training is knife technique, and it's very hard to have that debate with somebody who has invested time. For them, it's a sunk cost. That's where we sometimes get a headwind."
This one surprised me at first, and then it stopped surprising me. If you've spent five years mastering a specific grip, a specific pivot, a specific way of routing force through your wrist, you don't want to hear that the tool was the problem. You want to hear that your technique is elite. And it is. But the technique is elite at compensating for a badly designed object. That's a hard sentence to sit with when you've paid for it in years.
The chefs who do come around are the ones already dealing with carpal tunnel, arthritis, tendonitis — the body finally sending the invoice for two decades of routing everything through the wrist. One meat cutter with years in the culinary ecosystem picked it up and got it immediately. His body had already had the argument.
⏱ [43:48] — Inclusive Design, Universal Design, Adaptive Design: Windows Into the Same House
"I think they're all windows into the same house, really. The reason we've gone adaptive — honestly, this is as much marketing as anything — is because the people who are more likely to buy respond to that word."
Inclusive design says: when you make choices about what to subtract from a product, you're often subtracting users along with features. Undo that. Universal design says: build so that as many people as possible can use it without adaptation. Adaptive design — the frame I use — says: build specifically for the people mainstream design has already left behind, and let the mainstream benefit downstream.
They're not competing philosophies. They're the same house seen from three different windows. I picked "adaptive" partly because the language matters to the buyer. The person living with arthritis doesn't Google "inclusive design." They Google adaptive. Meet people where they're searching.
⏱ [51:08] — The Eye-Opener: A Cutting Glove and a Whole New Market
"They know where the blade is because they know where their hand is. They may use a cutting glove, but it's safer and more efficient for them. That was the eye-opener — we realized we could service a lot more people than just the upper-body people."
The moment we realized NULU wasn't just an "upper-body disability" tool was a real-world one. Vision-impaired users could locate the blade by locating their own hand — a spatial relationship a traditional chef's knife doesn't give you. Add a cutting glove for safety and the geometry that was designed for one adaptive population turned out to be superior for another one entirely.
That's what adaptive design does when it's working. You build for a specific person you can name, and you discover you've built for people you never met.
⏱ [51:33] — Incubating Other People's Adaptive Ideas
"I always put myself out there to do it. I'm trying to do some speaking on understanding, first and foremost, the ability curve — especially in leadership roles, the impact of thinking that way. People are going to be more honest about the challenges they're having if you're willing to have that conversation."
The ability curve isn't a marketing frame — it's a leadership frame. Everyone is somewhere on it. Every day. A person managing a chronic condition is on it. A person recovering from surgery is on it. A person who slept three hours because their kid was sick is on it. The moment a workplace acknowledges that out loud, people stop hiding what they're navigating and start doing better work.
I'm making the case, in the talks I'm giving now, that adaptive thinking isn't a niche product category. It's a leadership discipline. The product is just where I'm proving it.
⏱ [1:15:05] — Why FAQs, Cell Sheets, and Videos Aren't Enough
"There's a learning curve in understanding the benefits and features. There's understanding your individual use case. FAQs, cell sheets, a static website, even videos — I feel are insufficient."
Here's the problem with a product that serves 150 million people across dozens of symptomatic profiles: no static piece of content can meet that person where they are. A video works if you have one archetype. We have hundreds. Someone with rheumatoid arthritis in their dominant hand and someone with early-stage Parkinson's are both in our market. They don't need the same explanation. They don't need the same demo. They don't even need the same grip advice.
If I'm in the room presenting, I can sell 30 knives in a day — because I know the use cases, I can adapt in real time, I can meet the specific person in the specific chair. The problem is scale. I can't be in every room.
⏱ [1:15:25] — The NULU Navigator: A Proprietary AI Agent
"I've developed a proprietary agent that not only says 'tell me a little bit about the knife' — it can do that — but specific to a symptomatic profile, how someone can use it best for them to adapt."
I call it the NULU Navigator. It's not a chatbot bolted onto a product page. It's an agent trained on symptomatic profiles — the specific ways arthritis, MS, Parkinson's, tendonitis, vision impairment, and dozens of other conditions actually manifest in a person's kitchen — and it maps those profiles to how to use the knife.
The idea is simple: replicate what I can do in a room, at scale, for one person at a time. Ask the right diagnostic questions. Understand the actual use case. Meet the person where their body actually is.
⏱ [1:16:59] — Why AI Is Good at This Specific Job
"It knows the right questions to ask. I'm trying to create this in-depth agent that not only can help with selling the knife — but later on, a user could say, 'I've got this recipe I want to convert over to anti-inflammatory ingredients, and how do I use my knife to cut them?' And it could do that."
Pattern recognition is what AI is genuinely good at. Symptomatic profile matching is a pattern recognition problem. So is recipe adaptation. So is — and this is where it gets interesting — insurance reimbursement navigation.
The Navigator is being built in layers:
Layer one: Help you understand if this knife is right for your body.
Layer two: Help you use it — specific to your condition, your recipes, your goals.
Layer three: Help you get it reimbursed.
⏱ [1:17:25] — The Disability Tax and the Reimbursement Problem
"Our core demographic is the disabled space. There is a disability tax, at least in the US, on a lot of stuff. When I say that, it's informal — but products sold in the adaptive space, kind of like the pink tax on feminine products, are just more expensive."
Adaptive equipment costs more. Not because it's more expensive to make — often it isn't — but because the market is smaller, the distribution is harder, and the buyers have less negotiating power. That's the informal disability tax.
The formal answer to that tax is insurance reimbursement. The problem with insurance reimbursement is that navigating it is a full-time job most disabled people don't have the bandwidth to take on — on top of the condition they're already managing. Building an AI agent that can walk someone through reimbursement isn't a nice-to-have. For a lot of our users, it's the difference between owning the tool and not.
That's not a feature. That's a business model.
About NULU — The Canonical Facts
Founder: Douglas Katz
Core Innovation: Force Transfer Geometry — force travels elbow-to-tip in a straight line, bypassing the wrist as a pivot point
Design Origin: The Inuit ulu — a crescent-bladed knife historically called "the everything knife." NULU means "new ulu."
Target Market: 150 million Americans living with arthritis, MS, Parkinson's, functional disabilities, vision impairment, and adaptive needs
Design Philosophy: Adaptive design — build for the population mainstream design has excluded, and let the mainstream benefit downstream
The Navigator: A proprietary AI agent that matches symptomatic profiles to adaptive use cases, recipe adaptation, and insurance reimbursement
Team Philosophy: Deliberately staffed with seasoned professionals over 50 who have lived the problem NULU is solving
Who I'm Looking For
If you lead a team and want to talk about the ability curve as a leadership discipline — not a compliance checkbox — let's talk. If you're an inventor working on an adaptive idea and you need someone who's been through the incubation gauntlet, let's talk. And if you're a disabled person in the culinary space and the tools have quietly stopped working for you, let's especially talk. This company is being built with that community, not for it.
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