The Hardest Part of Building in the Adaptive Space Isn’t the Product

When I first got into the adaptive space, I figured the hardest part would be design. Adaptive products, after all, carry real responsibility. They have to work for people who don’t have the luxury of trial-and-error, who aren’t looking for novelty or marginal improvement, but for something that meaningfully changes how they move through the world.

I was wrong.

Design was hard, but it was solvable. What surprised me — and what continues to surprise a lot of founders and organizations working in this space — is that even when you build a good product, even when it solves a real problem, the system around it resists adoption at every step.

Not maliciously. Not intentionally. But structurally.

Over time, through conversations with other producers, clinicians, administrators, caregivers, and users, a clearer picture started to emerge: the adaptive market doesn’t suffer from a lack of innovation. It suffers from a lack of connective infrastructure. And until that gets addressed, even excellent solutions will keep struggling to reach the people who need them most.

A Market That Isn’t Really a Market

The adaptive space is often treated like a traditional commercial market — buyers on one side, sellers on the other — but in practice, it doesn’t work that way. It’s a three-sided ecosystem, and each side experiences the system very differently.

On one side are producers: inventors, manufacturers, designers, and brands building tools meant to solve specific functional challenges. These are often deeply focused solutions, created with real empathy and insight. A lot of them work. Many of them are elegant. Many of them are validated by the people who actually use them.

On another side are users and caregivers. This group is the most misunderstood. They’re not browsing. They’re not shopping aspirationally. Adaptive products aren’t lifestyle upgrades; they’re often aspirins, not vitamins. They address pain, safety, fatigue, independence, and dignity. When a solution is needed, it’s usually needed now.

And then there’s the third side: recommenders and intermediaries. Clinicians, therapists, case managers, HR professionals, administrators, nonprofit staff, educators, insurers — people who act as translators between need and solution, and often control or influence access to resources, funding, or approval.

Each of these groups is operating rationally within its own constraints. The issue isn’t misalignment of intent, but the absence of sufficient structure to make that alignment productive. The ecosystem is loosely aligned, but informally so. It lacks shared systems that allow information, trust, and validation to move efficiently across boundaries.

What exists is goodwill without mechanical advantage.

The Discovery Problem No One Owns

One of the first things you notice when you try to operate inside the adaptive space is how difficult discovery is. There’s no clear category. There’s no shared language. Even the largest retailers in the world don’t meaningfully organize adaptive products in a way that reflects how people actually search for them.

That matters.

Because when discovery is broken, everything downstream becomes harder. Producers spend enormous amounts of money trying to explain context before they can even talk about value. Recommenders default to what they already know, not because they don’t care, but because they don’t have time to continually re-learn the landscape. Users and caregivers are left to piece together solutions through trial, error, and word-of-mouth.

In effect, the system dumps its own complexity onto the people least equipped to absorb it.

I’ve come to believe that this is one of the great unspoken inefficiencies of the adaptive market: the cost of education, translation, and navigation gets shouldered by individuals instead of infrastructure.

Why Many Good Adaptive Products Fail to Scale

Spend enough time talking to adaptive product creators and you’ll hear a familiar story. The product works. The feedback is strong. The people who find it love it. Clinicians are receptive when they see it. And yet growth is slow, uneven, and exhausting.

It’s tempting to assume this is because users are hard to reach or slow to adopt. In reality, the opposite is often true.

On the user side, there’s a deeply receptive, highly motivated audience. Adaptive users aren’t passive consumers; they’re problem-solvers by necessity. When people discover tools that genuinely address their needs, enthusiasm is real and immediate. When something works, word spreads quickly within trusted circles.

The problem isn’t desire. The problem is awareness under constraint.

Most adaptive products try to surface themselves in one of two ways, and both approaches are structurally flawed.

The first is standard commercial marketing. This assumes clear product categories, predictable discovery paths, and neutral marketplaces. But in the adaptive space, categories are poorly defined or nonexistent, search language is inconsistent, and major platforms aren’t designed for need-based discovery. Marketing becomes a blunt instrument in a market that requires precision.

The second approach is community-based awareness — working through disability communities, advocacy groups, clinical networks, or nonprofit ecosystems. This path is far more aligned with how adaptive users actually find solutions. It’s also far more fragile.

These communities are built on trust. Their credibility is hard-won and easily lost. A single bad recommendation, a perceived commercialization misstep, or an association with the wrong incentive structure can undermine years of work. As a result, many communities quite reasonably impose strict limitations on promotion, endorsement, or commercial presence.

From the outside, this can look like resistance to innovation. From the inside, it’s risk management.

What this means in practice is that even excellent products face an awareness bottleneck. They’re welcomed once discovered, but discovery itself is constrained by systems designed to protect communities rather than efficiently surface solutions. No one is wrong for this. But the outcome is still stagnation.

Recommenders Aren’t the Bottleneck — They’re the Shock Absorbers

What’s striking about the adaptive ecosystem is that there’s no obvious bottleneck. No single point of failure. Instead, users, recommenders, and producers are often moving through the same terrain without a shared map — trying to find solutions, justify decisions, and reduce friction while operating in a kind of fog.

In that environment, friction doesn’t announce itself. It accumulates. And what we found in launching NULU is that recommenders — clinicians, therapists, case managers, administrators — end up absorbing much of that accumulated friction by default.

Importantly, this isn’t because they’re resistant to new solutions. In fact, what we consistently found is that recommenders are highly receptive to having options — especially options that span cost, features, complexity, and use cases. The more tools they can see and understand, the better they’re able to serve the people in front of them.

Recommenders aren’t trying to match people to products. They’re trying to match people to outcomes, with the least amount of disruption to daily life. That means no single product is ever “the answer.” What matters is whether a set of tools exists that allows someone to accomplish everyday tasks given their specific combination of abilities, environment, fatigue, and support.

This is why optionality isn’t noise in the adaptive space — it’s the work.

A person with an upper extremity limitation, a lower extremity limitation, or both doesn’t need a product that solves a diagnosis. They need solutions that fit into the reality of their lives. Recommenders understand this intuitively. When they don’t have enough options, they compensate. They default conservatively. They stretch tools beyond ideal use. They quietly absorb the mismatch so the person in front of them doesn’t have to.

That’s what shock absorbers do.

One moment in particular reframed our understanding of responsibility. Early on, we decided to place evaluation units into adaptive programs at scale so people could try the product in real conditions before committing to it. To us, this felt obvious — if a tool is meant to reduce friction in someone’s life, introducing friction at adoption made no sense.

What surprised us was how unusual this seemed to the system.

Program after program expressed genuine surprise that a manufacturer was taking on this responsibility voluntarily, rather than pushing risk downstream. That reaction revealed an unspoken norm: much of the validation, evaluation, and translation work in the adaptive space has quietly been carried by recommenders and programs operating at capacity.

That experience convinced us we were onto something important. Not just about a product, but about where the heavy lifting belongs.

If adaptive tools are meant to support daily living, then the responsibility for reducing friction can’t sit solely with users or recommenders. It has to live upstream, with the brands and manufacturers introducing solutions into the ecosystem.

Users Feel the Weight of All of This

For users and caregivers, the adaptive experience is rarely about solving a single, isolated problem. Disability — even when it starts in a specific part of the body — often creates comprehensive, cascading challenges that affect how a person lives at home, works, moves through public spaces, manages fatigue, and maintains independence.

As a result, there are almost never single-product solutions or universal answers.

Adaptive needs are layered, situational, and highly personal. What helps someone prepare a meal at home may not help them function at work. What works in the early stages of a condition may be insufficient months or years later. And what works for one person with a similar diagnosis may be unusable for another.

The timeline of need also varies dramatically.

In some cases — like a stroke or traumatic injury — the need arrives suddenly. Overnight, individuals and their families are hit with a mountain of research, decision-making, and discovery, often while under extreme emotional and physical stress. They’re expected to understand unfamiliar terminology, navigate new systems, and make high-stakes choices quickly, with little guidance.

In other cases, needs evolve gradually. Chronic or degenerative conditions change how people interact with their environments over time. What once worked no longer does. Capabilities shift. Fatigue increases. Workarounds fail. Discovery becomes a recurring task rather than a one-time event.

And for people born with disabilities, needs change as they grow, develop, and age. Tools that were appropriate at one stage of life may no longer fit years later.

Independence isn’t a fixed destination; it’s something that has to be continually supported.

What all of these experiences share is motion. The adaptive space isn’t static. It’s fluid. And yet, most systems treat it as if needs are fixed, products are permanent answers, and discovery is a one-time problem.

In reality, adaptive living often depends on stacks of solutions — multiple products, services, and supports working together across environments and over time to create a livable lifestyle. The burden of assembling, understanding, and updating those stacks currently falls almost entirely on individuals and caregivers.

That’s where the system becomes not just inefficient, but exclusionary.

The Opportunity Isn’t a Better Product — It’s a Better System

What ultimately changed my thinking was realizing that the adaptive market doesn’t lack tools. In many cases, it doesn’t even lack infrastructure. What it lacks is connection, visibility, and coordination.

There is, for example, a significant physical infrastructure already in place. Under federal requirements established during the second Bush administration, every U.S. state operates Assistive Technology (AT) programs that provide demonstration units, lending libraries, or both. These programs let people try adaptive products before buying them — exactly the kind of friction-reducing capability users and caregivers need.

And yet, remarkably few people know these programs exist.

That blind spot isn’t the fault of users, caregivers, clinicians, or manufacturers individually. It’s a systems failure. Resources exist, but they’re poorly surfaced. Knowledge is fragmented. Pathways are unclear. The result is that people keep re-solving the same problems over and over again, often without knowing that help is already available.

This is why the opportunity in the adaptive space isn’t simply better products or louder marketing. It’s connective tissue — systems that integrate what already exists and build on it intelligently.

A better system wouldn’t just provide awareness. It would provide:

• Understanding of benefits and tradeoffs

• Contextual use cases tied to real lives

• Guidance on fit rather than features

• Visibility into organizations, agencies, and programs that can help

• Opportunities to evaluate, borrow, and test solutions before committing

In short, it would help people understand what works for them, why it works, and how to access it, without requiring them to become full-time researchers or advocates.

Why This Matters Beyond Any Single Tool 

This isn’t about one product or one platform. It’s about rethinking adaptive as a systems-level challenge and opportunity.

The scale is way larger than most people realize. When you account for seniors, injuries, chronic conditions, progressive diseases, congenital disabilities, and the reality that disability is rarely singular or isolated, the adaptive market easily exceeds 150 million people. And that number grows when you include caregivers, employers, clinicians, and organizations trying to support them.

What’s missing are purpose-built platforms designed around the intersection of these stakeholders — platforms that stitch together their needs in ways that create genuine win–win–win outcomes.

This matters to:

• An HR leader trying to retain or support employees

• A restaurant owner who wants to accommodate or hire someone with a disability

• A caregiver navigating life after a spouse’s stroke

• An individual trying to remain independent as their capabilities change

These aren’t edge cases. They’re everyday realities shared by a vast, fragmented population that lacks the mechanisms to connect, coordinate, and act collectively.

As a society, and as an industry, we need to rethink adaptive — not as a niche category or a charitable obligation, but as a core part of how we design work, home, and participation. When we do, we don’t just make life easier for people with disabilities. We create systems that are more humane, more resilient, and more efficient for everyone.

The question isn’t whether we can afford to build better connective infrastructure in the adaptive space.

It’s whether we can afford to keep pretending the current one is enough.