The introduction stage of the product life cycle is the launch period, when a product is newly available, or about to be, and almost nobody beyond early adopters has used it. Sales are small and costs run well ahead of revenue, because the company is still paying to build the product and to teach people why they'd want it.
The introduction stage examples below are current as of September 2026.
A product is in the introduction stage when most of its sales still need a demo or a free trial first. In the growth stage, people buy without being taught why.
Sales - The company often won't report volume at all. Deposits and waitlists stand in for revenue.
Competition - It's either thin, because the category is new, or heavy, because an established company is launching into a market someone else already leads.
Pricing - Prices move within months of launch.
Marketing - The ads explain what the product does and who it's for.
In the introduction stage, strategy is about proving that one group of buyers wants the product enough to pay for it, and each of the 4Ps is set up to learn that cheaply.
Product - Ship one core version with few options. Set up a product feedback loop before launch.
Price - Pick skimming or penetration on purpose. Skimming starts high and comes down later, like the first iPhone. Penetration prices low, or free, to buy adoption.
Place - Keep distribution narrow. A few stores, one city, one platform or a handful of enterprise customers is enough to learn from.
Promotion - Pay for demos and test drives before reach, and track how many of them turn into paying users.
Products in the introduction stage in 2026 include Meta Ray-Ban Display, AI browsers, the 1X NEO home robot, the Zoox robotaxi, the Rivian R2, Amazon Leo, Joby and Archer's air taxis and brain-computer interfaces. The other four examples below are two textbook classics and two AI products that failed in the stage.
I think AI glasses with a display are the clearest introduction-stage category on sale in 2026. Meta Ray-Ban Display went on sale on September 30, 2025, starting at $799 with its Neural Band wristband. It sold through a limited set of US retailers, and Meta steered buyers to in-person demos.
Meta publishes no sales figure for Display, so the signal is distribution. In January 2026 it paused a planned early-2026 expansion to the UK, France, Italy and Canada, citing unprecedented demand and limited inventory.
Meta is widening access rather than cutting the price. On September 23, 2026, it added US online ordering and started sales in Canada and the UK, with France, Italy and Germany set for October 13.
Direct competition is thin. Google said in May 2026 that its audio glasses would come first and gave no date for its display glasses.
AI browsers are available to the public (Dia only on macOS so far), but few people outside early adopters use them. Perplexity's Comet showed 1M+ downloads on Google Play in September 2026, against 10B+ for Chrome.
Perplexity launched Comet in July 2025 for its $200-a-month Max subscribers and a small group of waitlist invitees, then made it free for everyone that October, TechCrunch reported.
The category hasn't agreed on a price. As of September 2026, Dia's AI plans cost $20 and $100 a month and Opera Neon costs $19.90 a month.
Competition is heavy, and one big entrant is already leaving. TechCrunch reported in July 2026 that OpenAI is sunsetting ChatGPT Atlas, the AI browser it launched in October 2025. Atlassian, which bought Dia's maker, The Browser Company, in October 2025, now pitches Dia for work.
A home robot you can only reserve is still at the very start of the stage. 1X announced NEO on October 28, 2025, and opened preorders.
As of September 29, 2026, the order page still takes a fully refundable $200 deposit and says US deliveries start in 2026. It lists a $499-a-month subscription and a $20,000 Early Access purchase. 1X's most recent announcement, in July 2026, didn't report a first delivery.
1X says it can make up to 10,000 NEOs a year, and as of April 2026 the robots coming off its line were being prioritized for its own team, for development and in-home testing.
Tesla's humanoid is also early. Tesla said in July 2026 that its first Optimus builds will be used for training data collection and development.
Zoox had carried more than half a million riders by the time it got federal approval to charge them. Its purpose-built robotaxi opened to the public on and around the Las Vegas Strip on September 10, 2025, and San Francisco rides started free through an early-rider program.
That approval, an NHTSA exemption, took effect on July 31, 2026, and Zoox says it's working with Nevada and California regulators on the requirements for commercial operations. Another half million had signed up for its waitlist as of late July.
Waymo and Tesla both already run robotaxi services, so Zoox is launching into heavy competition.
Rivian already sells the R1. The R2, its new model, reached its first public customers on June 9, 2026.
Only the top trim is on sale so far, starting at $57,990 in the US in September 2026, not including all taxes and fees. Cheaper trims are due from late 2026 through 2027.
Rivian booked about $100 million of extra cost of revenues in Q2 2026 from ramping R2 production. The company credits strong R2 reviews and rising brand awareness for a record 57,000+ demo drives that quarter. It doesn't break out R2 sales.
Amazon said on September 22, 2026, that Leo was still in a private preview with employees and select enterprise customers, with initial service expected in certain locations later in 2026.
The launch date has already moved. In April 2026 Andy Jassy said Leo was scheduled to launch in mid-2026. Amazon's first-quarter 2026 guidance included about $1 billion of higher year-over-year Leo costs, and its filings disclose no Leo revenue or subscriber count.
Amazon is signing anchor customers first. Jassy named JetBlue, AT&T, Vodafone, NASA and Delta, which will begin rolling out Leo on 500 aircraft in 2028.
Starlink is already well into growth, with 12.0 million subscribers as of June 30, 2026, SpaceX reported.
Neither Joby nor Archer sells air taxi rides yet. Joby began its first flights under the White House-backed eVTOL pilot program in Texas on September 10, 2026, and Archer started a California flight tour on September 4 to prepare for its own pilot-program operations.
Joby lost $245.4 million in Q2 2026 on $38.6 million of revenue, $36.2 million of it from Blade, its passenger air charter business. Archer lost $263.2 million on $5.0 million of revenue in the same quarter.
Joby is still in the fifth and final stage of FAA type certification, and says its Texas flights should give the FAA the operational data it needs to build safety rules for commercial service at scale.
Neuralink's and Precision's implanted brain-computer interfaces sit at the earliest edge of the stage, because their first users are trial participants, not customers. In January 2026 Neuralink said 21 participants were enrolled in its trials worldwide, and invited more people to join its Patient Registry.
Precision Neuroscience says its brain-computer interface is investigational and not for sale in the US.
Neuralink said its $650 million Series E in 2025 would expand patient access. Precision announced on September 24, 2026, that it had closed a $250 million Series D, and says the money will take its device through the next stages of FDA review.
The first iPhone is the textbook introduction with a fast price correction. Apple announced it on January 9, 2007, at $499 and $599, and began shipping in the US on June 29 with one exclusive carrier.
About ten weeks later, on September 5, 2007, Apple cut the 8GB model from $599 to $399 "to make iPhone affordable for even more customers this holiday season."
It didn't stay in introduction long. Apple sold 2,315,000 iPhones in the quarter ended December 29, 2007, and announced the iPhone 3G in June 2008.
Elon Musk, then Tesla's chairman, wrote in 2006 that Tesla would enter at the high end of the market and drive down market, with Roadster buyers helping pay for development of a low-cost family car.
Tesla's 2010 IPO prospectus says deliveries were first announced for June 2007, but the first car reached a customer in February 2008. By March 31, 2010, Tesla had sold only 1,063, and it had lost $82.8 million in 2008 alone.
The effective US base price in mid-2010 was $101,500 after a $7,500 federal tax credit. In the prospectus, Tesla called itself "the first and currently only company to commercially produce a federally-compliant highway-capable electric vehicle."
Tesla designed the Model S for "a significantly broader customer base than the Tesla Roadster" and ended Roadster production in January 2012.
The AI Pin is what a fast death in the introduction stage looks like. Humane announced the AI Pin in November 2023, saying it could be ordered in the US from November 16 starting at $699, plus a $24 monthly subscription. TechCrunch reported that it launched in April 2024, positioned as a smartphone replacement.
Reviews were scathing, The Verge reported, and by August 2024 around 10,000 Pins and accessories had shipped against the roughly 100,000 Pins Humane hoped to ship in the first year. Between May and August 2024, more AI Pins were returned than bought, according to internal sales data The Verge obtained.
Humane cut the price by $200 in October 2024, TechCrunch reported. Less than four months later, on February 18, 2025, HP announced a $116 million deal for Humane's key AI capabilities, and Humane stopped selling the Pin that day.
I think AI is compressing this stage, so products launch faster and die faster. The Sora app had the attention and still never reached growth.
OpenAI launched the invite-based iOS app on September 30, 2025, and its head of Sora posted that it passed a million downloads in under five days.
TechCrunch, citing a WSJ investigation, reported that the app was burning roughly $1 million a day while worldwide users fell from a peak of around a million to fewer than 500,000. An Appfigures estimate reported by TechCrunch in March 2026 put the app's lifetime in-app purchase revenue at about $2.1 million.
On March 24, 2026, about six months after launch, OpenAI announced it was discontinuing Sora in the consumer app and the API. The app closed on April 26, 2026.
I think the worst mistake in the introduction stage is letting funding run far ahead of sales, the mistake behind some of the best-known failed products. TechCrunch reported that Humane raised more than $230 million to create the AI Pin. Internal data The Verge saw put the Pin's lifetime sales, with accessories, at just over $9 million by August 2024.
Pricing far above the alternatives - A new category still gets compared with what buyers can get today. In April 2024, TechCrunch noted that the Rabbit R1, a rival device, cost $200, a fraction of the AI Pin's $699 starting price.
Announcing dates you can't hit - Tesla's prospectus said its Roadster delays "resulted in additional costs and adverse publicity for our business."
No stop rule - Write down the numbers that would make you stop before you launch. On a first AI build, set those numbers before you sign with a vendor.
A product manager's job in the introduction stage is to measure activation and early retention rather than sign-ups.
If you haven't defined activation for a product before, I'd learn how in one of these product management courses, not on your first early adopters.
Keep the product roadmap short and let early users set most of it. I've found the fixes they ask for in the first months matter more than the features planned before launch.
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