I think our ID firm put the head on the logo, and the software team decided the logo made a great fiducial since it was there anyway.
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Adding this info to my upcoming “Glowforge: The Game” trivia pack. 
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The video is interesting, but I’m sort of suspicious of two things he just states as fact - 1) that initial adopters of enthusiast brands want the lowest price and 2) the assumption that they would continue to stay with the brand indefinitely, and only abandon them when the company stops focusing on them. It just seems to me that people who are early adopters tend to be early adopters beyond one product or one company, and they aren’t waiting around for x product 2.0 to come out before they’re looking at what else is on the market. If anything, I think it might be opposite. The people who will just buy the next version of x are the people who don’t want to look for new things, so any research, etc. They just want to buy what they know.
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My thoughts…
He’s very clear in the beginning of the video that this is theory and, specifically, his theory. So nothing that follows that statement is fact. That said…
Much of what he’s saying has a lot of truth to it, but only from the single POV of an “enthusiast brand.” But I suggest that that is rarely a thing, and rarely the goal of a company. I don’t know that any company starts off saying “I want to cater to a very small group of people.” So to even call a company’s brand an “enthusiast brand” is something that is only possible, really, in hind-sight. He kept talking cellphone. I really have loved my Samsung phones. I’m a tech enthusiast. No doubt about it. So I get a new phone every 2 years. Oh, look… a sustainable model. Samsung has a range of products. Things to appeal to everybody. But they didn’t start the company with some huge range of products and ranges within each product type. A company, typically, can’t do that. That doesn’t mean they’re “this” type or “that” type of company. Just that they’re starting “here.” If the company is given the means to grow, they’ll expand to meet the needs of the many as well as the few.
To apply this thinking to Glowforge, they’ve done an interesting thing… They’ve marketed to a considerably-wider group of people than they could have… they’ve gone after first-time laser buyers (those who already knew they wanted a laser), existing laser owners, and makers. Then they went a (huge) step further and said “Hey, you! You didn’t know you wanted a laser, but now you do!” And they said “Hey! Crafty parent! Try this on for size.” As well as “Oh, art teacher! Look over here!” Their audience becomes… well… just about anybody. The sustainable model will come only partially from unit sales. That’s all years 1-3 stuff. They’ll make a killing on the high-profit consumable sales. Maybe they’ll even start doing training (which is nearly pure profit). And then maybe 3-5 years from launch, they’ll have a more-advanced product to sell. Or increase their line to 3 models to suit more-specific buyers.
And thus ends my thoughts on this. 
Whew! Okay… Time to get back to work.
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