I Burned €50 Million Building Apple Pay Before Apple Did. Here's Why We Failed.

Picture this: October 2012. We convinced 107 people to get naked on camera for our TV commercial. The message was simple—you need nothing but your phone to pay. The ad was banned by YouTube and condemned by Polish authorities for violating ethical standards.

We were desperate.

And we were failing.

Two years before Apple Pay launched, I led a 200-person team building the same thing. We had Visa. We had Mastercard. We had Samsung and Sony. We had five major banks. We had Warsaw's public transport system ready to integrate. We even had Legia Football Club on board.

We called it MyWallet.

We spent €50 million.

We failed spectacularly.

I was the business owner. The failure was mine. And every AI executive I coach today is making the same mistakes we made.

The Dream

In 2012, mobile payments felt like the future. Poland ranked in the top three globally for contactless transactions. The infrastructure was ready. The market was ready.

We just needed to put it all in a phone.

The vision was simple—tap your phone, pay for anything. No wallet. No cards. Just your phone and our app. Now it's obvious. Back then, it was revolutionary.

The partnerships came easy. Deutsche Telekom backed us. MasterCard and Visa wanted in. Banks lined up—mBank, Polbank, Getin, BPH, Alior. Everyone could see the same future we could.

Launch day felt like victory.

It wasn't.

The Unraveling

1 - The Technology Trap

We built MyWallet on SIM-based architecture. Your payment credentials lived on a special SIM card. Secure. Controlled. Perfect.

Except it required deep integration between the telecom and every bank. Every payment card needed provisioning onto that SIM. Every software update needed coordination. Every new phone model needed certification.

The user journey looked like this: Get a SIM from us. Buy a phone from our approved list. Visit your bank's branch to activate your card. Download our app. Hope everything works.

It didn't always work.

By January 2013, we had 5,500 active users. T-Mobile Poland had over 13 million customers.

We convinced 0.04% of them to use it.

By November 2013, Google announced Host Card Emulation. Banks could provision cards directly through their own apps. No special SIM. No coordination headaches. No us.

We were suddenly obsolete. And we were just getting started.

2 - The User Experience Death Spiral

Tech enthusiasts loved us. They debated firmware versions on forums. They troubleshot NFC activation issues. They made it work.

Normal people just used their cards.

The friction was everywhere. Want to use MyWallet? You needed:

↓ A T-Mobile account
↓ One of our certified NFC phones
↓ A special SIM swap
↓ A visit to your bank
↓ The right Android version
↓ A payment terminal that supported NFC
↓ All of this to work together simultaneously

WTF

Each requirement cut our potential market in half. By the time you multiplied them together, we had almost no one.

Meanwhile, contactless cards just worked. Tap. Done. No app. No friction. No us.

We kept adding banks. We kept adding features. We kept improving the technology.

We never fixed the fundamental problem: using MyWallet was harder than not using it.

3 - The Desperation Play

October 2012. Launch month. We needed attention. We needed adoption. We needed people to understand that mobile payments were the future.

So we made that commercial.

Director Frederik Callinggard. 107 people in casting—54 women, 53 men. Shot in a Warsaw furniture store. The concept was elegant in its simplicity: people shopping completely naked, using only their phones to pay.

You need nothing more than your phone.

The ad ran after 8 PM. Earlier timeslots showed a pixelated version. YouTube removed it for violating terms of service. The Polish Advertising Ethics Committee condemned it for lacking social responsibility and unjustifiably using nudity.

Consumer advocacy groups filed complaints. The media coverage was enormous. Everyone talked about the naked people (My copy of the ad banned by YouTube is here).

No one signed up for MyWallet.

Marketing cannot save a product that requires too much effort. Attention without conversion is just noise. We generated plenty of both.

By 2016, we shut it down. Banks moved on. Users moved on. The naked people ad became a cautionary tale about desperation masquerading as boldness.

The AI Parallel

Every week, I talk to executives launching AI initiatives. They sound exactly like I once did.

"We have the technology."

You probably have the wrong architecture. Technology evolves fast. Building on today's best practice often means building on tomorrow's dead end.

"We have the partnerships."

Partnerships create coordination costs. Every additional stakeholder multiplies your dependencies. Complex ecosystems move slower than simple ones.

"We just need adoption."

If you need adoption, you've already lost. Products that require adoption campaigns have fundamental problems. Good products get used because using them is easier than not using them.

"We need a bolder marketing push."

No. You need to fix the product. Marketing amplifies what exists. If the experience is friction, bold marketing amplifies friction.

The pattern repeats. AI projects with sophisticated technology and weak product-market fit. Platforms requiring complex integration across multiple teams. Tools that demand behavior change without delivering obvious value. Executives convinced that the next campaign will turn it around.

It won't.

What I Learned

1. Kill projects based on usage, not effort. We invested €50 million and three years. We built incredible technology. We signed prestigious partnerships. None of that mattered. 5,500 initial users told us everything we needed to know. We ignored it for years.
2. Friction compounds. Every requirement you add doesn't just narrow your market—it eliminates it. Special hardware. Special software. Special processes. Each one feels small. Together, they kill you.
3. Timing beats sophistication. We were two years ahead of Apple Pay. We lost to contactless cards that were five years old. Being first with the wrong approach loses to being later with the right one. Technology revolutions need infrastructure, not just innovation.
4. Desperation shows. The naked people ad was creative. It was attention-getting. It was also transparent desperation. When you resort to shock tactics, everyone can see you have nothing else. Confidence is quiet. Desperation is loud.
5. User experience isn't a feature. It's the entire product. MyWallet's technology worked. The experience didn't. For users, there's no difference.

Today

When executives ask me about their AI strategy, I ask about their users. Not their potential users. Their actual users. How many? How often do they come back? What would they lose if it disappeared tomorrow?

The answers tell me everything.

I've seen the €50 million failure. I was responsible for it. I learned that innovation without adoption is just expensive education. That partnerships without users are just coordination overhead. That technology without experience is just code.

I learned to recognize desperation in strategy discussions. To spot the moment when teams shift from building what users need to building what makes internal stakeholders happy. To see when "just one more feature" means admitting the core doesn't work.

I learned to kill projects early.

Most importantly, I learned that failure at scale teaches what success never can. The naked people taught me more than any triumph would have. They taught me to see the difference between bold and desperate. Between innovative and premature. Between technology readiness and market readiness.

They taught me that sometimes the best strategy is admitting you're wrong before you spend €50 million learning it the hard way.

Your move.