In 2012, I was thrown into the deep end of the mobile payments pool when I joined Verifone. New mobile wallet initiatives were being announced every day. Most of them were dead on arrival and did not even know it. The key to successful payment technologies is near-ubiquitous merchant acceptance. Without it, consumers will not adopt new technologies. In the fall of 2013, I immediately fell in love with Coin’s digital wallet solution. The beauty of the idea was its simplicity. This one piece of plastic could “pretend” to be any of your other credit cards and work everywhere your real card would. In other words, you could carry one piece of plastic instead of many. Nothing earth shattering, but I thought it would be pretty cool if it could help me slim down my bulging “Costanza Wallet.”

Like so many others, I immediately ordered two Coins as part of their successful crowd-funding campaign. Since then, the trials and tribulations of Coin’s protracted development and beta cycles have been well documented. Last week, a press release announced that Coin was finally ready to ship its first-generation device.

If the information in the article is correct, I am very disappointed with the differences between the pitch and the final product. For a company whose mission was to “remove mobile from mobile payments,” Coin could not have screwed things up more. Apparently, a Coin user’s mobile phone must be on and close by before the Coin will unlock itself for use. Talk about a terrible user experience. This was not part of the early product pitch. My expectations of a frictionless device that would work anywhere all the time aren’t met by a product that won’t work without my mobile phone … this just is not the same device I was sold.

When Coin launched, Google Wallet was struggling and ApplePay had not come out yet. Today, if a payment solution won’t work without my mobile phone, there is no reason not to go with one of these two options or another NFC-based wallet.

My guess is that after Coin’s successful crowd funding and VC fundraising, they hired some payment industry “professionals” who told them their product would not fly without this mobile-phone-tethering security feature. Instead of helping Coin launch successfully into the payments landscape, this “value-added feature” has ensured that consumers will pass over Coin. It will be remembered fondly as a good idea that was discarded due to its poor implementation.

This sad saga should be a warning to all entrepreneurs out there.  Innovation requires a bold vision and leadership that is strong enough to avoid the pressure to water down inspired ideas.  Don’t trade down your product dreams to make your ideas fit into a box someone else makes for you. Build your own box.