Congrats on the launch! There's definitely a need for this. Rooting for you. Liked the video, charts and explanation- clean, easy to understand.
Thanks for the feedback and support!
Launch HN: Kraftful (YC S19) – UX Analytics for IoT Products
41–50 of 53 posts
Re: Launch HN: Kraftful (YC S19) – UX Analytics for IoT Products
#42Congrats on the launch! Looking forward to seeing innovation in this space! We just yesterday decided to disconnect our home water boiler from the central programming. Just can’t seem to figure out how to optimize to reduce consumption whilst still having hot water when we need it!
Thanks! As we say, a connected product that isn’t connected…is not a connected device :)
(Heidi from Kraftful)
Re: Launch HN: Kraftful (YC S19) – UX Analytics for IoT Products
#43The best form of data is usage and third party data, since self-reported, first-hand data can be dirty, chocked full of biases and subjected to opinions. Connected devices are only just beginning to take over and we will see more of them in our spaces - from owned and rented properties to co-living and co-working properties. Excited to see where Kraftful will go!
Yes, there's a difference between what people say that they do and that they will actually do. Similarly, when people are given instructions to test a product, they behave very differently from what real users do. After listening to or reading instructions, users will usually carefully read everything that’s in an app. In real life they just click. That’s why it’s so important to use interaction data :)
Re: Launch HN: Kraftful (YC S19) – UX Analytics for IoT Products
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
Heidi from Kraftful here again. You’re right, it is possible to track all the right events and then send data to Amplitude and configure charts there. The way this is different is that we’ve already done most of that work for hardware companies. So they don’t need to figure out how to track IoT specific events. The SDK doesn’t do that automatically, but our documentation saves them time figuring out how to do it. And…
Thanks for responding! I'm not quite sure I follow what the value proposition (over a generic analytics solution) would be then if the SDK doesn't know how to automatically detect the 'interesting' events and I'd have to add them manually, unless I'm missing something? Why is 'figuring out how to' track IoT specific events tricky? And why would 'your documentation' be enough of a differentiator? It seems like the imp…
No worries, appreciate a little skepticism! Figuring out how to track IoT specific events is tricky because there are usually too many cooks in the kitchen (back and forth between product, engineering, data science, and sometimes even marketing teams). This back and forth is often a barrier to using a generic analytics solution. From talking with hundreds of IoT companies, they just don’t use these tools. Some of them try to use Google Analytics because it’s pre-configured, but it doesn’t show them the right metrics for IoT type interactions. That’s why they need pre-configured charts focusing on IoT metrics.
About our no-code UX platform: it was our first take at solving usability of connected products with an experience that improves based on interaction data. That product is live in the field and has for example improved the app store ratings for one of the largest HVAC providers in North America from a brutal 1 star rating to 4.5+. We got to dog food our analytics solution with that platform before productizing it with other beta users to make sure it can actually be used to improve an IoT product.
Re: Launch HN: Kraftful (YC S19) – UX Analytics for IoT Products
#45Amazing read, really loving points mentioned in the article and also the clean and friendly UI within the demo. I'm excited to see the impact Kraftful makes within the IoT industry and beyond. Congratulations on the launch !
Re: Launch HN: Kraftful (YC S19) – UX Analytics for IoT Products
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
Renat from Engineering at Kraftful. The MVP has a different architecture, but we’re in the process of switching to using batch processing. For now the main components are Segment and BigQuery.
I’m curious how are you using Segment? I used to work at Segment and we didn’t have any IoT customers due to the price being too high
It hasn’t been an issue so far, but we have our own ingestion pipeline on our roadmap that will address this and other issues. (Renat from Kraftful team).
Re: Launch HN: Kraftful (YC S19) – UX Analytics for IoT Products
#47Congrats on the launch! Your tool is going to make many people's (and companies') lives easier!
Re: Launch HN: Kraftful (YC S19) – UX Analytics for IoT Products
#48I am the co-founder of a connected fitness startup and our particular consumer electronics product brings to the table a range of software & hardware problems such as mechatronics, manufacturing, low-latency sensors/processing, consumer safety, content production, content delivery network, fleet management, hell even optics... which already take 100% of the brains of our engineers & developers (if not more)... Even if we all know that down the line, what ultimately is going to make or break us is how much our user base likes our experience how good we get as a company at fine-tuning said experience to create something viral.
To that aim, getting, storing and visualizing usage is paramount, but we paradoxically have very little bandwidth to invest in making it happen. Plus I have seen other early stages companies trying to implement their analytics platform... and fail miserably at doing so. I have to personally plead guilty for having implemented some custom ELK-based over VPN telemetry madness in the past... Complete failure.
On top of being labor-intensive, most analytics tool solutions out there are strongly biased towards the app/webapp SaaS paradigm and do not fit our use case very well, and that’s when they run at all on our custom Linux platform (options tend to get scarce when you leave the Android / iOS ecosystems, API is the way to go for us).
Glad to see Kraftful finally tackling these issues, the IoT and larger hardware scene really needs a tool like this.
Re: Launch HN: Kraftful (YC S19) – UX Analytics for IoT Products
#49I am the co-founder of a connected fitness startup and our particular consumer electronics product brings to the table a range of software & hardware problems such as mechatronics, manufacturing, low-latency sensors/processing, consumer safety, content production, content delivery network, fleet management, hell even optics... which already take 100% of the brains of our engineers & developers (if not more)... Even i…
Having spent most of my work in software before having an opportunity to work with hardware, I think it’s hard for software folks to fully appreciate all the different engineering challenges that go into connected hardware. So it completely makes sense that UX analytics gets little attention and doesn’t get done well, if at all. Kudos for articulating the problem so well and for juggling all this :)
Look forward to getting you the analytics you need to optimize the user experience!
Re: Launch HN: Kraftful (YC S19) – UX Analytics for IoT Products
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
Renat from Engineering at Kraftful. The MVP has a different architecture, but we’re in the process of switching to using batch processing. For now the main components are Segment and BigQuery.
I’m curious how are you using Segment? I used to work at Segment and we didn’t have any IoT customers due to the price being too high
[Context: I worked with this team previously] Data here is coming from mobile apps, and is similar in volume to typical mobile app user analytics. I can certainly imagine that Segment would be a poor (or maybe just costly) fit for device telemetry in most IoT use-cases.