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Taking over a Dead IoT Company

blog.kchung.co

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Re: Taking over a Dead IoT Company

#81

Post by dinosaurdynasty »

pdntspa wrote: post #70
michaelt wrote: post #8

"As we discussed earlier, even at $300 the product is too cheap. The sign should have likely been selling at $600 from the very beginning." Even at $600 - there's a screenshot saying the company had three engineers and a marketer. If your 4 employees earn $25k per annum, with the $150 parts cost you'd have to sell 222 signs at $600. And if the employees were on $100k, that's 888 signs a year. That's a heck of a lot o…

Why does a project like this need three engineers? Two, I can kind of see (a hardware guy and a software guy, though it doesnt look like the hardware guy was doing much here), but three?

People have to go on vacation sometimes

Re: Taking over a Dead IoT Company

#82

Post by adriancr »

explodingwaffle wrote: post #77

Woof. Adafruit + Raspberry Pi in a shipped product screams to me that they did not have a real electronics guy on their team. https://ukdepartureboards.co.uk/ is the British equivalent of this, and it seems to do everything right (don’t own one, but have seen on Twitter)- optional subscription, and nice looking hardware (seems like they contracted out for that). Though at the minute I suppose there are barely any tra…

This still seems like its fallen into same BOM trap.

You could buy a phone (moto e20), same size as their small display at 90e vs 140e for the board above...

Sell a nice android app, subscription and be done with it.

Phone packs a lot more features.

Re: Taking over a Dead IoT Company

#83

Post by iamflimflam1 »

neilk wrote: post #53

Maybe it’s very North American of me but I cringe when the author says “bad team”. Objectively, they didn’t have the skills, experience, or advisors to do this thing. And if the money truly disappeared, then someone crossed over into “bad” territory. But hardware startups are brutal. Kickstarted hardware is torture. Even experienced and well capitalized tiny teams go through this. A friend did one, rapidly realized t…

Indeed, I enjoyed the article, but felt the snarkiness was bit too much.

Startups fail all the time, and hardware startups are a minefield.

If they had succeeded then we'd be singing their praises on how they started off with a scrappy product built from off the shelf parts and then managed to productionise it and outsource the manufacturing to china...

Re: Taking over a Dead IoT Company

#84

Post by pdntspa »

dinosaurdynasty wrote: post #81
pdntspa wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why does a project like this need three engineers? Two, I can kind of see (a hardware guy and a software guy, though it doesnt look like the hardware guy was doing much here), but three?

People have to go on vacation sometimes

So you let the thing run and brief the other on what to do if SHTF. We're talking hundreds of units out in the field, not millions. Every aspect of that can be provisioned for ahead-of-time, and cheaply at that, and then the SWE can walk away for weeks at a time.

If the HWE leaves for a bit, same thing. If he's making units production stops, but maybe the SWE can fill in since these dont look like difficult builds.

Re: Taking over a Dead IoT Company

#85

Post by tyingq »

schubart wrote: post #78

I didn’t quite understand the need for an injection attack. Once you had bought the domain and could respond to the devices‘ API calls, weren’t you in the driving seat already?

A guess, but...

"At boot time, the Config Server will pull the latest configuration from an HTTP server. In addition, the Config Server will connect to an AWS IoT Core endpoint to receive real time config updates from an MQTT server."

So, perhaps to bootstrap information they didn't have, like the current configuration? It sounds like they sold different types of signs with different resolutions, and also whatever train station setup config there was. Maybe a one-time exploit to upload that info from the sign itself.

Re: Taking over a Dead IoT Company

#86

Post by dom96 »

explodingwaffle wrote: post #77

Woof. Adafruit + Raspberry Pi in a shipped product screams to me that they did not have a real electronics guy on their team. https://ukdepartureboards.co.uk/ is the British equivalent of this, and it seems to do everything right (don’t own one, but have seen on Twitter)- optional subscription, and nice looking hardware (seems like they contracted out for that). Though at the minute I suppose there are barely any tra…

> and it seems to do everything right

Last time I looked they were missing CE conformance, which afaik is pretty illegal. Surprised they haven't been found out yet.

Re: Taking over a Dead IoT Company

#87

Post by bpicolo »

michaelbuckbee wrote: post #5

Towards the end of the article the author mentions not wanting to pursue this as a business as there are so many cheap programmable signs out there already. As someone who would love to buy one of these and customize it for myself does anyone have experience or recommendations with any of these?

There are a lot of different sorts of programmable signs out there: https://tidbyt.com/ https://www.vestaboard.com/

Re: Taking over a Dead IoT Company

#88

Post by awkward »

adriancr wrote: post #82
explodingwaffle wrote: post #77

Woof. Adafruit + Raspberry Pi in a shipped product screams to me that they did not have a real electronics guy on their team. https://ukdepartureboards.co.uk/ is the British equivalent of this, and it seems to do everything right (don’t own one, but have seen on Twitter)- optional subscription, and nice looking hardware (seems like they contracted out for that). Though at the minute I suppose there are barely any tra…

This still seems like its fallen into same BOM trap. You could buy a phone (moto e20), same size as their small display at 90e vs 140e for the board above... Sell a nice android app, subscription and be done with it. Phone packs a lot more features.

That's an indescript rectangle that could just show anything and could be from anywhere. They are selling a specific shape of rectangle that shows stuff about London and aesthetically signals that it is from London.

Re: Taking over a Dead IoT Company

#89

Post by twawaaay »

not_the_fda wrote: post #18
twawaaay wrote: post #13

I think RPi in this thing says it all. It screams it was built by somebody that does not know how to develop a physical product for mass market. There are only three parts in this product that should have any significant cost to them: * the display itself, * the wooden enclosure, * the packaging the product comes in, If there are switches, potentiometers or encoders I am really partial to well working ones and these…

You would be surprised at how often people with no experience try to build a physical mass market product that nothing more than an RPi in a box. And they often go under because the BOM is too high and the software is garbage.

That's why when I started with design I decided to go for niche products for businesses. Kind of thing that when they have to buy it they will not be looking at the price too much.

Low volume (I was doing all soldering myself!), high sticker price, not especially profitable for me.

But makes it so much easier to design when you don't have to compromise so much and you don't have to be very inventive trying to save on BOM. And it is fun to be able to just do whatever you fancy.

I think starting mass market production for price conscious clients with no experience is just asking for problems.

Re: Taking over a Dead IoT Company

#90

Post by ChuckMcM »

explodingwaffle wrote: post #77

Woof. Adafruit + Raspberry Pi in a shipped product screams to me that they did not have a real electronics guy on their team. https://ukdepartureboards.co.uk/ is the British equivalent of this, and it seems to do everything right (don’t own one, but have seen on Twitter)- optional subscription, and nice looking hardware (seems like they contracted out for that). Though at the minute I suppose there are barely any tra…

This is all too common in my experience, "oh we could just use an arduino/pi and a hat and a peripheral" rather than "Design a system that does ". As an EE who spent their primary career programming (horrors I know) and in systems analysis, I see it as the logical extreme of "why use a 555 when I can program an ATTiny to be a timer and do other stuff too!"

The allure of having one be able to add features "with just a bit of code" is catnip to product managers. They seriously cannot seem to resist going there.

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