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Is (was?) there something more to this product that I missed, or is it really a $700 smart lock?
Well apparently this one has "a new, exciting and addictive (?) user experience".
Earlier quoted context omitted.
They were trying to sell a $700 custom designed lock based on its “user experience”. How much sense do you think this management team had?
> They were trying to sell a $700 custom designed lock based on its “user experience”. And they were succeeding. That was not their problem. And the average penny pinching Joe wasn't their target at first anyway. You'd be surprised what people buy, and how many buy it, for way more than $700. Even smartphone covers.
Were they? Source? How big was their beta? What was their revenue? Beta users will bias toward early adopters, and often not represent the mainstream market necessary to make a company profitable.
EDIT: I just read that they had ZERO revenue. So they certainly weren't succeeding.
So looking more into this, is it just me, or it looks outrageously inefficient to raise $45m and have ~40 employees spend 4 years to release a product that is basically an IoT door lock? Both the mechanical and the electronic parts are based on commodity components, so I can imagine a well-motivated team of 5 delivering something like this in a year and being able to offer it at a much lower price.
So was making a competitive product ever a priority here, or have the founders discovered a different way to benefit from the over-optimistic tech investment climate?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It doesn't even have a proximity sensor -- you have to touch it to make it work. Might as well stick a key in at the same time. If I paid that kind of money I would expect my door to unlock for me when I approached it. It also has no manual override with a key like some smart locks -- it just has some backup batteries that last an unspecified amount of time. Because it has no key, it can't be re-keyed, so good luck c…
It's so awesome when people create problems to fix non-problems. I never once thought my life would be better if I didn't need to put up with those nasty keys...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Guidelines say to not editorialize titles, and stick with original, but I agree. Putting short summary in parentheses would help (like "So Close (Otto postmortem)")
That guideline needs to go. HN submitters often summarize the content of an article more appropriately for other readers than the original writer does. Often the newsworthiness of an article isn't apparent for one reason or another. It took me a couple of minutes to figure out that this was a story of a promising hardware startup that ran out of operating cash during acquisition negotiations.
When authors or site editors choose titles for their presumed audience, they aren't necessarily considering clarity for deep-linking external sites like HN.
If I understand the sequence of events properly, the company entered acquisition negotiations and agreed not to solicit other bids during that time. When the acquisition fell apart, the company was out of money and had to stop operations. If that's correct, it seems to me like it's something they should have known in advance -- if they knew they would be out of money by the end of the year, why would they enter acqui…
Thank you for pointing this out. For those reading, an archive now exists https://archive.fo/CJF9r the original comment is at https://medium.com/@ben_73928/as-one-of-the-team-members-let...
If Ben realized this, he should have never worked at this company in the first place. It sounds like it was a failure of a product strategy.
Is (was?) there something more to this product that I missed, or is it really a $700 smart lock?
In the same sense of "is there anything to this SUV that I missed, or is it really a $70K car?". Quality and reliability matter, and not all locks are made the same. If a run-of-the-mill smart lock goes for $200, and if you can even buy lightbulb systems that go for the same or more, it's not really difficult to imagine a $700 smart lock if it's advanced enough. Especially since most of those $200 smart locks are usu…
I’m not assuming anything, I’m wondering what makes it so much more expensive than other products in this space, since the article (and the “Introdicing Otto” article I also found) don’t explain it at all.
Not "so close".
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It doesn't even have a proximity sensor -- you have to touch it to make it work. Might as well stick a key in at the same time. If I paid that kind of money I would expect my door to unlock for me when I approached it. It also has no manual override with a key like some smart locks -- it just has some backup batteries that last an unspecified amount of time. Because it has no key, it can't be re-keyed, so good luck c…
It's so awesome when people create problems to fix non-problems. I never once thought my life would be better if I didn't need to put up with those nasty keys...
When I travel and let friends or family stay in my NYC apartment, I leave them the keys in an envelope at a nearby 24/7 supermarket. It's not ideal. Key concierge services exist, but are not super practical either.