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The satellite imagery industry still has no idea what customers want

joemorrison.substack.com

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Re: The satellite imagery industry still has no idea what customers want

#81

Post by campchase »

bromuro wrote: post #65
campchase wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't mind you saying this - I think my style is very off-putting to some. The same things that disenchant you about the style are what make others love it. I try to be entertaining and informative, rather than just informative, because that's what makes it enjoyable for me. But like all entertainment, it's stylized, so it will put some people off. Hopefully you found the content valuable, at least!

Please, think about us living in poor countries with expensive and slow internet connections.

Thank you, I will do that in the future.

Re: The satellite imagery industry still has no idea what customers want

#82

Post by nightpool »

A year or so ago there was a long-ish discussion about countthings.com—technologically, a very simple app that's seemingly found a lot of value in having a close product-market fit and being able to (efficiently) sell to customers that don't have their own ability to build custom CV solutions. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27261399

I really understand the author's argument that lots of satellite companies are "doing this wrong", by investing lots and lots of resources into "new products" that cost a lot of money to produce but don't have a clear user story, but I wonder if there's a way to do this "right" by building very simple, customizable software that lowers the floor in terms of what sorts of customers are able to purchase satellite data feeds? Maybe even using the same software the CountThings does?

This seems to be qualitatively very different from the types of "data feeds" that OP is talking about that try to measure "useful analytics", rather than working on a scalable process for shipping bespoke solutions to customers with turn-key integration. This is (one way) to tackle the long-tail problem. But maybe it runs into some other pitfalls

Re: The satellite imagery industry still has no idea what customers want

#83

Post by tepitoperrito »

kccqzy wrote: post #40
mikestew wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fed Ex (quite surprising) have decided that freely providing delivery dates to consumers is too value to leave to third parties... ...or to leave to the shipping endpoint customer, either. I can't tell you how many clicks it takes to determine when a particular shipment will arrive at my door. Off the top of my head: 0. Email from vendor: "your package has shipped!" 1. Log in to the Fedex account. 2. One would think…

You don't need to log in or even create an account at FedEx just to track deliveries. You just need the tracking number. It's the first thing you see when you go to the homepage of fedex.com

You do need to login to see information on individual box delivery statuses.

Otherwise, you just get the "master tracking number" delivery estimate which seems to be based off of the first box delivery date, not the date all the boxes will have arrived.

There's probably a good reason things are that way for delivery tracking (see chesterson's fence). But the rabbit hole doesn't end there! Reports generated from their own customer portal don't include per-box delivery dates. They all show the delivery date of the FIRST box. This is extremely frustrating when trying to make accurate models for forecasting, or even just lead time estimation.

They do this to make it harder to compare their services to competitors like DHL (oodles better than FedEX - but there are risk management considerations and also capacity issues) and it ends up harming businesses trying to serve their own customers better. This is especially annoying since they have really granular data internally that go into even more detail than just delivery date on a per box level.

Attached is a screenshot of a spreadsheet fed by some internal SQL database and macros that can spit out per box information including delay reason (weather, transit, act of God) and even number of hours late.

https://ibb.co/k3sNxYz macro / control sheet https://ibb.co/Zzjw8TV selected column titles

If anyone at FedEX is reading this please consider pushing the narrative that your business customers aren't the end of the line for the goods you move. If anyone who DOESN'T work at FedEX is reading this, I can email you a redacted copy of the spreadsheet I referenced above (just send it to tepitoperrito AT 420blaze DOT it).

Re: The satellite imagery industry still has no idea what customers want

#84

Post by _puk »

campchase wrote: post #75
frakkingcylons wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Sell both applications and wholesale data at the same time Bloomberg comes to mind since they offer wholesale access to data in addition to all the terminal functions.

Interesting example! Planet sometimes describes themselves as "Bloomberg for Earth Observation" or something along those lines.

"Bloomberg for x.." strikes me as just the modern corporate version of "Uber for x..".

I've heard so many founders try to describe their business as "Bloomberg for.." when trying to describe a mixed focus offering of products that I immediately hear alarm bells nowadays.

Re: The satellite imagery industry still has no idea what customers want

#85

Post by vgel »

campchase wrote: post #41
annoyingnoob wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me, its not so much the presence of animated gifs as much as I wanted to be able to scroll one off of the screen while I focused on the words. For me, the top 30% of the page had something moving no matter where I scrolled. I can appreciate style and levity but for me the busy screen was enough to drive me away. Looks my Reader mode would have blocked all of the images and should have just gone with that ;)

That's great feedback, I will avoid .gifs in my future blog posts. I can see how that would be distracting and an accessibility issue.

I appreciated the gifs, personally. Added some humor to the article. Maybe there's a way to have them not autoplay or something.

Re: The satellite imagery industry still has no idea what customers want

#86

Post by [deleted] »

soniman wrote: post #64
GlenTheMachine wrote: post #46

Me: 20 years in the defense space business. Stating my own opinion. This is basically right. The problem with space imagery is that almost everyone who wants it has a niche use case, and those few organizations without a niche use case (the US Weather Service, various militaries, etc) generally want imagery that's so specialized to their own problem that they have to spec, buy, and operate their own orbital assets. T…

You don't think the US military is providing for all of Ukraine's satellite intelligence needs?

[deleted]

Re: The satellite imagery industry still has no idea what customers want

#87

Post by enriquto »

GlenTheMachine wrote: post #46

Me: 20 years in the defense space business. Stating my own opinion. This is basically right. The problem with space imagery is that almost everyone who wants it has a niche use case, and those few organizations without a niche use case (the US Weather Service, various militaries, etc) generally want imagery that's so specialized to their own problem that they have to spec, buy, and operate their own orbital assets. T…

> The problem with space imagery is that almost everyone who wants it has a niche use case

But this is a good problem. It's like saying "the problem with motors is that everyone who uses them has a niche use case" (submarines, cars, airplanes, industrial machinery...). Or that "the problem with microscopy is that everyone who wants it has a niche use case". And indeed it does! Microscopes for biologists are different to those for chemists, engineers, medical doctors, physicists, etc.

The concept of "space imagery" is extremely wide. It is natural that earth observation satellites become specialized. I wouldn't be surprised to see in the near future some "CH4" or "CO2" satellites that acquire light in a handful of extremely narrow particular bands on the short wave infrared spectrum that are useful only for observing plumes of these gases. Right now, people use hyperspectral imagers (which have a dense sampling of some parts of the spectrum) and throw away most of the image data.

Re: The satellite imagery industry still has no idea what customers want

#88

Post by nradov »

GlenTheMachine wrote: post #76
soniman wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't think the US military is providing for all of Ukraine's satellite intelligence needs?

I think it’s very, very unlikely. It would risk giving away information on the capabilities of US national security assets. Which is classified literally as highly as it is possible to classify. We don’t even let the Five Eyes know that stuff, much less hand it to non-aligned militaries who we can’t vet. Plus, it doesn’t appear to be needed. The Russian military is proving to be god-awful at even basic field ops like…

Too late. President Trump already publicly gave away information on the capabilities of US spy satellites in 2019.

https://news.yahoo.com/trump-tweeted-classified-satellite-im...

Re: The satellite imagery industry still has no idea what customers want

#89

Post by GlenTheMachine »

enriquto wrote: post #87
GlenTheMachine wrote: post #46

Me: 20 years in the defense space business. Stating my own opinion. This is basically right. The problem with space imagery is that almost everyone who wants it has a niche use case, and those few organizations without a niche use case (the US Weather Service, various militaries, etc) generally want imagery that's so specialized to their own problem that they have to spec, buy, and operate their own orbital assets. T…

> The problem with space imagery is that almost everyone who wants it has a niche use case But this is a good problem. It's like saying "the problem with motors is that everyone who uses them has a niche use case" (submarines, cars, airplanes, industrial machinery...). Or that "the problem with microscopy is that everyone who wants it has a niche use case". And indeed it does! Microscopes for biologists are different…

Absolutely. And what you do in that case is to sell motors to people who want them. If they give you feedback on how to make better motors, take it and make better motors.

What you don't do is presume that you know everything about how people want to use motors, and offer a subscription to a design service that does all of their engineering design for them, as a way to sell your motors.

Re: The satellite imagery industry still has no idea what customers want

#90

Post by lokimedes »

As someone from the industry, all I really want, is a Netflix of datasets. Planet.com, Capella, Maxar, ICEYE, AIRBUS etc.. I hate the guts of their B2B business models. I want an aggregator, I want basemaps that are refreshed on a best-effort basis (not by me buying km^2 of observations), I want standardized formats and metadata across vendors. Give me that, with some obscene, but transparent pricing structure, that lets me explore for discretionary funds and exploit for less money than triggering tenders and investment decisions. Then, then you have what will move the entire commercial earth observation industry out of the CAPEX-fryer it’s in today. For anything less, there’s stiff competition from ESA’s free Sentinel satellites.
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