Three Years! – Looking Forward
When we released our v1.0 BUG platform we believed, from our initial research, that it would appeal to three market categories – early adopters/hackers, entrepreneurs/product developers and educators/students. We guessed that the majority of orders would come from the first group – individual technologists. This was true initially. But quickly, our order mix tipped in favor of the enterprise, the second category.
Today over 50% of our orders come from companies, many of them big Fortune 500 corporations. We were a little surprised by this. We had assumed that big companies had the budgets necessary to custom build whatever hardware they needed/wanted. We were wrong. In talking to many of these customers it became clear that getting internal funding for new hardware projects was at least as difficult (sometimes more) as prying dollars out of a VC. They were drawn to the BUG platform because it gave them a complete, vertically integrated hardware/software system that they could use to innovate and explore options without having to go beg for funding. And when they did decide to make the trek upstairs to meet with the suits, they had a well tested, functional prototype to show with results to prove their case. This story was also making sense to entrepreneurs who, like us when we started, were discovering that innovating in hardware was a looking a little more complicated than it first appeared.
What have I learned in the past 36 months? I’m used to saying that hardware is “hard”. And it most certainly is. I’m reminded of it almost everyday. But I’ve started to include a more optimistic position as well. Having seen our customers at work, I realize now that it doesn’t have to be. It can be made much easier, cheaper and more enjoyable. Is our system exactly right? No. We still have much to learn from everyone using it to do new things. We have to continue working hard on our platform so our users don’t have to. We need to continue to refine our design (see picture above from our work with IDEO). The other thing I’ve learned is that companies, organizations and even individuals are beginning to realize that devices don’t have to just come from the Big Guys. Amazon’s Kindle is a good case in point. This is a seismic shift. But in order for it to really happen, the pain and suffering must be taken out of hardware prototyping, piloting and production.
As I look at the breadth of BUG-based projects going on now – in such diverse areas as health care, asset tracking, home automation, security, point-of-sale, to name a few – and in many areas around the world, I can’t help but feel that we’re on the right track. We are still a ways from making it as easy as just snapping LEGOs together, but that vision is still the golden ring. We’ll get there. I look forward to telling you how we did twelve more months from now.
PS – I will devote a separate post to our experiences in the world of education. The activity and lessons-learned there are fascinating and bode well for the future of electronics!
