> If you have a $70 nicely designed, documented IoT sensor but the DIY home automation people think they can put ESPHome on a $10 Amazon device and accomplish nearly the same thing, which one do are they going to buy?
I agree with you that targeting devs/people with an under-developed sense of buy/build doesn't work!
I'm hoping that the devs with money/slightly more accomplished who don't have time to mess with stuff would pick it up.
A bit of a jump but I think this was one of the big strategic mistakes of products like FirefoxOS -- aiming for the dev with money who can afford a $600 I-support-foss-and-mozilla signaling device that also happens to be a phone they can hack on may have worked better than targeting $60 feature phones.
> If you go through the forums you can already find some semi-premium devices that are a little better constructed and might have better feature sets. They’re always followed by comments from people recommending a cheaper option.
I think that's OK! It's similar to HN dropbox effect. IMO you actually want those people to find the cheaper option, those are bad customers for a premium brand.
The product has to actually be noticably better/more consistent/etc than the cheaper option though. And IMO there is a large subset of nerds that don't actually want to write 5 files and flash an OS to do smart home stuff -- they want to play at the application layer.
A good counter example might be the NAS industry.
This is all theoretical of course, so... We're just armchairing at this point.
I agree with you that targeting devs/people with an under-developed sense of buy/build doesn't work!
I'm hoping that the devs with money/slightly more accomplished who don't have time to mess with stuff would pick it up.
A bit of a jump but I think this was one of the big strategic mistakes of products like FirefoxOS -- aiming for the dev with money who can afford a $600 I-support-foss-and-mozilla signaling device that also happens to be a phone they can hack on may have worked better than targeting $60 feature phones.
> If you go through the forums you can already find some semi-premium devices that are a little better constructed and might have better feature sets. They’re always followed by comments from people recommending a cheaper option.
I think that's OK! It's similar to HN dropbox effect. IMO you actually want those people to find the cheaper option, those are bad customers for a premium brand.
The product has to actually be noticably better/more consistent/etc than the cheaper option though. And IMO there is a large subset of nerds that don't actually want to write 5 files and flash an OS to do smart home stuff -- they want to play at the application layer.
A good counter example might be the NAS industry.
This is all theoretical of course, so... We're just armchairing at this point.