Speaker 2 (00:00.172) In this episode, Elijah and Grant from the Glassboard team in the Hard Tech podcast sit down with John Grady from Alia Networks. Alia Networks really lives at the application layer of connected devices, actually working with some of the largest connected brands in the world. Some to mention is like Shark, for example. This conversation is really in depth. He comes from a very diverse background in being a P-backed CEO. And it really goes deep into what it really takes to scale this kind of product that really lives at the intersection between connected in actual hardware products. Enjoy. Well, welcome everyone back to the Hard Tech podcast. I don't have my co-host guest DeAndre here with me. He has got an ankle that needs repair. So he's out getting that repaired. But I've got Elijah joining us here today. welcome. And I've got John Grady from ALA Networks. He was kind enough to fly in last night and we were able to catch up. So hopefully you're not going to miss too much of the fun from last night's conversation into this, but we'll try and cover the highlights today. Thanks for joining. Thanks for having me Grant, it's great to be here. So our worlds overlap in the connection piece, right? in everyone knows we're Glassboard, we're HardTech, in our IoT stance, we're gathering all this great data and we have to shuttle it to the cloud and then do something useful with it, which we can shuttle to the cloud sometimes, but we're not the ones that going to make the app or the user experience on the cloud. But getting it to the cloud and that user experience is where you guys come in. Right. Speaker 1 (01:22.03) Exactly right. We have a tripod effectively in our platform. We're a well-known smart home IoT platform based in San Jose. We provide three primary elements, the cloud capabilities and all the intelligence that resides there, the mobile app experience for discovery, command and control, configuration, and so forth, and then the device integration. It's those three things that allow us to deliver differentiated experience to the 50 some odd brands that work with ALA each and every day over the last 13 years. So we've been really, really fortunate that that has we've been able to ride the wave of connectivity and of IoT, particularly in the home. But as you said, we meet in the middle. Yeah, where you hand off is where we pick up the baton and we run with it. Yeah, no, and think it's great because there's just like our clients use us for hard tech, because you don't need to have your hands wrapped around how to make the sausage to build a great product company. Neither do you have to know how to do a web experience, an app experience, build a database. If your core brand is, I'm going to pick out something at random here, a door lock or a washing machine or a vacuum cleaner. You don't need to be an expert in, for me, the IoT hardware side and the microcontrollers and the memory and the connectivity. And on your side. they don't need to be an expert in building that back end database or an app or UX. They can focus on their core skillset and let you guys run that for them, right? Similar to how we will build that hard tech supply chain and get them going. Exactly. And that's why customers approach us. They know we do a couple things really well. But one of those things is not design the actual piece of hardware. We do the three things that I mentioned really, really well. That's a sandbox we excel in. But we love to work with really creative and innovative hardware partners who have a vision for what a superior connected experience looks like. And then we go out and enable that. That's what we do every day. Speaker 2 (03:19.724) And so let's play a game so the listeners are not getting the feel of where you would tag in. Where would someone I'm going to go make up an appliance in my house? I want to go make a smart water filter, right? Water dispenser in my house that tells me when the tank, the filter needs to be replaced. I come to you and I say, Hey, this is, I've been making water filters and dispensers for 20 years. I want to make one that auto alerts for filters so I can get recurring revenue on selling the filters when they're burned out. How do you help? So where would you tag in and how do you start that conversation? Yeah, so that's frankly the lion's share of the leads that flow into us or exactly that, whether it's a vacuum cleaner or water filtration device, a lock or whatnot. Where we pick up is understanding from that customer, what's the motivation behind the connected experience? Is it a superior customer experience? Is it retrieving data that helps the product improve? Is it a replenishment and a maintenance strategy? There are a lot of different elements. And sometimes it's a collage of all three or four of those things. But understanding what that driver is, is really, really important. So we help crystallize that during the sales process because that drives what the onboarding experience looks like. Okay. Speaker 2 (04:29.07) how much of your creative team they need to get access to to build that app experience. Exactly, exactly. And many of our customers have a team that's deeply embedded in understanding and appreciating the brand and looking at ways to perpetuate that in a mobile experience or in a product experience. Some, though, don't have an idea and they turn to us. And some just say, look, you guys do it, but no bells and whistles. Black and white is fine. And we can do all the above. But we have a professional services organization that really helps. filter those sorts of questions out and understand the priorities that our customers have, and then focus on a statement of work that drives the mutual achievement of those things. Yeah. And that's like the way you and I were trying to relaunch that, you know, this is the key that you and I both have to do in our service business is intake customer emotions wants needs and translate those out into a plan and action set a list of DIRs. Elijah has been jumping in some really fun projects and having to, know, we, joke that it's the clown with the handkerchief that you just keep pulling and the user needs and the requirements keep coming. If you ask the right questions and getting the client to describe their experience, you know, adequately, that's what I'm looking for, is really hard and takes both art and science nowhere to dig. Speaker 3 (05:48.43) Yeah Yeah, but that playbook is a feature, not a bug. I that's why grounding your experience in the connected world where it can be updated, enhanced, and improved and extended every day, every month, every year, that's the beauty of the connected experience. And that's where Elijah and I are jealous because when we have to go fix something that's called a recall and everyone's upset with Exactly. You guys get software updates. Right. We solve that riddle with an OTA next week. we empower our customers to do that OTA. And that's the beauty. we love the, I love the handkerchief metaphor, the clown handkerchief metaphor, because that's the type of thing where we're really adding value. We're simplifying that process. We're facilitating it in a way that allows people to think of it as an advantage, not as something that slows them down. Right, no, it's the, have the experience to ask the right questions that will make them deeply think, not just, yeah, I've been pitching this product feature to our management team for six months and I finally got to talk to you, I want you to build exactly what I pitched. The answer is no, no, no, you actually want us to do that plus these two things you didn't know you wanted, but your customers deeply are going to need. Cause not you're just your competitors in the exact same space, but your parallel competitors, right? Speaker 2 (07:03.01) We have a client that might've been in the lawnmower business that is allowed to learn, battery status is really important. And then we're going to sell that to the customer that is in the remote lock experience, right? So you know to ask, well, what do you really want that battery life notification to look like? I'm just picking random features out from here, but it's, you you can borrow from parallel industry. So you're not like taking something from a competitor, but you're able to really learn lessons at scale and deploy them. So true. Yeah. And we're, going through that same thing. What is the right customer notification? What's the right timing? What's the right verbiage? What's the right call to action? and cadence and like, you know, give them a weekly update where it's got all their notifications so you don't burn them out or do they want that real time response? Oh, that's so much fun. And then, so this is very much on the user experience side, which we could talk about literally forever and always. But just to kind of frame the rest of the conversation, that is just the surface pun intended of user experience, what you guys touch. people. Speaker 1 (07:43.979) Exactly. Speaker 2 (08:00.056) How deep in the process do you go? I know you guys are hosting your own data and servers and things like that and allowing clients to rent that from you guys, but you actually write some of the firmware stack that lives on the hardware. That's right. We integrate with a number of SOCs, and that is essentially plugged into a module from any number of module folks out in China. It's a pin-to-pin replacement, as we spoke about, and that allows for a much more seamless transition so forth. Some customers who are migrating from one platform to another, we've done quite a bit of work in smoothing out that experience and making it as transparent as possible. And in this day and age, there's a lot of geo... political pressure out there around some of our competitors. We're certainly looking to take advantage of that. And we've made that process for those customers who've elected to go that path really, really simple on all three facets, but particularly in the SOC. Yeah, and changeover. getting the IoT platforming up and running when they're switching both to you guys and from whoever they were on the hardware side. Because you guys aren't dedicated to a certain set of hardware. You support a couple of different vendors. guys are. Right. And I say, let me ask, I didn't ask this actually already. Are you guys hardware agnostic? If I came to you with a client that wanted to run on a US Silicon brand for whatever reason, more expensive, would you support it if their team could write the firmware to integrate with your back end? Speaker 1 (09:21.378) Chances are we've probably already done that integration. The answer is yes. And we've done it with probably four or five different providers. the likelihood is we already have that experience. We've always taken the view that we're agnostic in virtually every dimension of our business, whether it's the SSC. On the cloud side, we work with GCP primarily, but we have AWS and Azure instances deployed around the world. So we are I don't want to say we're indifferent because certainly we have a belief, but if our customers feel very strongly about a particular platform or a particular go-to-market approach, we're here to accommodate that. Again, our responsibility is to deliver a good experience as defined by our customers. And if they view that on one platform or one SOC, we're not standing in the way of that. We're going to go help roll that out. Yeah, and that's similar to how you and I work, Elijah, with our clients is like, we're going to make recommendations on what's going to provide that best experience, that best COGS target for their volumes and also the best development pathway for how big their project is, right? We have some clients that are never going to be high volume and we're going to pick a way more expensive SOC because it will make development easy. Yeah, and you can save that money there. And sometimes clients come to us and they know exactly what they want. And like you said, we'll ask questions and make sure that that's going to be the thing that works best for them. But we'll also push back if we need to. And so it sounds like that's a little bit of what you guys do as well. Exactly. We've rolled out a program called the Fast Track program, for example, which includes seven different product categories today. And its focus is time to market. It's not looking at, it's not really factoring in a lot of other considerations. It's focused on how fast can we move and bring this product to market. Speaker 2 (10:56.173) I'm this name. Speaker 2 (11:07.286) And that's based on you having already touched that stove and been burned, figured out where all the hotspots are, where the bruises exist and how to navigate right to only the right. on the cloud and on the mobile app. We've already moved into the second or third level of the learning curve. we know the hardware partners that are manufacturing this in China. And so we can take advantage of all those learnings and bring those markets or bring those products to market much, much more rapidly. And we do that more and more. In fact, that's probably the fastest growing segment of our business over the last 18 to 24 months, as those fast track products. that the ramp time is four to six months max. is And then this is almost equivalent to like an ODM or JDM that you're helping your clients partner with, right? They're not owning a hundred percent of the IP in the hardware or in the software. They're truly, I already make a insert device here, toaster. I always use Sunbeam toasters as a fictitious IoT device. Sunbeam toasters comes, you know, once you make an IoT toaster, you help set them up with your software stack and your backend and all of your connectivity. And then you're partnering them with a hardware manufacturer for the IoT, I'll call it Speaker 2 (12:19.308) circuit board that would live in that toaster. Exactly. That probably came from another insert kitchen appliance, maybe a smart oven or a smart coffee machine or juicer that you're just copy-pasting into the toaster. And that's how you can do that so quickly. It's. Very, very similar. It's probably not identical, but it's awfully darn close and allows us to move with great speed and velocity together. tomorrow. They can basically customize that layout at circuit board, add a couple of the power switches they need for toasters versus the oven. But the underlying IOT stack is the same schematic, the same layout underneath those chips. Speaker 1 (12:51.66) And the backend cloud, the backend piece is all the same. All right. And we're definitely starting to do that more in our IoT stack. We've got some Bluetooth and wifi and cell chips that we've done enough times now that like, I can just take that part and lay it down and do that. Practice the art for us. Pretty plug and play. One of the exercises we try and go through annually is looking at what the next five to seven years projections are around connected devices. And if you go back two or three years, we used to call it lights, camera, action, because that was really the driving force behind connected devices, lights especially, then cameras, then plugs and so forth. So we jumped at that and really started. And we'll do that again later this summer. We'll go through the same exercise in August. Speaker 2 (13:38.592) Can you share what's coming down the pipeline that I don't know about? Video still has maintained the momentum. Yeah, the simple home, unmonitored camera is really becoming interesting. There's a lot of pet applications now. Think about the evolution since COVID. Lots of animals in the house. You're in the house all the time. Now, all of a sudden, you're back at the office three or four days a week. You want to see what Spot's doing. that it really is. cameras and security. Speaker 2 (14:05.332) He's not eating all the cushions. Precisely. So there's those applications that have now been extended to a spot eating enough is eating three times a day. How much is eating each survey, you those sorts of things. The things that distinguish between the mailman and someone who's, you know, probably not so nice. Go to CES this year, the bird feeding camera is really, popular. It can identify the specific bird. So there's a lot of different applications, infant cameras for young infants. Parents want to monitor their At the doorbell, yeah. Speaker 1 (14:36.846) sleep activities and so forth. So cameras continue to be significant and we're jumping in. And that's both feet difficult. That's high data rate, that's a lot of storage if you're trying to do playback. mean, it's very much different than an action, right? I want to turn on my light, did my door unlock, right? These are a couple of bits of data and those are kilobytes or megabytes of data you're having to transmit, store, record, recall. So that's certainly one of the top two or three. Lights is, the growth has slowed a bit, but it's still a top five fastest growing category. Smart plugs and outlets. In fact, this is probably a very good correlation between what we're doing on the Fast Track side and what we're seeing or others are seeing in terms of anticipated connected adoption. And it's interesting. So the smart home stuff has been really popular. What do you want to say? 2014, 15, it started, the fuse was lit and then it just off to the races. Speaker 1 (15:35.306) Aeolus started in a garage as we were talking about in 2010. The first devices appeared a couple years later. And so by the time 13, 14 came around, the notion of a connected device or connected appliance in your home wasn't far-fetched. That's CES basically. It was the new, new thing. Can you believe they're internet connecting your light bulbs? It was a Jetsons kind of storyboard. This is where we're going to go. But right now, there are a bunch of concept cars in Las Vegas in January. You're exactly right. And so from there, then we started to see a couple categories take off. And that was really the catalyst for, oh my gosh, look at the possibilities. Look at the value proposition. Everyone's view earlier in the 2015 to 17 era was, Connected devices are cool, but articulating the precise value proposition was a little more challenging. The of the data was a little ambiguous, for example. Was the consumer experience with the mobile app a net favorable? Was it a NPS score? Yeah, exactly. So understanding those types of things really started to take form and shape in the 2017-2018 timeline. And then we started to see. It was so hard. Speaker 1 (16:51.618) the proliferation of connected devices. And that's certainly when AILA started to hit its stride. Oh, that's awesome. Because I mean, it's such funny how that mirrors our experience that in there's a certain subset of IoT times when devices without UX was like the rage. Let's build a thing with an on light and that's it. Everything else is through the app. The app will give you the best experience. And what everyone's realized is nobody wants to get their phone out to do everything. What they want is a great light switch that still is a light switch. Right. But I can control it for my phone and not in the room. And it's this, you know, this, comes back around, right? It circles around and you'll get that, man, a great physical UI augmented by an amazing digital UI, where I can go and fine tune every feature a few times. need that, or make it start, you know, start heating my coffee up when I'm in my shower. Right. And setting those automations. It's, it's that blend that really is tied home. T IOT together. And that's what we refer to that in our mobile app is scenes. What is the portfolio of action you want to take? Because you're right, you don't want to open up five different applications to do five different things. If you want the drapes open, the lights off, the air conditioning on, and two or three other things, can you do that concurrently or simultaneously? And that's the idea behind an integrated mobile experience. And certainly, that's something that we facilitate as well, understanding and defining what that experience looks like and then facilitating the actual execution of. Speaker 2 (18:18.03) Yeah, because you and I were talking about some of your brands that have more than one product line, right? That might build very different devices that you still use to have, like you said, drapes and HVAC system. What is, if you can share, what brand do you have that actually has the widest range of things that all lives in the same user experience? For us, it's a service provider at Tysolot based in UAE headquartered in Dubai. We're the platform of choice there for their smart living platform. And we integrated four different products into that experience. Lights and things like that were kind of the baseline, but we then extended from there. And they're even considering today extending that to another dozen or so different devices. And so that's really the integrated scene. that they then incorporated also through command and control capability on the TV to make it even more user friendly and kind of centralized. you can have a central home hub. Someone comes to the door, look at the TV to see if it's the mailman or if it's your best friend coming over. That kind of experience, opening the drapes, turning on the lights, changing the temperature in the home, opening the locks or unlocking the door, all those sorts of things are the types of experiences that can be integrated. So if you think about the business model there for someone who already kind of quote unquote owns the home, it's really, there's a heavy incentive. Speaker 1 (19:43.074) to drive an integrated experience for someone like a TIS lot or any service provider, Comcast, Verizon, you name it. They all have similar motivations to kind of command that. Right. roll that up into one seamless user experience, just like Apple does, right? In your Apple ecosystem, you can use your iPhone to control things that interact with your iPad and your AirPods and your Mac and your Apple TV at home, which is the hub for your Apple Home, right? So you got your integrates with your off-brand locks and lights and whatnot and that integrated experience. So it's, you everyone's fighting for that pie to roll that up, I think. That's right. Exactly right. Speaker 3 (20:20.142) I'd love to dig in a little bit too on the hardware side. When we're developing hardware, IoT connected hardware, we're thinking about, is this going to be Zigbee, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Matter? And that can be a difficult decision where we want to provide to the widest range, but we also don't want to over-engineer something. How do you guys come in and help out with integrating potentially things using different protocols there? Or also, do you guys come in and dictate that with your products? No, I use the word agnostic five or 10 minutes ago, and we take the same view around connectivity. It's certainly fair to say that the lion's share of our devices are using Wi-Fi or BLE. But that's not an exclusive statement. So we support various other protocols. Probably the bronze medalist in that competition is 4G and 5G. we're indifferent. Again, we have an opinion on that. There are trade-offs associated with each, but the scale of our experience right now certainly tilts towards Wi-Fi and BLE today. And that's a byproduct of where most of our devices are installed. They're in a home, they have access to a wireless gateway, and they're continually on and being utilized in some form or fashion. So it makes sense. again, as we drifted into adjacent business lines, you know, we're in a smart home space, but a customer may have and plugged in all the time. a lot of them Speaker 1 (21:45.166) a business version of that product, we're open to different forms of connectivity. And we think that's one of the strengths of our business is the ability to adjust on the fly as partners need to either evolve or market segments within that business simply are different from the get go. Absolutely, yeah. And the value to the customer there I think is awesome too, because as a consumer, if I'm going to buy something and I'm looking on Amazon like, man, is this going to work with what I already have set up? Having that peace of mind as a consumer would be super helpful. well. Agreed. Well, I think it's interesting that we, know, everyone in their home now has smart things in their home. That's what you guys are, know, currently is the bread and butter. We're starting to see the smarts expand outside of the home, right? You're starting to get the outdoor equipment that's got to have longer range communication, more weather resistant and different user experience in activities like, hey, my lawnmower is stuck. I need to go fix it right now or she's going to stop mowing my lawn. Right. And those real time activities. activities. Speaker 1 (22:45.358) Everything has, one, you're right, everything has moved outside. All the focus on the new product introduction over the last couple years, you see this at CES. Waterproofing things is hard and everyone put it off until the end. You know, at IFA last year, three or four floors of outdoor, what I'll call outside connected devices. A lot of challenges there, right? With different deployments, different topographies, different size homes, all those kinds of things. you know, lawn mowers are kind of the outdoor vacuum. Lights, you know, now there's external or exterior lights, excuse me. But we've done Yep, they're coming. Speaker 1 (23:27.49) We've done interior lights for a long, time. So we have experience there. All those sorts of things just a matter time. Irrigation is another big area that we're starting to see. Yeah. Speaker 2 (23:40.632) We're seeing a ton of that pop up in the smaller companies. It used to be the outside irrigation was the realm of the big fish, right? For automation and things like that, like the rain birds and the big names. But man, in the last five or six years, we've seen a huge amount of push in garden or outdoor IOT automation, which is just great. It's so cool to see people adding innovative new features or. You can water your whole lawn from the corner with a machine that's got a high pressure jet and a nozzle that knows that it turned in a camera. It'll make sure it gets all of your grass wet. Way in. Then you have the precipitation detection. My house, we have an awning over the backyard. And if it starts raining, there's a detection mechanism that automatically closes it up so the furniture stays dry. But extend that into irrigation. If it rained two days ago, does the sprinkler need to run today? So there's all these things that in general have a lot of consumer benefit. They're smart in terms of their use of energy or in this case, of- Yeah. Speaker 1 (24:41.262) and resources and so forth. the consumer derives quite a bit of benefit from that experience. so CES, starting in 24, but certainly this year in 25, saw an explosion of outdoor connected devices. And for us, it's very exciting. mean, that's just another sandbox to go play in, exactly. And it leverages so much of what we've done. player. Speaker 2 (25:08.366) I said, you guys are lucky. are going to benefit because your software for outdoor, the user experience may need to change a bit, but the underlying software is mostly the same. And for the port, those of us who are doing the hardware outside, it is so hard to go outside versus inside. mean, temperatures on your batteries, just cold air. Waterproofing is everyone's favorite nightmare in our industry because it's horrible. Totally different animal. Speaker 3 (25:30.7) Not just waterproofing, mowing the lawn, you've got other things flying around that aren't just water that you have to also protect against. Yeah, no, and it's, and you got to protect people from anything that moves outside because it's no longer in your home. You're not the only sole responsible. It's, it's a whole different level of safety, especially with spinning blades and lawnmowers. Um, and then, uh, I mean, that's for you guys, that's gotta be just, you know, a full fun sandbox. Just fun user experience that you could iterate and make better. And the hardware guys have to go put it all together for you. Yep. Speaker 1 (25:51.929) Exactly. Connect. Speaker 1 (25:58.894) That's exactly right. You've said it precisely the way we see it. It's new opportunities for us. It leverages what we did yesterday or last year or in 2023. And this time we have a lot more data, a lot more success points to point to direct our customers to and what they can do with the data and what that experience looks like. And where do people get stuck on the journey of connecting a device initially, for example? And how do you upsell that product on a, you know, if it's a lawnmower on whatever the next gimmick is that's attached to the Yeah. It's the, you know, the base, the premium and the plus, and how do you differentiate what features do you put in which tier? Right. Yeah. Well, and so in that helping clients go all the way, right. You've seen clients go through this enough that you've started to be able to coach them into, don't do that. That's going to be a long development cycle. That's way too risky. Or if you're going to please use this vendor, this maybe regulatory consultant, get them through FCC or insert thing here. how has that grown over your, your years, right? Like. How much more vocal do you see your team getting helping to lead clients, not just in your core offering, but throughout that development life. Yeah. Speaker 1 (27:11.842) I think it's less about being vocal and more about having a lot more data points to bring much more color and detail and a fact-based set of experiences that help customers make a better decision. If you can make a decision based on 23 data points versus two data points, chances are you're to make a better decision on things being equal. And so I think we're a lot wiser there. Like I said, 13 million device activations gets you a lot of learnings. Only good. bad, right? We've learned some things the hard way, undeniably. But we've also learned how to make the experience much more seamless, much more simple for customers. And we've also added technology partners to help us in that endeavor. Where we've seen potholes in the road, we've made sure to tack on partnerships that allow us, for example, to understand where in the mobile journey do customers get stuck. what happens when they get stuck, but you repair whatever that is that troubled them. How do you get them, how do you turn that troublesome moment or that challenging moment into an opportunity to get a really good review? So from every stumble, there's an opportunity to correct it and convert that into a moment that really stays with the consumer for a longer time and reestablishes the brand in that sense. Right, or really? Speaker 2 (28:24.174) relationship, Speaker 2 (28:39.758) What is it's one of the things you never know how good someone's customer service actually is until you need it. It's like even at a restaurant from, you know, electronics, doesn't matter what experience you're as a consumer, you're experiencing. If you have a pretty good or even great experience, that's only okay. You're never going go tell someone, Oh man, can you believe they did this for me? That's just what you expected from the service. But insert thing goes sideways and someone takes care of you and makes it right. It makes you feel like you're a valued customer. You're going tell 10 of your friends. until something goes wrong. Speaker 2 (29:09.132) how cool that was, they helped you out. And that is true in ways, good and bad. If they have a bad experience there, as everyone knows, they're four and a half times more likely to go to Google or go to Yelp or whatever the feedback form is. So if you can pinpoint that moment where they're having trouble, them to stand the bike back up and then get on a success path and then say, hey, now's a great time to put that review out there. If you have, Don't really screw it up. Speaker 1 (29:39.054) Think about the transformative power that that experience has and that's just one of the many ways that we've you both learned and then developed a partnership to drive that kind of improvement in the journey because look every connected device most connected devices today are purchased only after Looking at online reviews and understanding what brand provides the best experience or the best support or the best Right. or the least amount of bad experiences. And certainly, connected products are much less impulse purchases, as you probably both know. They're much more often to be researched. They're much more often to be comparison shopped and so forth. And so that really begins to matter. And let me guess, I just want to see if I can guess this right. The time in which the customer has the most likelihood to have a terrible experience is in setup. Speaker 3 (30:36.334) It is a loop. How do I get my thing on my Wi-Fi network to do the thing that I wanted to do the first time? Because even for us in the hardware, that's actually the worst part. How do we make sure all of our code and all of our transitions, the microcontroller of which radios it's communicating over? Because you always start on Bluetooth, right? It's always, you're searching for a Bluetooth network so that it can connect to your phone and then your phone can tell it what the Wi-Fi password is. Because smart door locks don't have QWERTY keyboards on them to enter in your Wi-Fi password. So we have to, you know, bridge that connection. And if you screw that up, it might lose comps. Yeah, let you. You probably came across the same great research from our friends at Parks and Associates early in the week. They found that 20 % of customers experience some sort of challenge in just connecting the device initially. that's both a problem, but it's also an opportunity, as I mentioned a moment ago. But you're exactly right, Grant. That's where the lions share the problems with lots of things, with cars, connected devices. Speaker 3 (31:39.096) is. high-speed internet connectivity upon installation. All those things are the most at risk in their first 30 days. And for most connected devices, the first weekend you go out to install them. remember, the connected portion is only the first half of it. In many cases, they're doing the physical installation of the camera or the light. And then they're going in and trying to connect it. So look, it's a path that's fraught with risk. first 30 seconds. Speaker 1 (32:08.854) And we have a couple pieces of that that we're really working hard to smooth out. But as you mentioned earlier, you guys have some of the harder challenges in understanding what the design is of that device to simplify that installation. Yeah. And write the right instruction manual. I mean, we learned this lesson in such a fun way with a feminine care product that the instructions matter more almost than the product experience. If you're trying to get someone to do something they've never done before in a different way, you need the right words, the right imagery, the right pictures, the right story to tell in that instruction manual to help them get themselves unstuck without making them feel like they're being... down to. It was such an interesting experience for our team to learn. Because with that, it was an FDA-regulated device. So we actually had to go do formal user studies. And if someone wouldn't follow the instructions properly, we failed. Because it had to be cleaned properly every time it had to be used. And we would have people come and do the user study and miss one step. And if we can't make sure that the average user does every single step every time, we can't put it on the market. And so we got really good at Speaker 2 (33:19.38) nailing that balance between something that felt good, an experience that was amazing to read, to understand, to never feel like you're being talked down to, or you're having to be a scientist to figure out what's the next step. And that middle ground is super challenging from a user experience perspective. And that's, you know, not to beat a dead horse here, but that's the beautiful thing about a connected experience. You have that relationship, that communication line to the customer to help them. on YouTube. And you're getting the feedback. That's the beauty for you guys. So had to go run a pretty large user study at expense. Again, early on, probably eating our veggies, good to do in product development. But you guys get to benefit the area under the curve of feedback forever. You're getting constant and consistent user feedback. You can see statistics in that feedback in a way we couldn't with our numbers. Because no one with a good, all silicone and plastic. they're not going to call you and tell you that one thing they wish was better. But man, if there is a support page of, this part of it sucks too in the forum, they're probably going to comment that if they're already in the. Speaker 1 (34:24.11) that's the type of information that our customers, like we talk about the journey and wanting to be always improving that journey, but our customers want to improve that product. And so that data becomes so powerful, so valuable and rich. And that's what we're routing back to them. And they're then taking advantage of all the goodness that that offers. what Speaker 2 (34:44.27) Yeah, so you're the true answer to what do you do with the data? You guys have learned enough and had gotten updated. These are the kind of actions you should do on your data to go see the insights, to go make insert product. I'll pick on Sunbeam again. Insert, make a better toaster, make a better experience for those using that toaster. Yeah, we facilitate that information flow back to our customer and their engineers, their hardware team, go make sure that that kind of thing is always kind of embedded and integrated into the continuous improvement process inside those operations. their product leads. Speaker 2 (35:21.386) So expanding out past the home and expand out past the outside of the home Are you guys I know you guys are very heavy in the end consumer the end user of the device being a general consumer Do you guys do a lot of work in either the industrial space or the med device space because what we've seen recently Which is really weird is that consumers for once were the early adopters? Usually you get these really high-tech things that happen in industry first because they have the money to do it But ironically, in IoT, they tried industry first and no one adopted it. And everyone in their home adopted everything. And here at Glassberg, we're starting to see this real turnover where we get more med device clients and more industrial clients clamoring for new IoT things than we're seeing in the consumer space. I mean, it's like, it's weird that our consumer electronics are getting simpler and cheaper and our industrial and our med device stuff is getting expanded. Are you seeing those trends yet? Or should I make some introductions for you? Both, yes and yes. So it's funny, there's a really fine line between wearables and medtech, right? And so I think when we think about wearables, and in this case, we do think of it as medtech, that's one of our biggest connected devices on the platform. a lot of experience there in Europe, here in North America. We are starting to see more of that. There's a blur. line. Speaker 1 (36:46.606) It's not it's it's a steady flow, not a tsunami yet. But I think we are we are a believer that that is one area for us as we think ahead over the next two or three years. Where will we start to see a lot of incubation of new ideas, new products and so forth? That's certainly at the forefront. Understanding green tech and where we can play. That's it. And that's really in the industrial side, right? the industrialized. Exactly. And that's what's ironic is I feel like the smart grid was the very first IOT movement that never happened. Right? I mean, it was I dropped out of college joining Grid Energy startup that was supposed to be part of the smart grid. And that found great other money before before we made it. But not many people have. Right. Even if that that company would have worked out, the industry of smart grid hasn't taken off yet, despite we now have more batteries in everyone's garages than we had two years ago, let alone 10 or 15. Exactly. Speaker 2 (37:40.29) We have more batteries in people's homes, basements are replacing gas janitors outside of these power walls or eco flows got a huge set of home batteries now. Yeah. But you're right. So back to med tech. didn't mean to take this off the tangent. Med tech, think, something most of what we do today is in infant tech, infant med tech. so the extension of that into senior care is very logical, I think. or acute care even, kidding there, because I think you and I were talking at dinner that remote patient monitoring, remote patient monitoring is just starting to take over med tech because it's a way to break into a payer system because you get reimbursed for remote patient monitoring and it breaks you into something everyone understands, but it allows you to do the thing your med device does that's at a small scale and they get enough data to do it at a big scale. Exactly. Speaker 2 (38:33.666) So I think that as you and I were talking about data earlier in this podcast, the home IoT data set is useful for trends and what you should be doing and efficiency. The health care industry data is truly going to life changing and saving. mean, learning a little bit more about yourself or a patient in a hospital or your treatment plans. mean, Elijah, you and I are working on a couple of devices right now that just record how you respond to treatment over time and changes the treatment based on how you respond to it. Well, and having that connected data, too, of how somebody in one place may have responded to a certain treatment. That's where being able to have access to that data when a new person comes in, that previously that doctor might not have had access to that data. But now it's all connected. It's all in the cloud. And they can go and look at previous cases and look at the way that this one might be similar or might be different to a previous case. Well, and the doctor doesn't have to make comparison with machine learning and large language models. Absolutely. so good. The doctor can ask, hey, has any other patient responded like this? Yeah. And it's going to go pull up those exact records. So the doctor can review the other three patients that did that exact same response curve, not just AI hallucinating what the doctor's supposed to do. Yeah. But it's finding the right data set in the sea now of collected data on personal health or specific health metrics or. know, gains in physical therapy or, you know, skills that people are regaining after an injury. time to care is going to come way, way down. And that's one of the exciting derivative benefits of what we're starting to see in that. Speaker 2 (40:03.838) And the other one that's really fun is the gamification. I don't know if you've got too many clients in this space that you're getting doctors and really device makers to trick patients into eating their veggies, doing their exercises, taking their medicine. I mean, fun doing it. And they're tricking them into becoming better, healthier, you know, insert positive up into the right metric here because they're gamifying the experience the same way that video games have gamified it. and having fun doing it. Speaker 2 (40:28.61) both on consoles for all of us growing up originally of, leveled up, this is good, I wanna go to the next level, all the way to the smartphone, the Angry Birds, insert thing here of that constant, I can check it now, I can play it for a little bit, I can see my progress. And it's really, I think, gonna revolutionize medicine without more drugs, without more treatment or more thing. It's just going to be coaching you and delivering a healthier lifestyle because you have so much data. Yeah. So we're I'm really excited by the prospects that MedTech is going to introduce to us over the next couple of years. Wearables is is well within our strike zone. And so we're starting to see a little more curiosity there and hope that it is becomes that tsunami I mentioned a little bit ago. Yeah, now it's coming. So I'm probably the canary in the coal mine because I think the hardware's got to be there before the software becomes the problem that you can then start helping for everybody. But now we're seeing on our side and it's just exciting because half the time we're not even building a new device. We're not reinventing a new medtech. It's not academic tech transfer. We're getting existing companies coming to us where they've been making this thing for 30 years and, hey, the doctor usually reads the screen and reacts in the moment to whatever's on the screen of this data set. Can you ship it to the cloud so we can go ML it and find patterns over years instead of instance? And that's just for us so easy and empowering. Now, another whole episode is FDA compliance and software. How hard that's become in last six years. But we can burn that bridge. That's outside of our area of responsibility. That's a problem you and the customer have. Speaker 2 (42:04.799) It's super fun good times had by all. Yeah, but now this has been super fun. Thanks so much for coming in Good. Speaker 1 (42:10.776) Grant, thanks so much. to be here. So, for all of you listening at home, we'll make sure to keep tabs on the IoT space here, both with AILA and the coming IoT wave that's continuing to hit us. So, thanks for joining. We'll catch you all next time.