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Hey Arjun and Sid! I am CTO at Golioth[0], a connected device cloud platform. Just wanted to say congrats on the launch, and wish y’all the best of luck! There is lots of complexity to be addressed, and it is always great to see more folks building in this space. Happy to compare notes any time!

[0] https://golioth.io/

Hey, thanks a lot! Really appreciate you reaching out!

I agree. There's so many cool things to do in this space, and so many unique ways to achieve them. We're excited to be here, and would love to chat sometime as well!

I've never attempted to use IoT devices for development, but my recommendation is to make the copy quickly explain what problem you are solving. E.g. "Stop spending months building infrastructure to manage your IoT device systems, instead integrate in days"

Perhaps with a concrete example with and without your product.

Hey, thanks for the feedback. Great point! We're gonna add something like this to the landing page soon. And we're going to write a few blog posts showing quick integrations across different hardware and protocols as well.

I've been staring at the same space for a while from the point of view of needing to integrate our user facing application with various hardware platforms provided by partner companies specializing in mostly RTLS solutions.

Because these companies are almost universally not very good at software (bad UI/UX, weird bespoke SDKs, lots of proprietary components, etc.), there's a lot of wheel reinvention, integration issues, etc. And the worst is that non of this stuff delivers any value until you build typically very bespoke services on top of this stuff. The software they ship is effectively low level middleware: a necessary evil that the end user doesn't care about.

In my view, what's lacking here is good Open Source components and standardized protocols. And out of the box software experiences that deliver true value using those. Companies seem to be defaulting to building walled gardens and low level SDKs. And they just aren't very good at it. It's a mess of low quality, low level software, and a lot of messy integration projects. You can't order any of this stuff on Amazon and expect it to be plug and play.

Ironically, the home automation market is much more mature than the industry is at this point. You even have some interoperability for devices, protocols, etc. and some pretty decent open integration platforms, slick mobile applications, etc.. That does not exist for large scale industrial/business usage outside a few narrow verticals/niches (e.g. fire alarms, agv tracking in automotive, etc.). Consumers are much more critical and less forgiving than companies when it comes to buying stuff. If it doesn't work, they'll return it.

Something like Apple Airtag is science fiction for asset tracking in an industrial context. It simply does not exist in a usable form. A polished easy to use end user experience that works out of the box. It's easier to track your luggage than it is to track expensive machinery across a supply chain.

The widespread software incompetence is holding back the IOT industry as a whole. They all talk big about topics like ESG, energy savings, smart buildings, fancy tracking, etc. But when you pick it apart it's a bunch of chips in a fugly 3d printed housing with some MQTT and Grafana on the side. They throw it over the fence with some proprietary SDK. And good luck building anything that does anything useful. You are typically looking at expensive integrations and consulting projects. Just to connect some hardware thingies to some ERP thingies.

We're trying to fix this in our company; just so we can remove the friction of getting companies started with our software solutions. It's hard poking through all the BS in this industry.

The core issue is the user/developer experience of Industrial IoT is nowhere near where it should be. I understand where you're coming from, and I feel the same way too. Building a great developer experience is something we deeply care about. Exactly for that reason, we started building our own Device SDKs.

We also have support for open protocols such as MQTT and HTTP+SSE, but the Device SDKs enable us to provide a richer set of capabilities. Our SDKs actually speak a custom protocol we developed for higher efficiency. We're also going to add many more features such as automatic telemetry collection and tracing support, which is more feasible with a plug-and-play SDK.

Another big issue you pointed out is with documentation, a key part of Developer Experience is always great docs. A compelling model might be standalone open source tooling that works independently, with an integrated platform that ties it all together, creating a strong ecosystem.

I've been using Home Assistant with a bunch of Zigbee and Wifi devices at home, and it's been pretty stable. However, for an industrial context, there are already many other hurdles, having a platform handle a lot of the cloud infra and connectivity & monitoring is really helpful.

The problem with custom protocols and SDKs is vendor dependence. When you go out of business or pivot, what happens to my product? I was already burned once by Google cloud IoT...

You’re completely right. Vendor lock-in and platforms shutting down are real risks. We also used Google IoT Core in our previous startup and would have been burned by its shutdown as well.

In fact, the idea for a unified IoT platform came from dealing with the complexity of setting up so many different Google Cloud services just to get data ingestion working.

I think a healthy balance between open source and commercial platforms is possible. We want to compete on reliability, UX, and features while building open device-side tooling and protocols that give users the ability to switch or self-host if they choose. We’re far from that today, but it’s the direction we want to pursue.

-- Sid, Fostrom Co-Founder