GridSpy

16 months ago now I left my day job to move to a mix of Gridspy and Contracting work. It really has been a hard slog (more on that later) but we’ve made it through. Our initial offering has been refined into a reliable, complete system and we are already getting positive reactions from our clients.

Running a startup parttime is never a glamerous thing to do. I’ve talked about it before, but it just isn’t practical to go fulltime on your startup for over 6 months without a lot of savings or outside funding. We had neither, but what we have had is high paying contracting jobs. Thank goodness we are both experienced engineers.

What Follows under this entry is a short rant I wrote and didn’t publish about the difficulty of being a parent, starting a startup and contracting all at the same time.

Stephen and I spent August through September hard at work in different contracting roles to re-fill our respective bank accounts. It was just enough time to reflect on how easy it is to just be a contractor and to leave the difficult selling and running a business part to someone else. Since we are both engineers, contracting is like a holiday to us in many ways.

It took us both by surprise when Stephen had a meeting with another entrepreneur in the sensor space. It wasn’t long before that entreprenur was arranging a meetings and talking serously about purchaing our IP and merging GridSpy into his endevour. We were suddenly confronted by the financial severity of what we are trying to accomplish and the very real possibility that we might get real money for our work. In the world of high hopes of young startups, we’ve garnered some interest, made some sales but haven’t yet made “real money” or gone past the tipover point into a self-sustaining business.

I’ve moved office again. When I first left full-time employment for a company I had just begun my exciting new life as a self-employed programmer working in the comfort of my own home. The commute was excellent, the environment comfortable and the space affordable. For the months up until that move I had been a part time entrepreneur working 60 to 70 hour weeks (plus father time) and it had taken its toll. I was mentally exhausted, unavailable for the kids and my wife, and stressed out.

When ‘working from home’ I bounced back to normal 40 hour weeks, with time spent either contracting to pay the bills or working on Gridspy. The change in environment and focus improved my mental state and allowed a lot of progress. But then the honeymoon ended. I have discovered that home is an environment rife with distractions, unfortunately all from people I love. We settled into a routine of the toddlers and their mum going out each morning and then returning at lunchtime to spend the afternoon at home. Towards about 3pm the household becomes progressively louder as the toddlers become more tired and amp up their behavior. When this happened, it became extremely hard to resist lending a helping hand.

I’d like to dive into some technical detail today about those automatic updates that everyone takes for granted.

If you are a web developer, I wouldn’t blame you for thinking that deploying updated software is (mostly) painless and simple. Once the latest version of our code is live on the server, all our customers are essentially updated. Because a web developer can control the set-up of the web server it is very easy to deploy quickly and predictably.

Even the desktop folks have it pretty easy. There are lots of automated ways to check for new versions of code, and just as many ways to install the latest version onto the client’s PC. If things go wrong, as things often do due to both human and hardware issues, there is a human involved who can interact with the computer to fix things.

Life got very interesting one and a half months ago. I had a meeting with my employer where he sat me down and asked me if GridSpy was ready to survive without my salary. Essentially he asked me if I was ready to leave and take GridSpy full-time. Being an VC funded entrepreneur himself he knew how hard it is to make that initial leap into full-time start-up and gave me a gentle nudge “out of the nest.”

After that meeting my mind was racing. My wife and I agreed that taking GridSpy full-time was absolutely exciting but equally frightening. We’ve been tightening our belts for some time to get ready for bootstrapping but even we don’t know how soon GridSpy will transition from a ‘sure thing’ to a trading business. I assured her that I could land on my feet with a contracting job should the money run out.

Currently Gridspy has a centralised server where each user gets a dashboard online to read their power usage. Originally we planned to have these dashboards hosted inside each building on simple servers. Our first prototype simply used a small PC, our IO range and simple sensors. The PC logged the data and also hosted the dashboard.

It seemed sensible at the time. It seemed easier to have one device both logging data and providing a website. A locally hosted dashboard would ensure a nice fast connection between the user and the dashboard. We found ourselves a nice cheap low power PC and created a nice blend of custom software and great open-source technology. The custom part was a sensor-polling database stuffing daemon. This plan let us develop rapidly and we planned to take it to market.

Update - we are now now working full-time, in our own office!

Most startups seem to embrace 60-80 hour weeks, you keep reading about them and begin to believe that this is normal. After 12 hour marathon coding sessions ‘typical entrepreneurs’ walk 10 metres from desk to bed and collapse in their shared accommodations. Living in such lean conditions makes those crucial first months of business far cheaper. This work ethic and minimial living costs maximises the runway before the seed money runs out.

Paul Graham is one of my favourite bloggers, and in his essay entitled The Other Road Ahead he paints a clear picture of how lean a start-up can be, stating “You can literally launch your product as three guys sitting in the living room of an apartment, and a server collocated at an ISP. We did.”

It is difficult to admit, but Gridspy is not yet complete. The physical prototypes of our new Radio device are not yet manufactured and much of the software is yet to be written. That has not stopped me from putting on my sales-person hat and describing Gridspy as a complete system. We know that everything will be finished running and ready for deployment in January or February next year, but it is not ready today.

Sitting down to develop new features for Gridspy is a real pleasure, but it has recently become a rare one. Marketing has quickly become essential to gather feedback from our clients and secure pre-orders. Trust me, there is no time-sink like marketing. Hours flash by as careful email dialogue takes place, meetings are arranged and executed, and promotional materials created. I started to forget how great it is to sit down and code for hours straight and my late hours quickly caught up with me.

After deciding to cut down our power usage, we know exactly where to start. A quick trip around the home or office to turn off standby devices, shut down computers and set the Air Conditioning to less comfortable levels is all it takes… right?

So after doing all those things, you wait and wait and wait some more. Finally the power bill arrives and with luck, it is lower than the previous month.

To me, ‘web 2.0’ is fresh, fast and fun. Gridspy is all about making power monitoring fascinating and accessible - that’s the goal. We’re talking numbers you can understand, graphs you can read and systems that you can intuit as you change the amount of power you use. Read on to learn how we deliver on our live data vision all the way from the Nexus to the browser.

Our Gt Barrier offgrid house uses 2 towel rails worth of power each day (4Kwh), but in our apartment in the city we use 13Kwh. That is 3 times more…. Is it the hot water, or the fridge, or the cooking? I just don’t know and that it annoys me. A friend of mine has tells me his power bill for a single parent and child is between $300 and $500 per month. They wonder if someone is stealing the power somehow.

If there is one thing that trying to make my own product has tought me, it is that the old sages are right. The key to success is to choose the very smallest possible subset of your features and focus with razor vision on that and only that. I have spent the last six months doing nothing else, discarding distracting feature after seemingly important improvement until only the key feature remained.

Over the last few months, my mantra has been “All I need is web-based graphs of power usage.”

I have been programming in C++ for ages, so it would come as no surprise that I am comfortable with it. That however, does not make me god’s gift to database programming. I have tinkered with these mysterious beasts several times and always come away impressed at how much I could do with so little effort. With just a little SQL, an amazing amount of data just leaps from the hard disk into a handy table. So, with a little trepidation, I set out to design a database schema for the Gridspy power-monitoring system.

Update : You can now purchase the Nexus (now called the GridHub)

Since the beginning of last year, my Dad and I have been hard at work on our own power monitoring system. It wasn’t always for power monitoring, originally it was more about controlling the cool automated house on great barrier. It didn’t take long to realise that just measuring power usage is a pretty cool feature in and of itself, one with minimal hardware costs.

Have you ever been stuck in that horrible guess and check routine? You know the one - the page layout is just wrong and Firefox isn’t quite reading your mind. You keep making small changes to the css but nothing seems to change. Suddenly you make the wrong change and everything is a mess. Trust me, I’ve been there too. I’ve also seen my fair share of inscrutable JavaScript bugs. As a C++ Veteran coming to all this fancy web stuff is fun but can quickly become frustrating when all you see is that nice opaque view that browsers tend to give our users.

Far off the beaten trail, you will find the Barrier house. A perfect retreat from city living, it is nestled among trees high on a hill overlooking a bay on Great Barrier Island. Like most houses on the barrier, it is completely off the grid and has no access to the power grid, or council provided water and sewerage services. These are all facilities that have to be provided on site. There is no road access to the property, the only access is by boat and by foot. The construction process required a barge and a helicopter!