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.”
Well, I am proud to say that it has paid off. I have now got a system that can send live power data from our very own custom hardware to our twisted server, and have graphs rendered. It has been a hard slog, but now we have something that we might be able to sell… to one or two clients. I am fairly certian that even with promises of upcoming features we will not sell very many units until our system can do the other impressive things that we have planned.
Fortunately from here things only get easier. With all this key technology in place there are no new peices of the puzzle to add, just nice incremental improvements.
Okay, so who am I kidding? I have to master JQuery to get the live data working the way that I would like to… I have online billing and subscriptions to set up, Restful apis to develop, all manner of ideas and features that I would like to add. There are important features yet to add to the firmware. But we now have a system that we could install and it is enough to delight at least a few alpha testers. What they have to say about it will ultimately be what guides our decision of the very next thing to implement.
I like to think that a year from now I will look back on this blog entry and smile. Considering how far I have come already, by then our system will be very exciting.
When I look at the power monitoring market now, I see many companies providing cheap meters that do not tap into the power of the internet. There are meters that offer clunky online interfaces and cost the earth. The demand for internet savvy power meters is so strong that many do-it-yourselfers have forged a path with modified off the shelf hardware and garnered quite a following.
We are ready, and the market is waiting.
I think you took the right step in making sure version one delivered the bare minimum - fulfill the expectation of what the product title implies. Now, as you say, just wait for the market to drive your next steps. Well done!