jtrjr
 Second Officer
Flight distance : 4341 ft
United States
Offline
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John,
I appreciate your response (I thought this thread was dead, what'd you go on vacation!) and your story sounds very similar to Ken's. Having been self-employed most of my life I get what you're saying. As I've said to Ken as well, it's a tough road you guys have choosen. Without the passion that you obviously possess, it's a dead-end. I was deeply involved in developing my own, very robust video security program. I am not a programmer but comfortable with IT and system platforms. I had the vision for the application, similar to you guys. Doing things that the other players weren't. It was a side business opportunity but it complimented my core business. I hired staff and did all of the planning and provided the capital. We got started, just as you guys have, with a major vendor's SDK and off we went. The first few months were rocky but fun as we started to figure out the way we could incorporate our visions into the application. We started to get a working product within about 6 months. That's about when we started running into the limitations of the SDK and our inability to execute some of the features that were going to make us different. We would work for a little longer trying to see if we could find away around the limitations and when we exhausted all avenues we would put that item on the back-burner to pick up again later. We'd move on and incorporate another item or two and hit another roadblock. This cycle continued. At about a year into it I had to realize that we would not be able to develop what we wanted because the SDK was much to limited in it's scope and the vendor had already moved on to more advanced products, basically obsoleteing the products that we were developing. Sound familiar? Anyway, after a great deal of investment, a lot of time and effort it was time to make a "business" decision. Not a passion or emotional decision, a business decision. I pulled the plug. Fortunately and by my own design, not one single customer was impacted by my decision. We were doing all of our own alpha and beta testing on our own site. Although all of the brochures and sales/marketing pieces had been developed and even printed and I was just getting ready to hire a Sales Manager for the project not a single customer or potential customer was impacted. Nobody's current security system (substantial customer investment) was left vulnerable or put at risk. I think if you read this note you probably understand what I'm saying. The evolution of this segment is growing so rapidly and to the mainstream population that, in my opinion, customer investment are being lost. Again, in my opinion, in many instances not because of customer error but because of flawed and untested applications/systems. What ensues next is exactly what we're seeing on these very pages. Is it the hardware? Is it the software? Is it the customer? Is it the ignorant customer? Obviously, it's a combination of all of those and others which makes the paradox that much harder to resolve. Everybody races around finger pointing to the other guy. Not a great start for this industry if you ask me. I'm actually loving every aspect of what's going on right now because I know, without a single doubt, that I will lose my investment in my product, then I'll invest more into a new one. Because I believe that I understand how this plays out and I wanted to experience the thrill of something new. I'm passionate about my motorcycles, fishing and now drones but my number one passion is business! That being said, I'm enjoying every minute of this thing from all aspects. It will be very interesting to see how it all plays out. I'm all in, one-hundred percent (not 101 or 150 percent because I know, as a real businessman, there is no such thing). I wish guys like you all of the luck and good fortune in the world and I hope you get to live the dream. It is the ultimate thrill to succeed and live the dream. IMHO, success lies in two things and unfortunately neither one of them is "the dream". The two things I believe create real success (excepting dumb luck, which never hurts either) are the "written plan" (a real one!) and the "numbers" (they have no passion, they have no emotion and they never lie). In my limited experience those two things must be in place and constantly executed, studied and revised for any real measure of success. Remember the old saying " A bad plan well executed is better than no plan at all". See here I go again, I'm retired now and all I think about is business. I'm supposed to be out flying. I did solicit Ian's input and he did a fantastic job giving me the highlights. I really appreciate the stuff he did last night, gave me a good idea on what to expect. I had to have been one of the your first customers, I purchased the whole shebang the first day I saw it. It's installed and ready to go on my iPad Mini and My iPhone 6. All my stuff is charged, packed up and ready to go. I might just turn your app on today. If I do, I'll let you know what I think even if you don't ask me to. As you can see from this note and the others I've left in this thread, shy I'm not! I hope the version I have installed is the most current one.
Later,
Jerry |
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