Building Hardware Through A Software Lens

The connected device world is an interesting space. We spend a lot of our time trying to figure out how all of the pieces come together, or what makes a good IoT product in general. For us, it always comes down to the software. After all, that’s the promise of a connected world. That’s what you’re paying for: the scalable, intelligent features that come with software. And it’s a beautiful thing when you start to think about devices and household appliances from a pure software perspective.

When you think of it as software enabled by hardware, you start to push the boundaries of what you thought was possible and think about physical products in a much different light. You think about things like “how do we not constrain our software by our hardware?”, which is a very interesting thought process.

Rachio thinks this way.

We are watching a number of trends taking shape because of the transformative power of software on our physical world and we try to interpret what those trends mean for and how they tie into a connected device company. We thought it would be great to share our learnings in a few blog posts, starting with this one, the obvious one.

Start by building a 10x better mousetrap.

Eighty six percent of our customers replace what most of the world deems to be a working product: an irrigation controller that is neither connected nor intelligent but still runs the sprinkler system. If we’re going to continue to replace “working” products, we’re going to need to create something that is ten times better than what’s being recycled.

The key here is to do it with software.  Companies have been making irrigation controllers for decades. There’s most likely not going to be a lot of innovation on the hardware outside of connectivity. Instead, the 10x improvement needs to come from software features. This is probably fairly obvious, but as we go through these trends, you’ll notice how this has a profound difference on the end product.

At Rachio, we believe the product must do something intelligent. It must do something you, the homeowner, couldn’t have done without great pain in the past. Installation of a physical product is just the start. We design and build features that make your ongoing relationship with the product a wonderful experience. We strive to make you feel empowered by the system and brought into the decision making process when you’re ready and willing. Since your ongoing engagement is going to be through the software, that’s where we focus our energy.

Here are just a number of high level benefits that come with a connected device over a non-connected device:

• Convenience: the ability to control and interact with the product from anywhere, on any device.
• Pain Relief: real-time smart scheduling that makes efficient use of a resource, which was painful to do manually in the past. Or a cycling technology, like our smart cycle, that more efficiently distributes the resource. 
• Empowerment: usage information at your fingertips about a valuable resource like water or energy, at the single product and community level. 
• Shared Access: a sharing feature that makes a subset of product functionality available to family members or service providers, on-site or remotely.
• Timely Information: notifications that get you information that you deem important in notification systems you’ve become accustomed to.
• Bundling: combinations of data feeds, like how a weather feed can now affect your landscape.
• Delighters: the small things that were essentially impossible before, but can easily be done with software now.  An example for us is our water hammer feature that keeps your pipes from banging in the middle of the night when your irrigation system is switching zones. 

This is just the short list and these types of benefits can really only be achieved with software, and they make these products very different from their non-connected predecessors. The really exciting thing is that these features can also be expanded on and continuously updated for our customers as we learn what they value most.

Next up, Getting Connected - what a public API can mean for a connected device company.

We’re looking forward to continuing to share as we learn.