Status of Camect as a consumer product

[P Mallone]

This is a question for the Camect guys:

Now that you've launched on Indiegogo what's the plan for making this a standard consumer product and growing the user-base? 

Are revenues enough to continue running the cloud infrastructure? 

Should we expect a wink-styled near-death experience?

Have you acquired VC funding?

What's the future look like?

[David Messina]

These are all great questions. I'd be curious to know this information as well.

[Will Stillwell]

The difference is the ongoing subscription that Camect has.   Wink brought that up after the fact.   To get cloud based features with Camect it requires a subscription.   

I hope they are around for a long time.   I'd also be interested in them offering people to build their own Camect on their own hardware using the Camect software / cloud.   

~Will

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[CamectArup]

I haven't really been following Wink so I can't compare -- but there is no problem with paying for the costs of the cloud infrastructure in the foreseeable future. No need to worry about that. We will also be turning on subscription enforcement soon for those who didn't buy the lifetime plan. 

Like all small businesses, we have had to make adjustments to plans based on the events of the past few months. We're still waiting to see which sales channels are going to be the best bets in the post-Covid-19 world. So, I also can't tell you yet what the future looks like in terms of growth, except to say that it's not necessarily all bad. The events that have affected the world also make it less likely that we suddenly wind up with a large competitor. 

[Will Stillwell]

Wink sold the product for years with no subscription.  Then they gave everyone 1 week warning, Pay $5 a month or loose all functionality.   

For those of us who didn't pay for the lifetime, is there a way to upgrade our subscriptions to lifetime?  

~Will

On Fri, May 15, 2020 at 4:32 PM CamectArup <ar...@camect.com> wrote:

I haven't really been following Wink so I can't compare -- but there is no problem with paying for the costs of the cloud infrastructure in the foreseeable future. No need to worry about that. We will also be turning on subscription enforcement soon for those who didn't buy the lifetime plan. 

Like all small businesses, we have had to make adjustments to plans based on the events of the past few months. We're still waiting to see which sales channels are going to be the best bets in the post-Covid-19 world. So, I also can't tell you yet what the future looks like in terms of growth, except to say that it's not necessarily all bad. The events that have affected the world also make it less likely that we suddenly wind up with a large competitor. 

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[P Mallone]

On Friday, May 15, 2020 at 6:31:59 PM UTC-5, CamectArup wrote:

I haven't really been following Wink so I can't compare -- but there is no problem with paying for the costs of the cloud infrastructure in the foreseeable future. No need to worry about that. We will also be turning on subscription enforcement soon for those who didn't buy the lifetime plan. 

Like all small businesses, we have had to make adjustments to plans based on the events of the past few months. We're still waiting to see which sales channels are going to be the best bets in the post-Covid-19 world. So, I also can't tell you yet what the future looks like in terms of growth, except to say that it's not necessarily all bad. The events that have affected the world also make it less likely that we suddenly wind up with a large competitor. 

What's your vision for the product? Are there still technical milestones left to achieve? Is there a public roadmap? Are they top-secret?

Do you have a plan for growing the user-base? I don't think sales-channels is the only problem. What about customer awareness?

Selfishly I'd like to see the product be the #1 camera integration in Home Assistant. I see pent-up demand for a solid AI-based camera solution in that community and I think your user-base would grow if the integration was solid. I bet that's true in the SmartThings and Hubitat communities too. Home Assistant is within the top 10 most active projects on Github.

I'm a lifetime subscriber and I'd really like to see the solution continue to improve and survive. I'm just curious what the vision is. I'm just trying to decide if I should put my long-term bet somewhere else...

[CamectArup]

"Still technical milestones left to achieve"? Very much so in the long term. We have many ideas for what can be done that go well beyond what the current product does -- but when and how we get there is constrained by resources, whether people seem to want it, etc. It would not make sense competitively for us to publicly publish all our ideas. 

Growing the user-base is going to be a function of both advertising and organic growth. Where we spend limited advertising resources does depend on first determining which channels look workable for us in the current environment. (e.g. Although we won't stop selling directly to consumers, it may make more sense for us to primarily focus on camera installers and integrators, rather than to compete with the large advertising budgets of other consumer brands.) 

Re: Organic growth / word of mouth. We are certainly interested in supporting enthusiast communities like Home Assistant, Smart Things, Hubitat, etc and are well aware they're large enough to help a lot with awareness.  That's why we put out the home assistant integration. However, we're not specialists in any of those systems, and we were hoping our role would be one of supporting an integration rather than doing it ourselves. We would also love to see it be the #1 camera integration in Home Assistant, but so far haven't really seen much interest from anyone wanting to own the HA integration. We're also not sure of the level of interest in the community even though it's large ... Many people seem to be using Pi's and may not want to buy a system like ours as the hardware cost is comparatively high.  If someone wants to develop the integration further, we'll certainly do what we can to support it. (Of course, we're small and integrations still compete against other features for resources, so interest level does matter.)

In the near term, we're looking at Alexa and Google Home support since those were popular requests, and at what can be done to improve the UI. SmartThings would be high on the list for a look after that if no one else has taken a stab at it by then. 

What other long-term bets are you comparing us to?