#lockitron

I'm a fan of crowdfunding. More often than not, you need to be prepared to treat it as a donation or long term investment.

Now the device did ship and while it garnered pretty solid reviews, especially for its ecosystem, it still had problems. Its WiFi proved to be a pretty serious battery drain and the device would have to enter “sleep mode” to conserve battery. This led to delays in interaction and people asking, “why don’t I just pull my damn key out?!” Not the question you want people asking for a “smart lock.” The other major issue was how Lockitron worked. In an ideal world, everyone’s deadbolts are installed well and operate with buttery smoothness. In the real world, yours were probably installed as poorly as mine and you many times have to really twist the bolt or move the door a bit to get it to latch. This led to people having to replace their lock anyway, alter their door or the Lockitron burning through battery trying to force the door shut.

Lockitron appears to be forging ahead and appears to have learned from these early pitfalls. Today they announced the Bolt (not really the most clever name in the world). This time around, the device is a full-on lock replacement. No mounting over the existing deadbolt, you’ll replace the whole thing and will get it working right from the start. The device also ditched on-board WiFi in lieu of a “bridge” device that connects to your system and spares the battery in the locking device. They now claim up to 6 month battery life, which is great. It still has Bluetooth LE so that you can walk up the door with your connected phone and will automatically unlock, but the bridge removes an antenna. They also took out the “knock sensor” citing it was unreliable and the functionality wasn’t worth the trade-off in battery life. I applaud them for focusing on the important things and realizing battery life is a pivotal feature. What’s also nice is that Lockitron is offering a service called KeyMatch that offers to match your current key. This keeps people renting still in the game.

Lockitron also realized it really let down a lot of people during the last launch with the number and length of delays. Lockitron seems to have its supply chain hammered down this time and promises to ship on time. It is doing this in a two-stage manner. It’s offering a “Preview” device that is essentially a beta for early adopters to provide feedback and work out bugs. This will ship in March of 2015 and is only available in satin nickel and doesn’t offer the KeyMatch program. The full retail device ships in “late spring” and will be offered in multiple styles/colors. Let’s hope that still means 2015.

At $99, this smart lock is one of the cheapest out there and offers great looks and a developer friendly ecosystem. As this is the team’s second go-around, I expect this product to be much more polished and the production process to be the same.

Pre-order here.

For the full Lockitron blog post on the product, head here.

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Lockitron Bolt

The Bolt next to the beta “Preview” model that’s available in March.

The “bridge” device that serves as the WiFi conduit for Bolt.

Hardware is difficult. That is, still, no excuse for promising delivery of something - and then being over a year late. Like, say, Coin. Or Lockitron. Or, to a lesser extent, August. 

Though it may seem like it - that isn't everybody. The good folks at Nest didn't over promise with their thermostat. They had prototypes out and in press hands for 3+ months. They got the kinks out first. They didn't presell - until the thing worked. And when things went sideways on the smoke detector - they had goodwill.

The lean startup advocates preselling, then building. But if you look at other hardware companies that disappointed early on - Square comes to mind - you realize it's hard to come back from a brand standpoint. 

The advantage of being a startup is you can fail quietly. Uber's bad moments all happened with a few hundred (maybe thousand) users in San Francisco's SOMA district. Nobody had heard of them. They were focused on customers and delivering an awesome product.

Not cashing millions of dollars of pre-sold revenue, and basking in the glow of a "successful" campaign.

I don't dispute that early sales give great indication to future demand. But Coin and August both raised plenty of money and were going to build what they were going to build regardless. In the interim, the distraction of managing tens of thousands of would-be customers, PR, marketing, and the rest of it cost them the focus on delivering the product that was necessary. 

I bet you anything Coin gets hacked before mine ships next year: all this attention put a giant target on their back that every hacker is looking at every day.  

And I'll bet you my Coin (whenever it arrives) that the coolest cooler also fails to deliver on time. 

We’re happy to announce that integrations with Philips Hue and one of today's most popular locks (TBA) are done and being tested. Both integrations will be included in the first batch when Chui ships this fall.