Comment by siscia | Hacker News Reader

Comment by siscia | Hacker News Reader

Since we are talking about IoT and market I would like to ask you guys to share some thoughts..

I am actually focusing quite a lot on IoT in general.

I was lucky enough to land a quite interesting contract to manage a LoRaWAN architecture, I learned every trick of one open source implementation[1] (big shout out to brocaar who is the author) and now I am considering selling my expertise as a product.

So providing for a flat monthly fee all my knowledge in running such system plus my expertise about LoRa in general.

Then I will segment the market considering the number of devices that an user need:

1. Extremely cheap (50€/month), sharing the resources with other tenants and best effort email support for less the 50 remote nodes

2. Quite expensive (5000€/month) for a High Available, scalable and isolated architecture (plus guarantee support) for whoever needs to manage more nodes.

Do you believe this is a viable solution or I should focus on something different?

[1]: https://github.com/brocaar/loraserver

You might be a bit early (especially in the USA), but I think helping people implement LoRa will be a massive market. (Bigger than setting up WiFi networks for companies back in the day.) It covers a unique niche between GSM and WiFi that just couldn't be solved until now.

I think your segmentation is way to rough. There is a ton of space between the farm with a few hundred nodes to manage, and Nest with a few million nodes.

People are just learning best practices to manage a few thousand web servers. Managing a few thousand brickable devices with KBs of RAM is more challenging.

You definitely have a point on the segmentation, however, there was a rationale behind it.

It seems to me quite unlikely that someone will buy only the software and not the hardware, I believe that most of these systems will be installed by some vertical company that will sell both hardware and software. And I honestly don't have the knowledge, nor the capital, to set up a vertical company around (say agriculture).

It ends up to understand what should be my customers and I am afraid they won't be the final user of the system.

My customers are technical, I provide them with digital data that they should somehow consume and it is not an easy task...

My thoughts are that no-one will invest in hundreds or thousands of nodes till they have seen and bought and used a dozen - and the supplier of the prototype will almost certainly be the supplier for the rest.

For many companies the sales channel to this might be the it agency (postlight type of company) - so I would suggest selling your expertise to these guys first.

I agree with you, whoever will provide the first working prototype will provide the whole system.

What you mean by postlight type of company?

Postlight is a NYC based agency that do "initial digital MVPs" or similar - taking companies to a starting point for some new venture - do a good ish podcast - search iTunes

> LoRaWAN architecture, I learned every trick of one open source implementation[1]

> [1]: https://github.com/brocaar/loraserver

How does that compare to the TTN stack [2]? I thought that was the most popular choice by a large margin.

[2] https://github.com/TheThingsNetwork/ttn

TTN is more an open network where everybody can contribute.

The other project is just the server architecture to run a private environment.

The idea is similar, however when you need total control on your infrastructure I believe the the loraserver project wins hands down.

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