[mangoman]

I'm confused, how would this be different than an IOT app developer adding mixpanel, amplitude, etc and tagging the various events in their app? does the sdk somehow automatically figure out when the device that the user is trying to connect actually connects properly?

[heidig]

Heidi from Kraftful here again. You’re right, it is possible to track all the right events and then send data to Amplitude and configure charts there. The way this is different is that we’ve already done most of that work for hardware companies. So they don’t need to figure out how to track IoT specific events. The SDK doesn’t do that automatically, but our documentation saves them time figuring out how to do it. And our dashboard is pre-configured so that IoT PMs don’t need to spend time configuring charts or figuring out which metrics matter for IoT. Amplitude also doesn’t have IoT specific benchmarks, usability recommendations, and app store review analysis. So this is just a more complete solution for everything an IoT PM needs to improve the experience in the app.

[mangoman]

Thanks for responding! I'm not quite sure I follow what the value proposition (over a generic analytics solution) would be then if the SDK doesn't know how to automatically detect the 'interesting' events and I'd have to add them manually, unless I'm missing something? Why is 'figuring out how to' track IoT specific events tricky? And why would 'your documentation' be enough of a differentiator? It seems like the important events would largely be based on various APIs provided Android/iOS, no?

I guess, I'm not really understanding how kraftful would save users time. And those other product analytic services have tons of integrations, AND they could also use those solutions for their landing pages / logged in web experience too. Imagine creating a 'funnel' like

Home screen (referrer=HN) -> product purchased -> app installed -> device connected

where the funnel tracks the funnel of users from HN all the way down to device connection. Does that make sense?

I realize that my concerns are a little pessimistic, sorry about that! I do think that there's something there, but I'm not quite sure I understand the overall value prop. I also noticed your site has something like a no-code 'white label' mobile app product for IOT device manufacturers, that seems really interesting! how does that tie in with the analytics piece?

[heidig]

No worries, appreciate a little skepticism! Figuring out how to track IoT specific events is tricky because there are usually too many cooks in the kitchen (back and forth between product, engineering, data science, and sometimes even marketing teams). This back and forth is often a barrier to using a generic analytics solution. From talking with hundreds of IoT companies, they just don’t use these tools. Some of them try to use Google Analytics because it’s pre-configured, but it doesn’t show them the right metrics for IoT type interactions. That’s why they need pre-configured charts focusing on IoT metrics.

About our no-code UX platform: it was our first take at solving usability of connected products with an experience that improves based on interaction data. That product is live in the field and has for example improved the app store ratings for one of the largest HVAC providers in North America from a brutal 1 star rating to 4.5+. We got to dog food our analytics solution with that platform before productizing it with other beta users to make sure it can actually be used to improve an IoT product.