Time to read: 7 min
Entrepreneurs are known for falling so hard for their own products that they can’t see past all the fancy features. Not to knock all those labors of love, but when it comes to building products that work (and brands that last), a little cool-headed distance goes a long way. Certain industries lend themselves better to simplicity than others (think door locks vs rocket ships), but even there it’s possible to layer on the bells and whistles a little too thick.
我们与Paul Gerhardt坐下Lockitron, the company that invented the smart lock and booted up a whole new industry sector, for a frank conversation about how they overcomplicated their second-generation product and finally got things right with their third.
进入风暴
Lockitron’s first-gen product effort was a series of electronic customizations to existing locks. This was back in 2011, before anyone else had entered the field. Then, in the fall of 2012, the company became a collateral victim of an apparent anti-hardware wave in the Kickstarter ecosystem: “This was back when Kickstarter reviewed and approved every single campaign application,” explains Paul. “We got rejected, officially because we were considered a ‘home improvement’ project.”
Paul and his team were not to be deterred. They studied the data on the two major crowdfunding platforms, Kickstarter and Indiegogo, and determined they could just as easily build their own crowdfunding platform—and they did. “We built a white label crowdfunding site,” he shares. “Hosted it ourselves, opensourced the code on GitHub, and it got featured as one of the top ten projects on that platform.”
他们在第一天就花了100万美元。
现在，他们面对现金，面临着为住宅市场设计智能锁的前景，它将与所有锁和锁定机构的差异差异很大。前门的孔可能具有相同的标准直径，但是您或您的建筑商安装的实际硬件与成为艺术的程度有所不同。
To cover—literally—all of these variations, Lockitron designed a large box-like structure that fit onto the existing lock. Trouble with that was that over time, the alignment went off, and the lock no longer fit the way it should. Not to mention it had no fewer than fifty (50) custom-molded plastic and metal parts, and functionality that fell flat on arrival.
不必要的功能：敲击传感器
这里的想法是，如果您不回家并且有人敲门，传感器将拾取振动脉动，并且系统将向您的手机发出通知。然后，您可以决定是否打开门。说，对于一个与您住在一起或送货员的朋友。并不是说我们大多数人都会感到很舒服地向陌生人打开大门。保罗同意这不是最好的主意：“在实践中，这很愚蠢，因为人们并没有真正敲门 - 他们敲响了钟声。”
The other thing the team discovered, mainly through user feedback after the first thousand or so units shipped, was that door sensors don’t work with heavy duty, hurricane-proof doors in Florida (knock strength < hurricane strength), or with the light flimsy doors in lower-income neighborhoods that would rattle in their frames every time a truck rolled by.
不必要的功能两个：低功耗Wi-Fi
Lockitron在同一电路板上结合了Wi-Fi和蓝牙，认为这将使人们在智能手机如何与锁之间接触的方式方面具有更大的选择和灵活性。
“We wanted the lock to be Arduino compatible [hence the third AVR controller] so people could modify it,” explains Paul. But the customer base for smart lock systems is different than the user base of, say, racing cars, who might in fact enjoy modifying their machines. People just wanted their Lockitron to work, not to tinker with it.
There was also the “walled garden” trend that Paul and his team began to notice—the tendency for communications device manufacturers, notably Apple, to lock up access and prevent users from modifying the devices. So even if a customer wanted to modify their smartphone and the connection to the smart lock, the manufacturers’ walled gardens would render that nearly impossible.
低功率Wi-Fi棺材中的最后指甲是Wi-Fi本身。“ Wi-Fi协议支持一项节能功能，该功能使您可以在四个AA电池上运行连接的设备一年多。不幸的是，并非每个路由器都有此功能，更糟糕的是，很难看到路由器是否支持该模式。” Paul解释说。因此，如果您确实有一个非支撑路由器，则您的电池将在2个月内耗尽，因为您从锁中排出更多的功率只是为了保持Wi-Fi运行。Lockitron的客户中有20％的客户经历了这一事情，并让公司知道这一点。
Unnecessary Feature Three: Fifty Custom Parts
Okay, this wasn’t really a “feature,” but the reality of no fewer than fifty custom-made parts did complicate Lockitron’s product significantly. “In addition to the alignment and the battery issue,” shares Paul, “we had to deal with the complexity of quality controlling these fifty custom parts. Tolerance variations were cumulative, meaning, some parts could be fine by themselves (+/- 1%), but if you put enough -1% parts together, the product won’t work as intended. Chasing these problems cost us time. And time cost us our customers’ good will.”
消费者的善意并不是要付出的琐事。那里的其他选择和选择太多，让他们耐心地坐在他们的手上，而一家初创公司则弄清楚了他们的成长，即产品的痛苦。当然，除非您实际上是您空间中的第一个玩家，否则人们只会因为他们无法获得产品而减轻您的懈怠。但是您仍然需要用客户做正确的事，因为您不会永远成为“唯一的”。
“It was these three factors—alignment, battery, and part complexity—that made this generation of our smart lock fail, and that made us decide not to take our crowdfunded product to retail,” says Paul.
The result was that over a period of three years, Lockitron took back 10 percent of the units they shipped following their crowdfunding campaign—and doing the right thing and refunding customers’ money (refunds were about 30 percent, including pre-order cancellations). In a smart move, however, with their customers’ permission they transitioned the charge authorizations for those units that had not yet shipped, to the third generation product, which would be called Bolt.
Back to Basics
在这种情况下，您确实想把婴儿扔给沐浴水。Lockitron仅停止了这一点：使用Bolt（他们的V3产品），该团队回到了根源，将他们的课程学到了充分利用，并认真考虑了客户的反馈意见。
“If your first product is a breakout success, it’s tempting to follow that up by trying to repeat the formula but pack in a lot ‘more,’” says Paul. “‘More’ as in everything you had wanted to do before but didn’t have the time, resources, or budget to do. But that’s a trap.”
对于Lockitron而言，他进一步解释说，V3是重点的回报，但专注于质量而不是任何定量方面。他提出：“如果您想要如何制作第二或第三个（或第四个）产品的口头禅，那应该是'更好的'而不是'更多'。”
Their eye on “better,” Lockitron based Bolt on the same mechanical platform as their V1 product, and dropped all of the mechanics from V2. They designed a full replacement lock that replaces the outside and the inside mechanism, but still fits within that standard door hole. Mechanically, this approach made Bolt smaller and a lot simpler than its predecessor because “you’re working with a known set of restraints,” explains Paul. “We got rid of the knock sensor and put the Wi-Fi onto an external device we call ‘Bridge’ that plugs into the wall.”
Bolt’s design is not only appealing, it’s highly functional: the top half of the device is black plastic to give the Bluetooth radio frequency better signal strength (metal cuts the range down). Bluetooth stayed in the new design because it’s built into smartphones.
另一个细节的其他智能锁制造商通常忽略了内部齿轮。您可能看不到它们，但它们确实会影响客户体验：您可能不想听到自己的门机构在锁定的锁定。传统的塑料齿轮是用Delrin聚合物制成的，但Lockitron选择了一种称为Hytrel的聚合物，该聚合物是一种较软的塑料。此外，齿轮的牙齿并非直接向上垂直，在螺旋设计中略微倾斜，这对于工具来说是极具挑战性的。但是这两个因素使齿轮更加安静。如此之多，以至于保罗完全有信心地说：“我们的市场上最安静。”
As for the knob, that ubiquitous functionality, that part of the lock with which we come into direct physical contact the most—and which you’ll also notice in the company’s logo—Lockitron went through a total of sixty designs. “We used 3D printing for figuring out the best knob ergonomics. For those tactile parts of a product, it’s not good enough to sketch it out. You gotta feel it. 3D printing is critical for rapid iterations, and enabled us to go through 20 designs in a single day. So we finalized the knob design within a week.”
As for features, there is one, but it’s a lot simpler and not susceptible to physical door vibrations, unlike the knock sensor: Bolt can sense when you walk up to your door (because you’re carrying your smartphone with you), recognizes you, and opens the door for you. And if you should lose or misplace your phone, you can change your password remotely and the lock will not authorize access.
The Final Solution, Unlocked
“We went from 50 custom-made parts to 10,” says Paul. “Simplicity is great for two things: expense and reliability.”
我们补充说，品牌信誉。保罗强烈地点头。他说：“归根结底，锁只有两个目的。”“要锁定门，并以视觉状态与您交流，它处于[锁定或解锁]中。这就是你真正想要的。”
是的，这很简单。最重要的是肉汁，这取决于您的客户是否需要额外的帮助或不希望他们。
