How creating one product led to the birth of another one?

This is one of those spin-off startup stories I personally have encountered with, countless times in the past.

For those of you who don’t know what I was working on for the past 2.5 years: It was Zulu (zulukds.com, usezulu.com). It is a parental control device for residential use to set reasonable boundaries to kids’ internet and offer them safe surfing.

While building it I had a problem; It is not a software, it is a hardware. Specifically, it is a mobile controllable access point. So after shipping it to customers I needed a way to upgrade its firmware remotely to offer new services, to give technical support when necessary. Since the devices are located behind NAT (a.k.a modems at the house) there was no way to connect them using any kind of remote shells. Also the ACS was out of the list because the device we are using has very limited storage, which is barely enough for our services inside, including the OS and underlying kernel packages.

So, I came up with my own way to remotely access to the devices on the field (a.k.a homes), manage them, send commands to them, update their firmware and collect data from them. I used MQtt to accomplish it, because it is lightweight, easy-to-implement and most importantly, the pub/sub protocol for this task is perhaps the best way for communication.

But enough for technicals. Something much more interesting than this happened in August 2018. While talking to startups from other markets, specifically in IoT sector, I realized that everybody has this same problem with their IoT devices in the field. Everybody, especially the HW startups need some kind of cloud software to collect data, manage their devices, version control their firmwares remotely.

The problem is three-fold:

1. HW guys don’t have enough know-how to create a reliable control panel for their devices,
2. From design thinking perspective the cloud apps which control the IoT devices are %80 the same,
3. From data collection nodes to front-end services there are many threats of security, specifically in realtime services.

So I started researching the needs of IoT companies and the problems above. I came up with the idea of all-in-one cloud app to accomplish a reliable, secure, easy-to-use, easy-to-implement and plug’n play solution which would potentially answer to all the questions. It is called Herni (herni.co).

Since the end of September, which was the release of MVP, I had the chance to work with 7 different companies in different sectors and collect case studies. Some of them are in demo stage with their own customers, some are in preparation. We’ve tested 28 different sensors and 5 different chipsets including TI CC3220SF-A and Arduino.

In the upcoming days I will pre-release the product (and a playable demo) in ProductHunt. Tune in to my feed in PH, in Medium and in Linkedin to get to know more. I will post case studies with different sensors in different markets with different customers.

Cheers,

M.E.