We launched on the Apple Watch this week. Here’s why we’re so excited.
BlueLight launched on the Apple Watch this week. We’ve seen adoption in all parts of the USA and we’ve had some great coverage so far. A lot of people think it’s too early on the Apple Watch, so here are the four specific reasons why we are so excited.
The platform is contextually awesome for our customers and our use cases
BlueLight is a service to enhance our customers’ feeling of personal safety and to lower their anxiety. In the event of an emergency, they use BlueLight to connect with the best help. Their interactions with BlueLight are brief, intimate, and very personal.
Right now, BlueLight on the Watch allows our customers to access the service much quicker. In the case of a cyclist or a woman walking at night, their phone may not be easy to reach but a Watch always will be right there on their wrist.
In the future, the Watch will be a great platform for BlueLight because it gives access to critical health information such as heart rate. We see a future where BlueLight will be able to send these vitals to dispatchers and based on sudden changes in heart rate. It could activate emergency response during a heart attack, even if someone is sleeping.
This is a nascent platform that the world’s largest company is spending billions on
Apple really wants the Watch to succeed. If you looked at their keynote announcing the new product, you can see the clear parallels to the iPhone’s initial launch. They truly think this is the next frontier in computing. We’re excited to be a boat moving with Apple’s rising tide.
The Watch is estimated to ship 21M units in its first year and we believe the number of Watches in the wild will literally double over the holiday season. While much smaller than the total iPhone install base, that’s still a significant market to address. Additionally, organic discovery will be a lot easier on the Watch compared to iPhone. There are 1.5M iPhone apps compared to ~13,000 Watch apps.
We’ll be learning things others don’t and will have an information advantage by being early to the platform
The wrist as an interface is very different than the phone. Customers use the Watch for quick utility with a very quick interaction time of 7 seconds. That affects your UI paradigms, revenue model, notification strategy, and even messaging. Everything has to be focused on executing intent.
We believe that this is going to be a significant platform, especially for our use cases, and learning quickly will give us an organizational advantage.
Moore’s law is a real thing and most performance issues for the Watch will go away in the next couple of years
A big concern for customers, developers, and even us is that the Watch has a laggy feeling to it. It sometimes hangs and doesn’t feel responsive.
We know this is going to get better. This is version 1.0 after all and a lot of people are waiting for version 2.0. The Watch’s performance will literally be two times better in less than 500 days (early 2017). BlueLight will keep getting better with it.
I’m Preet Anand, the former founder and CEO of BlueLight (now sold, but it exists via its thriving spinoff, Snug). It’s been an exciting launch so far with adoption in places we never would have expected. So grateful to our amazing team to execute a clean launch with a ton of potential.
Other essays from me that people really enjoyed:
What is a fair price in the Digital Age? Exploring the challenges of pricing software services when ‘free’ isn’t appropriate.
History Rhymes — The Internet & Electricity My argument for why the internet is still in its second inning and we still have a ways to go.
Why I’m investing $10,000 into YC’s fund. Given the opportunity, these are the reasons why I’d immediately invest into YC.
