Introducing Hapn — a powerful new GPS tool for businesses to manage their physical operations.
Hello, I’m Joe Besdin, co-founder of Hapn (formerly Spytec GPS), and I’m excited to announce a new GPS tracking platform that we believe will transform how businesses manage and automate their physical operations.
Background:
In my role as CEO of Spytec GPS, I worked in the GPS tracking industry for many years.
At the time my co-founder Jon and I launched Spytec, GPS tracking technology was mainly used by businesses, primarily those in the trucking and logistics industries. The GPS tracking products available at that time were extremely complicated to use and required specialized training. Our thesis back then was that by offering easy-to-use software coupled with excellent customer support, (highly influenced by the Zappo’s model) we could find a new audience unaccustomed to using this technology: consumers and small businesses. This was long before consumer tracking products like Tile or AirTags were ubiquitous. Consumers and small businesses might not sound like an intuitive combination, but in many ways, they have similar needs in a product.
We partnered with a software firm to help build the product. After launching, it quickly became clear that we had touched upon a real need in the market. Consumers began using our tracking solutions to track everything under the sun: their valuables, family members, pets, and even beehives! We experienced incredible growth but along with this growth, we began to sense limitations with the technology we were offering. First off, we experienced scaling problems, as we moved from thousands of trackers to tens of thousands of trackers on the platform, our customers began receiving slower alerts and tracker updates, and sometimes the system would even go down.
Luckily we had excellent customer support which we were able to use as a bandaid to maintain customer satisfaction. As it turns out, fast, friendly, and responsive customer support is rare and can paper over even drastic product problems. Secondly, we started to experience limitations with our ability to innovate within the product. As we spoke to more and more customers, we started to dream up new product features to better serve our customers. But, we quickly found that the technology foundations we were building upon weren’t up to the task. We were concretely limited in our ability to innovate. And despite trying, the software partner we were working with was unable to handle our scale or ambitions.
The road towards reinvention
An inability to improve our product coupled with unreliable and slow service was completely unacceptable to us. At something of an impasse, we started to consider how we could fix this problem. It became clear that the only way forward was to rebuild the technology from the ground up. Moreover, we could no longer rely on outsiders to build or manage our core technology. This clearly posed a large challenge as well as an opportunity. The challenge being that we would have to transform into a technology company. And that not only would we have to rebuild this complex technology from scratch, but we’d have to seamlessly migrate thousands of customers over to the new technology.
However, on the positive side of the ledger, rebuilding the technology and having complete control meant that we could finally do some of the things we’d only dreamt of. That we could build our platform’s foundation using the latest cloud technology, allowing us to build product features that would have proven impossible using older architecture. And by doing so, we could serve larger markets, namely more substantial businesses. Going after this broader market would be a risk, but if we were truly building a ‘Ferrari’ we’d be crazy not to offer it to the fastest drivers. We decided to take a deep survey of the market, focusing on the competitors most used by businesses. We used their products and read their reviews.
The following issues were common themes:
- Unreliable hardware and software: Software that crashed and hardware that sporadically worked.
- Laggy alerts and slow tracker updates: Alerts that would come in hours too late despite claims of ‘real-time tracking’.
- Poor customer service: Impossible-to-reach support staff with minimal expertise.
- Unfriendly billing practices: Three-year contract lock-ins and hidden fees.
- Difficult to use software: Too many unnecessary features and unattractive non-intuitive design.
Imagine running a complex and growing business and installing GPS technology only to find that the trackers only work some of the time. And that even when working, the data is often too out of date to be of any use. Yet despite these severe issues, the competition was quite successful and their products of obvious use to customers. We were energized by what we found. Many of the problems we had previously faced with our Spytec GPS product actually plagued the entire industry and still remained unsolved. And our consumer origins and focus on incredible customer support and easy-to-use design were unexpectedly going to give us clear advantages in this new market.
We next focused on attracting the best product and engineering talent we could find. Building the next-generation GPS platform would take serious computer science chops. We luckily found three world-class technical co-founders: Andres, Jasan and Marcos, who quickly got to work architecting the product and growing our team. When we began to have conversations with potential engineering candidates, some of whom had previously worked in the IoT or GPS tracking spaces, we found that many of them voiced a similar dissatisfaction with the state of the technology on the market. Some of them had even left the industry because of the frustration they had felt. When we told them what we aimed to do, they were eager to join. Many had a sense of unfinished business and, like us, wanted to build the GPS products that they had previously dreamed of.
At this point, we were on a truly different path with a radically new mission. We weren’t just rebuilding our technology, we were rebuilding our company. We’d have to rename our company and our product and completely redefine our brand. Going through the ropes with various naming exercises, we considered the core questions our products answer for customers around their assets:
What happened?
When did it happen?
Where did it happen?
Why did it happen?
And what will happen next?
Say hello to Hapn.
A wise man once said that a brand is a promise and so we began our Hapn journey by writing out the core promises to our customers. We wanted to transparently lay out the principles that will guide us when building and supporting our product. We are asking consumers and businesses to trust us with their most valuable assets and we take this responsibility extremely seriously. Speed, reliability, and excellent coverage are the bare essentials we needed to solve before moving on to anything else. So with Hapn, we started by building the fastest and most reliable technology for businesses to track their assets.
Core promises:
- Always on when you need it: The most reliable hardware and software.
- An obsession with speed: The fastest alerts and live maps on the market.
- A passion for serving our customers: Friendly, capable, and responsive support that is always willing to go the extra mile.
- Fair and honest billing: No hidden fees. We want customers to choose us because we provide the most valuable product — not because they were tricked into it.
- Software that strives for simplicity: Intuitively designed software that doesn’t compromise on power.
- We will never stop innovating: We will never stop finding ways to improve our value to our customers.
Beyond the core principles listed above, we’ve built the technological foundation to do so much more. Very exciting times are ahead. We want to build flexible workflow tools that allow a business to automate their physical operations. We want to offer the ability to track indoors. We want to use AI to provide valuable insights that can tell a business where to optimize. But our ultimate mission is simple: to allow a business to do more with less.
This is our mission, now let’s make it Hapn!
—
Hapn Website → gethapn.com
Twitter → @get_hapn
