If you pass the first hurdle of meeting your financial goals, then you pass the phase of manufacturing the product, testing it, and actually shipping it out as promised should it be considered a successful campaign? Most likely yes. Piper would be a success as well with in the same criteria.

But sometimes what happens is that by opening up the chance of success or failure of something to the public can create unwarranted demands on the product. Yes, you gained the ability to mass produce your product out in China without going for Angel or VC funding that would have immediately reduced your ownership of the product but what you lose is the advisory that comes along with a seasoned VC fund. People that are experts in supply chains, manufacturing, process, quality, marketing, setting the correct expectation and all other good things you need for true success of a product.

Thus starts Part 2 of my review of Piper. Let me preface this by saying that I really wanted this product to work. And I am sure that if time and expectations are managed properly, it will succeed. If the blacksumac team loses hope or direction at this point, there is no chance that it will be able to compete against the incumbent industry.

What works 

1. The Siren is nice and loud

2. The app connects eventually, the advertised pieces of information display

3. Everything sort of works

What doesn’t work

In a days worth of testing, here is what I had trouble with

1. App takes over a minute to connect to the piper service.

2. The video quality is not at par with what the industry is able to do right now.

3. The device keeps disconnecting from the Piper service and/or WIFI.

4.  The rules don’t work properly. I created rule that was supposed to notify me on movement but not trigger the siren. Guess what happened?

5. Data missing from graphs.

6. No video recording happening. I set the rule to record video upon trigger. No video was recorded.

Other concerns

1. How much bandwidth is Piper actually taking?

2. What is the general flow of information? Piper device detects something -> sends it to Piper Service in the cloud -> sends alerts to customer. What exactly is saved in the Piper Cloud?

3. Where exactly is the recorded video supposed to be saved? In the cloud or locally on the device?

4. Since the Piper device is sending a beacon out to the Piper cloud service, can a hacker hack the Piper service and gain video feed access to Piper customer homes?

The product as it stands today is NOT ready for prime time. The team at blacksumac is probably under the gun to deliver hundreds of these devices and are stretched too thin to be thinking about QoS. Whereas that is exactly what they need to be doing. 

I am actually missing the somewhat complexity of my old camera solutions where at least I controlled the ownership of everything. The ability to let the video feed be recorded in circular on an NFS share alone had a lot of value.

How to fix this

1. Take a deep breath

2. Concentrate on quality. Listen to what the field is saying.

3. Move Piper servers over to a better scalable service. AWS perhaps.

Conclusion

I will probably keep the device and check every couple of weeks to see if things have been fixed. I believed in the general philosophy of the blacksumac team and understand that these crowdfunding sites are not market places where you buy products. When you hand over some cash to a campaign, what you are saying is that you want this campaign to succeed in every way and you want to be a part of that journey.