If a thousand companies make their own smart light bulb, do a thousand companies also have to design a light switch app to control them?Kraftful, a company out of Y Combinators Summer 2019 class, doesnt think so.
Kraftful builds the myriad components that an IoT/smart home company might need, puzzle piecing them together into apps for each company without requiring them to reinvent the light switch (or the padlock button, or the smart thermostat dial) for the nth time.Because no company wants an app that looks identical to a competitors, much of what Kraftful produces is built to be tailored to each companys branding all the surface-level stuff, like iconography, fonts, colors, etc.
are all customizable.
Under the hood, though, everything is built to be reusable.This focus on finding the parts that can be built once makes sense, especially given the teams background.
CEO Yana Welinder and CTO Nicky Leach were previously head of Product and a senior engineer, respectively, at IFTTT the web service made up of a zillion reusable, interlinking recipe applets that let you hook just about anything (Gmail, Instagram, your cats litter box, whatever) into anything else to let one trigger actions on the other.Kraftful founders Nicky Leach and Yana WelinderSo why now? More smart devices are coming onto the market every day, many of them from legacy appliance companies that dont have much (or any) history in building smartphone apps.
Good apps are the exception the Philips Hue app is one of the better ones out there, and even its a little wonky sometimes.
Many of them are really bad.Bad apps get bad App Store reviews, and bad reviews dent sales.
And even for those who dive in and buy it without checking the reviews first, bad apps means returned devices.
According to this iQor survey from 2018, 22% of smart home customers give up and return the products before getting them to work.We kind of looked around and realized that 80% of all smart home apps have zero, one or two stars on the App Store, Welinder tells me.Knowing whats working and whats not with buyers is a strength of Kraftfuls approach; behind the scenes, they can run all sorts of analytics on how users are actually interacting with components in the apps theyre powering and adjust all of them accordingly.
If they make a tweak to the setup process in one app, do more users actually get all the way through it? Great.
Now roll that out everywhere.If you look at some of the leading smart lock apps, they all have very very similar interfaces.
Theyve basically gotten to a standardized user experience, but theyve all be developed individually, says Welinder.
So all of these companies are spending the resources designing and developing these apps, but theyre not getting the benefit of being standardized across the board and being able to leverage data from all of these apps to be able to improve them all at onceKraftful builds the app for both iOS and Android, tailors it to the brands needs, offers cloud functionality like push notifications and activity history, provides analytics for insights on how users are actually using an app and keeps everything working as OS updates roll out and as device display sizes grow ever larger.Of course, the entire concept of a dedicated app for a smart home device has some pretty fierce competition between Apples HomeKit and Google Home, the platform makers themselves seem pretty set on gobbling up much of the functionality.
But most buyers still expect their shiny devices to have their own apps something branded and purpose-built, something for the manual to point them to.
Power users, meanwhile, will always want to do things beyond what the all-encompassing solutions like HomeKit/Home are built for.Folks at Google seem to agree with Kraftfuls approach the team counts the Google Assistant Investments Program as one of the investors in the $1 million theyve raised.
Other investors include YC, F7 Ventures, Cleo Capital, Julia Collins (co-founder of Zume Pizza and Planet Forward), Lukas Biewald (co-founder of CrowdFlower), Nicolas Pinto (co-founder of Perceptio) and a number of other angel investors.Welinder tells me theyre already working with multiple companies to start powering their apps; NDAs prevent her from saying who, at this point, but she notes that theyre some of the largest brands that provide smart lights, plugs/switches, thermostats and other smart home products.