I’ve seen startups come and go over the years and I was particularly interested to see what happened to August Smart locks[1] today. The company originally tapped Yves Behar to make a better smart lock, one that would meld with the sensitivities of a certain kind of smart home stylist with the high-concept, high-tech design of the Nest thermostat. The products, while beautiful, were unusable in most situations that you’d want a smart lock. As Matt Burns noted, there’s a reason they were selling the locks in Best Buy and not Home Depot.
Why were they unusable? Because they essentially rethought the way locks would work. Take the deadbolt, for example. The August solution was to replace the outer lock and cylinder with their product, leaving in place the inner knob and all of the deadbolt hardware. It was the ultimate facade. This solution obviously reduced the cost and complexity but also required matching your current deadbolt to the new August actuator or buying a new deadbolt and throwing away the outside cylinder. Further, you were sunk if you wanted to put this thing onto new construction. Finally, unless you added an extra keypad, it was useless for homes with children.
While we’re throwing stones, it’s also interesting to note that the company’s latest product, a smart doorbell, could not be used in old construction. The doorbell was actually a three-by-three-inch box with a camera and button on it. This would never fit in the average home where the doorbell is a half-inch by three-inch rectangle.
In other words, the ideal August customer didn’t exist or instead existed solely in the company’s promotional photographs. They got acquired primarily for their potentially lucrative Wal-Mart[2] contract.
If you...