findy designs, builds and develops hardware for IoT. Our primary skillset is providing hardware designed for industry use, that can scale easily and is compatible with many different systems.
The people who talk to us directly are technically minded…maybe 95% technical inquiries, leading to a direct conversation with our technical team, based on the specific use case/issue.
The other ones (the vast majority of internet users) go and talk to their “software” or “tech agency guy” about linking up stuff to the internet, getting automation going, or getting an overview of a process. That leads our unwitting business guy into a dead end. The software guy does not want to give away a good lead to a “competitor” They do not want to share the lead, because the client will eventually figure out the ruse. At the same time he, or she, cannot admit that they know nothing ….you see the issue?
You’ve got a broker sitting on the wire between buyer and product. The broker has two conflicting incentives that both point away from you:
Don’t refer downstream. If the software/agency guy hands the hardware sourcing to you, they’ve shrunk their own scope of engagement (and probably the margin, if they were planning to mark up whatever hardware they’d have spec’d).
Don’t admit the knowledge gap. Saying “I don’t actually know industrial IoT hardware” to a client who’s paying you to know things is a credibility hit you cannot take. A very common issue in brokerage situations is misaligned incentives.
So instead of doing either, they will do neither. They stall, or they improvise a bad-fit recommendation. The business client just… disappears into dead air. We never see the lead because it dies one hop before it reaches us. For reasons that have nothing to do with whether our hardware is a good fit, or not. You do not need to cry for us. We do OK. But the core logic is faulty – there is massive scope for good software once the hardware actually works and starts delivering reliable data.
“Three of the four top factors behind successful IoT projects had to do with people and relationships: Collaboration between IT and the business side was the #1 factor…”
https://ctemag.com/news/cisco-survey-almost-75-iot-projects-are-failing
What did we do to fix this?
We started blogging. We blogged about bikes, car theft, farms, gardens, autonomous vehicles, IoT tools, IoT terms, IoT careers, IoT failures, weather conditions, water, connectivity options, topical issues, company politics, procurement, radio telephony, solar, container shipping, municipalities, and plenty more.
The reason is clear; to engage non technical people in simple language – the vast majority of people who are looking for an IoT solution to a pressing problem. The geeks, they already know how to find us.
The missing piece
That’s the missing piece. Our historical traffic came from hardware SEO. A non-technical buyer was never a visitor to convert on site . They were never there in the first place. The dead-end wasn’t happening on our property, it was happening entirely upstream, at whatever search query or referral path they took before ever hitting a findy page. We had no visibility, because there was no visit to measure.
Blogging changes that. It’s the first content type that can rank for the problem (“why can’t I get a straight answer about connecting my [thing] to the internet?”) rather than the product (“pressure sensor NB-IoT”). Someone searching the problem is, almost by definition, the business owner who just hit a dead-end with their software guy. The hardware SEO visitor already knows what a pressure sensor is. They don’t read that post at all.
So, this post has a specific job: it’s not really persuading anyone to buy hardware. It’s naming the dead-end experience accurately enough that the person reading it goes “…wait, that’s exactly what happened to me!“.
This is not a “Findy, the hero” piece. If it neither a sales pitch hiding in a diagnosis costume. The value is in being the place that explains it straight, with the “…talk to us” being a soft landing at the end, not the opening salvo for sales patter.
