Interview with Zack Supalla CEO of Spark

2016-02-23 | By Maker.io Staff

How did Particle come together?

I started Particle in the beginning of 2012. My original idea was to develop a connected lighting product, specifically inspired by dad, who is deaf. My dad has lights around his house that flash when something is happening, like the doorbell ringing. This type of device is really useful for the deaf because it translates those events into something they can react to. I saw that my dad was using his cell-phone for text messaging and thought it would be really helpful if the lights would flash when he received a text message. The cellphone is not hard-wired to the wall, so it required that the light bulbs be connected to the Internet. I started researching ways I could connect lights to the Internet for applications like this and for general home automation applications, which culminated in my initial Kickstarter campaign.

What product did you launch with your first fundraising campaign?

My interest in this connected lighting product turned into my first Kickstarter campaign for a product called Particle Socket, which we launched at the end of 2012. The Particle Socket was a consumer product that would screw into a light bulb socket and a light bulb would screw into the other end, which connected the bulb via WiFi. The user could then control the light bulb remotely through apps and there would be other apps that could interact with these lights. That Kickstarter campaign fell a little short of our goal, but it gave us enough confidence that people out there were interested in this type of technology.

How did you continue to develop Particle after the Kickstarter?

We were invited to do an incubator program in China called TechCelerator that helped tech startups in Europe and the US learn about manufacturing. The program was four months long and took place in Shenzen—which is the electronics capital of the world—to figure out how to manufacture our ideas. At the end of 2013, we moved to China and over the next couple of months, we figured out what we wanted to be as a company.

This is where the Particle Core idea came about, because we saw that this application was not just for lighting products. With the success and innovation of companies like Nest and their remote thermostat, we were surprised that there were not more companies that were doing things like this. We realized first hand that building products like this was really hard due to the massive amount of technology and hardware going into it.

What is the Particle Electron and what can people do with this device?

The Particle Electron is a cellular development board that helps engineers build things that are connected to the Internet via a cellular connection. For example, let’s say you work on a farm and you would like to put moisture sensors around the farm to detect moisture levels in the soil. In the field, there is not necessarily an available Internet connection, but there are cellular towers. You could have a board with the sensor, a battery, and a Particle Electron to relay all the information you need over cellular connections. It is the brain of the product and it is programmable, meaning you can design the logic to determine how often you want to check the sensors to see what the moisture level is. You can then connect to the cell tower and upload that data to a cloud service where it can then be collected, analyzed, and sent off to other services. The Electron bridges the gap between the Web and hardware. It is basically the cheapest way you can get a cellular connection into a consumer product without spending tens of thousands of dollars on certification. It solves a lot of problems for people that are developing cellular-based products.

How did you establish a relationship with cell carriers to create such great rates for an IoT device?

We have been working on building carrier relationships for over a year. It’s a slow process; there are not that many companies to talk to because there are only four major carriers here in the US and another dozen or so large carriers outside of the US. These companies are enormous, so it is really hard to find the people who are in the position to talk about products like this.

Carriers are valued on the stock market based on two metrics: average revenue per user (ARPU), and gross net, which is number of new devices coming market. The Internet of Things is great for gross net, because it means a lot of new devices are coming online, but it is terrible for ARPU, because it if you are making, on average, more than thirty dollars a month per every device that is out there, it will degrade that metric because that price per month is coming down considerably.

The challenge was finding the right person to talk to at these major carriers and convincing them that this was a major growth opportunity and that there is a lot of potential business coming out of it. We will be announcing our carrier relationship very soon.

How does it work with the cellular data service? Do users have to get their own SIM card, or is that provided?

If you back our Kickstarter campaign and order an Electron, it will come with a hardware module, which comes with a microcontroller on board as well as a SIM card. We will provide a data service for $2.99 a month for a megabyte and it’s $0.99 per month for each additional megabyte. We have a really efficient protocol so you can send 20,000 messages within that first megabyte, which means you can send data every two and a half minutes for the entire month and never go over your first megabyte. We will also provide an app where you plug in your credit card number for billing. You can cancel at any time because there is no contract. We tried to make it as flexible as we could for people who want to do development.

What is your team like at Particle?

We have 24 people on the team and we are distributed around world. We are headquartered in San Francisco where half our team is located, and we have a quarter of the team in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and another quarter of the team is international. We have a couple of people in China who oversee manufacturing.

In terms of making this product, what are your relationships with your distributors?

In general, distributors are really important to us. There are a lot of companies that have built strong relationships with engineers, and engineers then trust those companies to tell them what is available and what kind of hardware they should use. As of now, our Particle products are stocked with hobbyist distributors and we are working on building outwards. A lot of our customers are in the DIY space and building projects, but we are seeing more and more of our customers in the entrepreneur space that are using it in a professional context. We are trying to build up that more professional distribution pipeline so that people can find our products wherever they do their shopping.