A start-up combining decades of experience with insurance and restoration, and a desire to use LoRaWAN’s low-power advantage for a new IoT business offering around water leak detection and damage limitation? Sounds like a job for Matchbox, an IoT-expert agency with close ties to Semtech and the LoRa Alliance.
Our mission was to give this innovative start-up a way to go from pitch deck to demo, from demo to proof of concept, from proof of concept to customer pilots. This meant advancing on several fronts:
- Hardware evaluation and selection. We met with multiple vendors; did hands-on testing; set up success criteria; iterated through trials and demos until we had proven winners, and flexibility to mix and match components.
- UX design to ensure the systems we built addressed the needs of the key personas in the story: home owners, building managers, insurers, system admins.
- Business analysis, market research and financial modelling as inputs to investor materials. This included support in preparing for critical investor meetings.
Our product-team-for-hire sprang into action, combining strategic assessment, hands-on experimentation, visual design and business analysis.
While our analyst team helped with the pitch to investors and engaging technology partners, our IoT team built the first working system from off-the-shelf components, spoke to hardware vendors, tested software stacks, and designed the first end-user interfaces for web and mobile.
Within weeks, the client had a compelling demo system with real working parts, and we moved on to modeling how to go from PoC to operations. We worked on budgeting, engineering, training, partnering, supply chain management, and more as we put together a business plan to support and build on the advancing technology.
As always, we worked closely with, and learned a lot from, our business partner SenSOAR. Their unrivaled expertise in the insurance industry, in how to help home-owners, insurers and restorers, were essential to our mutual success. And our partners at Semtech proved instrumental in connecting us with other players in the LoRa Alliance to ensure the best of the tech and the best of the community were brought together.
