WildBill:
My only issue is Wyze is falling behind other smart home companies by concentrating on vacuum cleaners, scales, head phones and the like rather than sticking with the original line of products that brought them success
The VP agrees with you and said he made changes similar to your suggestions. He wants to return to having the product focus be about Cameras, Comfort and Control [of the home], as well as a shift away from cloud dependency and start having things be LOCAL-based a lot more. I love his answers on all of that!
Yes, this is a key question for us. For me on the hardware side, I tend to talk about the “3 C’s” with my team: Cameras, Comfort, and Control . So you can see that things like our new air purifier fall into the Comfort category, and the new Lock Bolt falls into Control. Where I struggle are items like the updated Scale X we just released. This isn’t a connected product in the traditional Wi-Fi-always-on kind of way and doesn’t cleanly fall into one of the above categories, but it sells well and helps new users discover the rest of our products, so we’re committed to advancing this lineup . Products like the Watch, which end up being fashion accessories, have been too crowded and complex for us to make significant traction in, so you’ll see less investment in these “Lifestyle” product lines as we continue to refine our focus back on these three core areas.
Wow, this is super deep! I would love to grab a scotch with you some time and talk about my 1.5 years at Wyze so far. But as a simple summary, my contribution has been to raise the bar on product quality and focus us back on core smart home and cameras . I’ve killed a lot of product ideas that were pushing us too far away from that cohesive strategy of cameras, comfort and control . My primary upcoming goals are all related to some AMAZING cameras we have slated in the next 6-9 months , all of which were kicked off right after I started (it’s been hugely helpful to see the entire innovation cycle of these products instead of coming in toward the end like I did for many others). I’ve also been the loudest voice of support our Matter expert, Frederik, who has made a compelling case for the shift away from cloud-only control paradigms.