If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. North Carolina, at one point, had a large concentration of cellular technology companies. Some of that talent then came together around IoT, including Bob Witter, CEO of Device Solutions. He shared his journey with me in 2016. Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of
If you haven’t already, please study our free Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. North Carolina, at one point, had a large concentration of cellular technology companies. Some of that talent then came together around IoT, including Bob Witter, Co-founder of Device Solutions. He shared his journey with me in 2016. Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning
If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. North Carolina, at one point, had a large concentration of cellular technology companies. Some of that talent then came together around IoT, including Bob Witter, CEO of Device Solutions. He shared his journey with me in 2016. Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of
If you haven’t already, please study my free Bootstrapping course. North Carolina, at one point, had a large concentration of cellular technology companies. Some of that talent has come together around IoT, including Bob Witter, CEO of Device Solutions. Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were
Sramana Mitra: This is very risky business though – trying to act venture capitalist in startups and building their products against sweat equity. That’s, business-wise, quite a risky move. Bob Witter: It’s a lot of fun. We have never had any investment dollars, so the risk is our own. We’ve taken a different approach than,
Sramana Mitra: What does it mean when you say they distribute? Do they distribute your component or do they distribute the fully-integrated solution of these gas cylinders that have self-monitoring and self-updating capacity? Bob Witter: When we started, we were only a device provider. We helped them find the resources to build out the solution
Sramana Mitra: When did you hit upon this as a key go-to-market strategy for sourcing projects and being brought into projects? Bob Witter: It was specific to these vendors. These are the relationships that we started to build in the first couple of years of our operation. We knew a lot of these vendors through our
Sramana Mitra: Can we double-click down on what exactly happened in the first couple of years? It sounds like you started with a hypothesis and that didn’t get any traction in the market. You had to pivot. How did you figure out what to pivot to? What happened? What struck the cord? Bob Witter: We