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It's only a good problem when your niche customers have deep pockets to pay for their varied needs and high risk tolerance. Most variations can't be protyped ou
by Frost1x 5y ago
It's only a good problem when your niche customers have deep pockets to pay for their varied needs and high risk tolerance. Most variations can't be protyped out by some engineer on the weekends where they just spin out a startup with minimal risk to address the gap.
The false assumption I deal with that drives me insane with so many individuals is that everyone thinks their specialized use case is a small variation on the major use case that already benefits from economies of scale. That often isn't the case and a significant R&D effort needs to go underway on just how one can leverage existing technology for their use case.
There's very often at least one, if not many, mission critical functional requirements from existing tech that require significant effort to make the jump from the existing tech to the desired use case. And guess what, all the non-niche users don't want to pay for that, so you need to be prepared to pony up the capital, accept risk of failure, and be ready to take the plunge.
I tell people with this mentality that they need to work in reverse, first understand the technology they think is close and find the problem sets that have the best match up and focus on those. These efforts can costs hundreds of thousands very easily if not millions to tens of millions if you just play it by ear that "...this thing is sorta like what we want so it can't possibly be that difficult to adapt." (Basically what I hear with technology management, many business people, and clients)
Many people pretend software and tech are just Lego blocks and since it's virtual, there's no capital needed. Good luck, because the skills needed to deal with this tech isn't cheap and the complexity often isn't low meaning expensive and difficult to find labor for long periods of time, often with a fairly good chance of failure.
- sandworm101 5y ago>> find the problem sets that have the best match up and focus on those. Or, abandon all of that. A space imagery company is a media company. They generate content. So do what other content creators do. Take everything you have and shovel it in front of people as fast as possible. Deliver it by any and every means available. Ask questions, but do so AFTER they have already made a purchase. Then judge what your customers want by what they choose to consume.
- ackbar03 5y agoIs this even feasible? I imagine high resolution satellite imagery is a lot larger than your typical blog post or youtube video. Plus the surface of the earth is huge, if you push out everything 95% of it is probably irrelevant crap that doesn't tell you anything about your customers. But I don't run a media or satellite imagery company so this is just what i imagine lol
- ricardobeat 5y agoWhy would that matter? Consumers get to choose which subset of the data they use. If they want to download the entire Earth at 5PB, just charge them appropriately.
- ackbar03 5y agoMy impression is that it matters because if the data hasn't been collected with a specific purpose in mind, then its probably not gonna be useful for a lot of cases. Say I'm a farmer and for examples sake I want regular aerial images to estimate crop yield for a plot of land. That would require high resolution imaging of a particular patch everyday for maybe a few months. That would require purposeful data capturing at regular time intervals during overhead satellite passes. From what i understand satellite imaging companies won't happen to just have those images containing the region of interest you want just lying around on their hard-drives which they can pull out with some query. If they make all the images they have available to the public, I'm guessing most of it will be useless to people considering it needs to cover the desired region of interest across time and space.
- pas 5y agoWell, this seems to cry for a big coalition. build it and they'll come. Iridium failed because it was too early (too costly, only a few specialized users had the cash for it), Starlink seems to thrive because they can go general.