I think the cost honestly killed them. If they would have just bolted a SoC and decent software onto a mostly existing lock, they could have sold the thing for $50 more than a regular lock and still made money.

Their desire to build everything from the ground up is stupid. The physical door lock has been optimized for thousands of years by countless companies. The only way you're gonna make it any better is with new technology, so take a regular lock and bolt ur magic sauce onto it!

But why? Keys work pretty well. But then, people buy IOT toothbrushes. So perhaps there would've be a market of idiots waiting in line.

I have a keyless, non-IoT deadbolt (number pad with access code). It's hugely more convenient and more pleasant to use than traditional keys. One of those things that you don't really realize until you have one. I never worry about having house keys. I can pop in and out of the house on short jaunts with much less friction. I can give people access to my home without coordinating handing over keys. I don't have to go through the clumsy and annoying process of getting keys out, sticking them in the lock, turning them, turning them back, taking them out, and putting them back in my pocket just to walk through a door. It seems trivial but it really does noticeably improve quality of life.

There's a few obvious use cases I can think of:

1. If you forget/lose your keys. If you still have your phone with you, then you can use that to unlock it, or if you set up a passcode ahead of time, you can use that too.

2. If you're having someone over and you're OK with them letting themselves in since it'd be inconvenient for you to meet them to let them in.

I've had both of these situations happen to me. Granted, the solution shouldn't cost $700, but a lock you can open with your phone and also email/text someone a time-limited passcode for is useful.

The traditional lock makers have that market sewed up.

(who knows what the state of their software is but that isn't something people will focus on compared to price)

> And the part about wanting to create an "addictive experience"! About a door lock!

It actually made me LOL. Sounds like someone read https://www.amazon.com/Hooked-How-Build-Habit-Forming-Produc... and tried to apply gained knowledge to a door lock.

Yep. Who or which user 'falls in love' with a lock (with reference to the lead line of the article) anyway? Sounds like there is some serious reality distortion going on.

Please don't post indignant rants like this to Hacker News. It reliably leads to garbage threads, as the embarrassing sequence of 'fuck you', 'fuck you and your farts', and 'no fuck YOU' amply demonstrates below. It's cringeworthy.

The users who posted those things should be ashamed of defacing HN this way, but the original fault lies with your comment, since had you posted a thoughtful one instead, those other comments wouldn't have followed.

Your post was upvoted, predictably to the top, but that doesn't mean it was good. It's because of the fact that rage activates the Jerry Springer Show impulse in most of us. This is a weakness of the upvoting system and something that amplifies the worst in online communities. As a result, we need all HN users, including you, to exercise a bit of self restraint and not go straight to the bottom of the barrel. That doesn't mean you have to change your views, just post thoughtfully and with an orientation to good conversation rather than venting.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html

I disagree. Civility in conversation has been a tactic used against women for centuries. "You can't talk that way! It's un-lady-like!" It is the morality of society who want to control those they oppress, by silencing them.

And I didn't post from the bottom of the barrel, FYVM, I posted from the bottom of my heart.

I'm familiar with that argument against civility, and even sympathetic to it, but I don't see how it applies here. We're not asking anyone to be "ladylike", nor trying to prevent anyone from voicing their experience of the world—quite the opposite.

It doesn't work, though, to invoke such noble categories as standing-against-oppression to justify ordinary internet flamebait. There's far too much flamebait out there and it's all largely interchangeable. It all leads to the QED of online fora, "fuck you". We're trying, against long odds, to have something more interesting.

If you're saying you didn't intend to post ordinary internet flamebait, I believe you. In that case it would be good to distinguish your comments from that more clearly. We only have your words to go by, not the intention behind them. If the words fit the flamebait genre, that's the effect they're going to have whether you mean them to or not. This effect is destructive on the container here, so we have no choice but to moderate it.

HN is more fragile than most people realize. Some people seem to think of it as a corridor of power, which it's a blow against oppression to trash, but that's definitely not what HN is. I think of it more as a city square or park, and when people throw garbage in it (or appear to), they're just spoiling the opportunity for others to enjoy it and maybe meet and create together. If you're trying to express something for principled reasons, as your comment seems to suggest, that's fine. There are ways of doing so that make this place more interesting and that don't require you to compromise or mute your views. Scorched earth is not interesting.

You're welcome to post from the heart here. I wish more of us would. In my experience, doing so involves taking a certain risk of vulnerability. If all you do is heap scorn on something that pisses you off on the internet—which is how your comment read to me—that doesn't feel like a heart connection. It feels like the same war most people in online forums seem captured by, and which we're hoping to find a small corner of shelter from in this community.

In this culture of "everyone's a winner" sometimes people can't accept failure. Entering acquisition talks is a dangerous move because you totally lose your focus, it sounds like these guys just got sloppy in their decision making and paid the ultimate price. The people blaming the acquiring company on the comments at the bottom of the article, as if they committed some kind of grave injustice by not bailing out the company, make me sick.

Having used Face ID on the iPhone X for 2 months now I would be more surprised if we didn’t open doors with our faces in a few years.

Respectfully, fuck this attitude.

Trying to recreate something each of us uses every day and make it delightful is a completely worthy goal. To say that a “keyless lock” isn’t a new user experience makes zero sense whatsoever - it’s a new UX by definition. The fact that it wouldn’t stop a SWAT team from breaking the door down is beside the point - they never claimed it would, and that wasn’t the goal.

Why is their passion for building great locks any more silly than the passion each of us has? They took a stab at it and it didn’t work out, and that’s too bad, especially since it seems to have been for business reasons as much as product reasons.

It’s ok to say it shouldn’t have worked out because it’s fundamentally flawed. But to cheer and mock the demise of a project a lot of people were passionate about, one that was dedicated to making a great anything, seems to me to be the antithesis of what a community of hackers and makers should be for.

I’m all for reinventing the wheel to make it better. It rarely works out, but when it does it’s well worth it. But if you can’t even describe what makes your wheel better, what are the odds it’s actually better?

I want to point out that they weren't necessarily building a great lock.

The "great product" bit seems to be the usual consumer startup rhetoric by the CEO, which many people fell for.

I can confidently say that it is marketing rhetoric because a similar example already exists in the world: car locks.

I still drive a car where you have to manually insert the key and turn it to open the door.

I've also driven cars where the locks are remote controlled.

I've also seen cars where you press your thumb to the lock to unlock it.

There's nothing "great" about any of the above after the first two or three uses.

Agreed!. They took a chance on hardware

Look at all the companies building the same old SAAS products doing the same old stuff and getting tons of investment.

To your three points:

0. We could all delightfully try to innovate all day without millions of wasted funding and a guy spewing garbage like every day that for a boss, filling our heads with propaganda. Also, does a lock need to be delightful? Did you not read they wanted you do be addicted to using their lock????

1. What's the difference? How about money, ego, and industry. we all get to have passions, but do they all deserve millions in funding?

2. Uh, what community is that? One of those "global" communities? I'm a hacker and maker, but I certainly don't feel like i'm a member of any such community. I'm not here to pat on the back the privileged failure of people I don't know, just cuz they are by some loose definition "makers" or hackers. Like, hackers do things with ingenuity and curiosity, not $50M. And I am mocking that project from the top-down, starting with the manic CEO who wrote that crap; so, it only trickles down to the hard working people who were conned into giving passion and time to the endeavor, but at least they got paid for being hoodwinked into believing they were "changing the world"... with a lock.

> Silicon valley is chock full of know-nothing delusionals who love the smell of their own farts a little too much.

And Hacker News is full of people who lob bombs at everyone who tries and fails because it makes them feel superior for never having tried, all the while vastly underestimating the difficulty of building something meaningful.

Most efforts at building something great fail, so it’s easy to shit on everything and be right 90% of the time and think you’re a genius. The thing that makes Silicon Valley work is that the times when you’re are what really matter. If you say Facebook is overvalued at $3 Billion (as most of HN agreed) you could easily be wrong not just 1x, but 100x.

The world would be much better off with more people trying and failing while using hyperbolic language than having more trolls throwing parties on their graves. There’s absolutely no shortage of the latter.

The thing is, I bet you they would find sympathy here if they launched, competed, and couldn't find a toehold. That would have been an honourable exit. But the way they went out here, after burning through $45m in investment funds and mismanaging a potential sale, then trying to imply blame on the would-be buyer--this doesn't look good at all.

Edit: example of HN crowd sympathetic to a postmortem https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13421608

What shows us it was mismanaged? How do we know the acquiring company didn’t cold feet and bail after the founders had run out of options to hedge?

You can’t raise a round with an acquisition pending, so you kind of have to put yourself in a precarious position. Perhaps they could have done something else, but hindsight is 20/20.

A few things:

- They didn't pay contractors for months of work

- They gave no hints to anyone that they were running out of funds

- They agreed to stop looking for acquisitions while in discussions, without requiring a bailout penalty clause in exchange

- $45m for a lock? Where the heck did it all go? Elon Musk's initial investment in Tesla was $6m in 2004.

I have been a founder at 2 startups that were acquired. In both cases there was a "noshop" with no bailout penalty. But the "noshop" didn't say we couldn't look for additional investors. I don't see anything in this writeup that implies that the noshop was unusual.

"Hacker News always trolls new products" and "Entrepreneurs should always ignore Hacker News because they always troll new products" are equally problematic absolutes.

On that we are agreed

[Removed pointless ranting]

I'm glad you work at CERN as an engineer. I work at Hacker News as a moderator. Really, please don't "do this". You're doing more damage to this site, which is trying against steep odds to be a place for thoughtful conversation, than even 100% rightness of your points could justify.

I assume you benefit from Hacker News, since you're a user here and a welcome one. But if you're benefitting from it, please take care of it, the same way you wouldn't litter in a city park or set fire to one.

If you read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html you'll get an idea of the intended spirit of the site. If you have a substantive point to make, make it thoughtfully; if you don't, please don't comment until you do; assume good faith, and please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize.

My apologies. You've a tough job as it is without me adding to your woes.

No worries! Thanks for listening. This is slippery stuff that we all need to be mindful of, especially at 4 AM. Myself certainly included.

Partially my fault as well. My apologies.

Headed to bed. Enjoy.

These know-nothing delusionals who love the smell of their own farts likely made both the hardware and the software you used to read that article, as well as everything you are using now using to post your message, on a site run by other know-nothing delusionals.

So yeah. Fuck them and their attitude. How dare people try anything.