Speaker 1 (00:05.614)
Welcome to the Hard Tech Podcast.

Well, everybody, welcome back to the Hard Tech podcast. I'm your host Deandre Hericus with my usual suspect Grant Chapman, CEO of Glassboard, a hard tech product film firm here in Indianapolis. And today we have a super exciting guest from a very cool company, Ashley Phillips, the head of product for Aura. Welcome to the show.

How's it going, everybody?

Speaker 1 (00:28.312)
Thanks so much, glad to be here.

And for those of you who are unfamiliar with Aura, they are really transforming how families connect through photos. And actually, we'd love to just get a quick overview of the company.

Sure. So AuraFrames makes Wi-Fi enabled photo frames. We allow people to connect and set up their photo frames at the end app. You can invite multiple people to a frame, add photos and videos to those frames that then appear on the frame. They shuffle through continuously. You may see some of these on Amazon. These are really, Aura really stands up.

They're really the best. They really stand above in this category. They're beautiful. They're beautifully designed. Wirecutter recommends three digital photo frames. Aura makes all three of them. So it is really an amazing product. And our mission, kind of referenced this earlier, but our mission really is built around connecting friends and families and celebrating the memories in their lives.

or it does end with hardware, but in a pretty unique way.

Speaker 3 (01:42.286)
Absolutely. And for those of you who know, Aura is in the nine figures in terms of the size of organizations. So they really are head and shoulders above the competition in terms of the quality of product that they're getting out there. Ashley, with your background, whenever we were having our initial conversations, you come from the world of software. Much like myself, I come from the world of software and jumped in the world of hardware and hard tech. Sort of why Aura? Why make that move from software over to the physical world?

You know, I've thought about this a lot and people have asked me this a lot, particularly with my background. I've been working in product development for over 15 years and primarily that's been in consumer facing products, primarily payments and marketplaces, which is obviously very different from the company and the product that I just described. So really what drew me to Auron, I think, is that mission that I was just talking about. It's pretty rare air.

to be able to work for a company and work for a product that serves millions of users who are very, happy in a way that is not selling their data, taking something from them, leveraging them as people in some way, but is truly a joy delivery device. And I think that that part of it for me was enough. Separately, I also happen to know some folks who work

who already worked at Aura, who are amazing people and that I've worked with, who also worked primarily in software and here's Spass and drew me in. I think the other thing too, which we'll talk a little bit about today is, you don't know what you don't know. And hardware is a vastly, hardware development is vastly different than software development. And I think one thing for me, having that ability to be able to learn,

and having something that you don't know and having a skill set like a product management skill set and being able to bring that to something new and certainly challenging is pretty exciting and was interesting to me in that way.

Speaker 2 (03:50.1)
That's awesome. It's one of those things that the the jump into the hardware space is always like the first jump into the cold pool Like once you're in it, you love it like it's a fun place to be but like this is a shock to the system because everything you they use the same vernacular They have the same gates milestones, right? But the way they all interconnect is so much more reliant on each other, right in software if you miss a thing or there's a bug That's called a software update. That's no big deal in hardware. We call those recalls those are really painful so, you know changing that mentality of like

gets a lot more important than dev. Whereas in software, you can use your users as testers and fix it really quick so no one really gets upset and it's just a wild world. But the one thing I wanted to touch on outside of the hard text space is something you brought up as to why you enjoy working for Aura. And you guys are a hardware and software company, right? You have a digital platform that allows your hardware to do its magic. Or vice versa, the hardware enables the digital platform to do its magic, however you want to phrase that. But what you said is really critical. So many digital platforms make

the user of the product, right? Either their data or their usage or their advertisements or can listen to buy other things. But what you described, and we didn't, you I didn't plant this question, so I just wanna like touch on, and I think it's really powerful. You guys make an experience worth paying for, and people are willing to give you guys enough capital, whether it's the sale price of the frame, if you guys have a subscription, to support that because you bring enough utility as the product. Very, very few connected products today have that mentality alone that,

We make something good enough that the market's willing to pay for it outright. We don't have to do any Trojan horse methods of making money or promising a data lake for someone else later. I think that is just from a integrity and caliber product speaks heads and shoulders above any other product of how cool the tech might be or how great your software stack is. That's just incredible.

It is, and it feels so good. And I think the other thing for us then is it makes it essential for us, like as we're building software, as we're building hardware, and as we're kind of thinking, that mission that I mentioned before of, we are bringing friends and family together to celebrate their memories through photos. That's a pretty broad mission. And right now we're doing that with,

Speaker 1 (06:04.95)
with hardware or we're doing it with a specific set of hardware, what could that look like beyond that? And so as we kind of think about those things or any new hardware development or any new product development at all, I think everyone at the company, and this comes from the founders certainly, feels a real responsibility to the users we have today and to our future customers to really be able to deliver on that. We don't charge a subscription for

any of our services or for photo storage or anything like that, it comes up, as you can imagine, all the time as like, there's another potential revenues.

I was just gonna I'm I'm mind blown because I assumed there was at least some amount of subscription to upgrade how many

And we've made a very conscious decision and again that comes from the founders a conscious decision not to do that because we don't want to and we believe in the value of the product and in the value of the product for customers and that has you know that has manifested itself in the popularity of the product. About you know 40 to 50 percent of our revenue comes from existing users.

So there is a, so funny to say, but there is like a network effect with this hardware product that has happened. It's very clear from the data, from our, from over the past seven or eight years, and you can really see it. It starts as a family member purchases it, purchases as a gift for another family member. They love it.

Speaker 1 (07:43.34)
and that kind of feedback loop of joy, not to be a cheeseball, but like it's real. Like when you talk to customers, it's very self-reporting.

You guys are really capturing. mean, there's nothing more special than the photos that you have on your wall or the photos of your family. And you guys are creating that vehicle to share that amongst the family. know, in grandma's kitchen, you know, that goes through the family photos and things like that. I feel like another area where you guys have really excelled and created that competitive advantage specific to the product is that unlike some of the competitors in the space, one of the reasons we really like to talk to Aura is because you guys do everything in house.

when it comes to the engineering and that gives you guys a kind of unique strategic advantage, industrial design, firmware, mechanical, this is all in house across your different locations. And so can you speak a little bit into that and how that gives you guys the ability to really continue to deliver on that hardware experience for the user.

Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, we talked a little bit about the beginning about how hardware is so different from software development. you know, often with software, there's a, you know, not often, whenever there's a bug in the software, it's very easy, you know, to fix and you can be very agile. Hardware is certainly a different time horizon. We certainly have a different time horizon for that. However,

At Aura, I think Aura is even different because of like as an outcome of having incredible firmware, hardware, industrial design all in-house, we are able to be more agile. We introduced a frame, a 12 inch frame called Aspen. It's amazing, it's beautiful, go buy it. Earlier this year, and we were able to turn that around in about nine months, which is

Speaker 1 (09:30.446)
Pretty, again, I still feel like I have so much to learn and I'm very new. So I'm like, nine months is so long. But on a hardware lifecycle, everyone at the company was telling me, no, this is actually incredibly, incredibly fast. And so being able to do that, I think, does a couple of things for us. One, we can be incredibly agile, which is really important for us. And then two, we are able to give...

put an enormous amount of energy into a level of detail that I can't speak to what other companies do, but I know that we're able to do. So we have this incredible industrial design team in New York that is constantly 3D printing and prototyping everything and looking at materials and trying to figure out both what can deliver the most, say, premium experience

but also like, you you have to look ahead for things, know, for things, you know, like design trends and that type of thing. anyway, kind of coming back to the question, it really enables us to like, I think have a level of quality, both in terms of design, both in terms of, you know, both in terms of like the hardware and the software that we're building across those three different offices, New York, San Francisco, and Shenzhen, and remain.

very close to manufacturing. actually, have folks from the, obviously we the office in Shenzhen and then we have, who are located close to, you know, our manufacturing partners. And then we have members from the team here that are going to those manufacturing partners three or four times a year. So it is like a constant checking in communication. It's certainly not a,

We're going to pass this over and we'll see what comes out at the other end of it and cross our fingers and toes. It's pretty incredible and the company itself is very committed to the highest quality there.

Speaker 2 (11:36.258)
That's that's amazing and I think that just to touch on one thing nine months for a hardware product is like a plus the report card platinum Platinum award like please other humans listening this don't expect nine months in a hardware product That is light speed from people that have been have a vertically integrated team that have done it more than once So you know you guys get that that's the other benefit of being that vertically integrated to have that experience as you guys can see in the future and know what you need to do by when because unlike software we can do a lot of parallel work and work on sub modules

Hardware has gates that you can't test everything together until it's all ready, right? So you guys can drive those gates at very known points in time and cut a feature if it's gonna delay a gate. And you guys have the maturity of a brand, say we'll just put that in next year's product. This isn't ship or die, right? This is ship the best product we can now, knowing that we have the next gen is coming down the line and we can kind of blend these all together. But the one question that I wanted to ask in all of this that I see from the outside and I wanna get,

if you also think this is true is your agency in design and delivery of experience to your customers is owned by you guys. There's like three tiers just for all the listeners. There's like three tiers in this space of consumer electronics. You can do very vertically integrated like Aura does. You can do what I'm gonna call partially vertically integrated where you might manage a handful of vendors that do different things. And then the third option is like an ODM or JDM development where another party is making this product.

and you're maybe white labeling it or adding a feature that makes it yours. But that team is engineering, manufacturing, and delivering that to you to go sell to your clients. And I think you guys just have so much more agency than your competition. Cause I think in your market explicitly for Aura is ODM. You know, Asian factory has 10 models. Everyone in the market is white labeling those 10 models with different, you know, maybe different face plates, something minor change that makes 50 different competitor models on Amazon.

but really it's the same 10 guts where you guys get to do your own features. You pick your timelines, you pick what features you're chasing and you guys can be trend setters, not trend takers.

Speaker 1 (13:39.532)
Yes. Wow, absolutely. Is there a question?

Yeah, is that assumption true? This is this is me doing my market research on what you guys did before the podcast and this is what rang true for me is Just the black and white dichotomy between you and your competition that you guys get to be trendsetters and all of your competition are trend takers and ironically the ODM partners are probably copying your frames from last year the year before to sell next year to their clients So you guys are always a model year or two ahead?

We definitely get to be trendsetters. That's absolutely true. And, you know, I think, you know, another thing that can happen in this space too is there are, there can be material shortages. There can be like, you know, different things where if you're relying on, if you're a hundred percent relying on vendors for something that can, you know, affect or impact your timeline. I was listening yesterday to

We had one of our hardware engineers talk to the product engineering team. And the product engineering team is primarily building out and working on the app, working on the mobile apps, and then also working on some of the frame software. he was talking through something that happened a few years ago where so Aura has, instead of

A lot of frames will have, or maybe all frames, most frames will have a touch screen. Or it instead has a touch bar on the top of the frame. Again, intentional design, because we wanted to create this beautiful frame that was a frame and did not have tons of fingerprints on it or something that you constantly had to clean. So you really control the flow, either from the app or from the touch bar.

Speaker 1 (15:31.374)
A few years ago, had, this is before my time, but we had a situation where the touch bar manufacturer ran into a shortage of those bars, which obviously produces like an existential, not existential crisis, but certainly a problem for us in terms of manufacturing and making sure that we're ready for, you know, our biggest sales times and we have, you know, all of our frames ready to go. So.

What we did, and this was an engineer who was talking us through this, what I call his lab, at his bench, he built a touch bar himself. So built a touch bar using, we were able to use the same chip, but actually built a touch bar.

And so that year, we now have a mix of those. have this homegrown touch bar that we developed on our own that we were able to cover there. And I think that speaks to what you were saying before around having this team, having this team in-house and having it like, other companies might not have been able to recover in that way. the in-house team, it's having a team in-house, but it's also the team itself.

We're just an incredibly scrappy group and we run very lean and we get things done. We're only a hundred people, which feels bananas to me on a daily basis. So I'm like, well, could use a fume wire, but you weren't fume about here. But it's really amazing and I think speaks to the commitment again to what we're trying to do here for customers and what we're able to do by that.

you know, in terms of like our organization.

Speaker 2 (17:24.238)
Yeah, no, and I think that the the narrative I love from that is that because you guys have great hardware engineers that have years of experience in your field, they the moment they heard about a problem, they weren't like, oh, no, the vendor has to fix this. They just got down to the bench like, huh, I could make that thing the vendor makes it, you know, it's probably more expensive because we don't have economies of scale and purchasing the raw components and putting it together. And we have to build an assembly line or find a contract manufacturer that will build just this thing for us.

But it allowed you to recover quickly and I think that's magic. I for everyone listening that's trying to build a hardware company at scale At the beginning you yes, you often have to rely on your vendors because you can't do everything but as you grow and you scale Get a team that can jump in and be versatile and understand what your vendors are providing you So if you need to go pivot or make a choice, that is huge So actually that is a just but I was not expecting that story and that is awesome

heard it yesterday and I was like, great story, I'm gonna use that tomorrow.

Oh, totally. We engineered ourselves out of a supply chain shortage, you know, supply chain manager way out of a supply chain shortage. That is just such a cool takeaway.

I suppose adding to that, coming from the world of software, Grant mentioned it earlier. You did as well in terms of you can have a software update if you push out a line of code that doesn't work. You have a bug or what have you. In the hardware space, of course, you have recalls. We joke about that quite often. Even in your experience so far at Aura, the hardware stakes are bit higher. And so have you experienced any recalls? Have you seen what it really takes to dig your? This was an example of one where it went really well. But are there examples where?

Speaker 3 (18:53.751)
Maybe that didn't go as well, but was a difficult thing to get over.

We haven't had recalls, but I think one thing that I learned and kind of related to, we can talk about, let's talk about OTAs for a minute. for, I assume people who listen to this know this, but I don't know. for those who don't know, OTA refers to like over the air firmware updates that you're doing to a piece of hardware.

yeah.

Speaker 1 (19:28.238)
And at Aura, obviously we can do those with the frames. have frames that are still, this is also like speaks to the quality of the product itself. We have frames that are seven years old that are still out in the wild and operating, still online, still serving photos. Part of the way that we're able to do that is, you know, to keep the firmware up to date, we are serving those over the air updates.

I think one thing, in my mind when, you know, coming from a software background, when I, you know, arrived here and I was like, over there updates. Great. That's just like a software update. That'll be super fast and instantaneous. And like, we don't need to, you know, like that's just like releasing like an app update or, you know, a backend change or something like that. It is not like that. It is a, you know, more time consuming process.

that takes time to, there's so many things that can affect the speed of that, when a frame gets that. And if you have features, as we do, if you have features that are software features, we introduced some functionality earlier this year related to captions, so allowing people to caption their photos, which is something people have been asking for for a long time, and customers.

absolutely love. It's a very simple sort of table stakes thing, but the product metrics around this feature have completely blown my mind and surprised me. like, yes, people want this. It will be great. But the reaction has been wonderful. part of the reliance of that feature working is actually the firmware on the frame being up to date and having a particular or being at a certain state.

or a certain release version. And so when you have millions of frames out there, trying to coordinate that and make sure that that is working as expected can be challenging and certainly new for me, particularly if you're talking about, as we often will roll things out to, we might start around with new users for this reason.

Speaker 1 (21:53.848)
They're a new user, they've got a new frame, everything's up to date, everything's fresh, like great, no problem. When we think about the complexity of like rolling something out that is like a frame app, you know, a feature that interacts both, you know, both like very, very directly, like with the experience that someone's having on the frame and also in the app, we have to consider, we have to consider that RAM strategy, that communication strategy to customers about, you have this feature, you might see it on the app.

You know, like we need to make sure that those things are in sync. And so that that's not a recall. So maybe not that exciting story, not a story. But certainly, I think, like trying to navigate that ramp strategy based on, you know, OTAs and making sure that we're communicating the right thing to come up customers and not creating a problem for our customer support team because they care a lot as they should. And and, you know,

We want customers to be as happy with everything we build as they are when they first purchased the frame and see those first photos of their friends and family on their frame. So trying to manage that is, was a learning for sure.

Well, and I think that for listeners that are in software and then haven't played in the hardware space, the difference between like an app update on an iPhone is that's a managed process. Apple gives you very hard guardrails and it's a quick click of a button or it happen in the background. Up to firmware, the stakes are higher. As Deandre mentioned, it is this is the thing that if done improperly can brick the device. And when I mean brick, I don't mean the user needs to unplug and plug it back in or hold a reset button down.

This can make a device truly have to go in the trash because the manufacturer, even I couldn't recover one if a firmware update goes completely wrong. It will make that hardware insolvent. It is a brick. So I think the big challenge, this is again one of those assumptions I have that maybe is also a question actually, is you guys must have a fleet of all the models that you still support in a lab somewhere in various states of software that you can.

Speaker 2 (23:59.328)
jump from a prior update to three generations ahead if someone hadn't connected it to the internet in a year and turned it on for the first time. And just for everyone listening, that amount of testing and quality assurance is a huge burden compared to what software quality is. And everyone that's in software knows the QA team is a huge team that needs lots of resources and is very important to create customer happiness. But when that's in hardware, you could not just have the client have to delete the app and reinstall it. This is like,

You have to either send them a new frame or convince them to buy a new one if something goes completely wrong.

Yes. Yeah, that's a great point. do have, we have, I kind of laughed when you said in a lab, but we have frames of, we have devices of, or we have like versions of everything that we have out in the wild today, actually in employees homes. So, you know, in homes or in offices. So I actually, in this, in this office, I'm in my coordinate space today. I five frames here and then I have

five or six frames at home to the point where my children are like, do you, why, why did we have so many things here? Why do we, they love it, but also why? So we do something with those OTAs before we start winking them out or before we start turning them on for customer facing or external, I should say external facing frames where we have a set that we are testing and pretty much all the employees are on.

beta test list.

Speaker 1 (25:27.438)
Yeah, we're on these frames and we let them run for quite a while and there is check in process and we're monitoring the heck out of everything to make sure that what you described, that is a nightmare scenario of releasing something and then having frames bricked would be a catastrophe.

Those were rough days. Yeah.

You know, Ashley, there's, I think, a huge lesson to be learned on really achieving what I to think product market fit in the hardware space. And I think you alluded to it whenever you were kind of giving the example a second ago, whenever you were like, yeah, we launched this update. It was super small, super lightweight, just giving captions for the users. And all of sudden, that user, your metrics went up and to the right. And I think it's so telling that you guys are really looking deep into the analytics and listening to the customer feedback that you're getting from the customer success team.

A story that I always like to allude to and I'm talking to founders about this exact same thing is the story of Twitch. So Twitch has a bunch of users and they're like, they had every bell and whistle on this streaming platform. Of course they went from Justin TV to Twitch and so on. And Mike Seibel tells this story, I just love to retell it. And they're like, we'll build you whatever you want to make this experience better. And like the budget's endless. Like you tell us, you want to change the colors, you want to do all this kind of stuff. And of course he says the same thing. He goes,

They're like, hey, I bought a five figure or more computer. I have this super nice webcam and I'm shooting in like 780p or something like that, like super low quality. Just make the quality go up. And he looks to his co-founders and they're like, that's a dial on the hardware. We just turned that up a little bit and all of sudden that changes that and all of sudden their usage spiked and then actually that changed. That pivot really created Twitch.

Speaker 3 (27:21.322)
That kind of leads me into the question around the network effect. And I think once you do that, once you make those key changes, I think that's where you guys are seeing the huge, not just customer retention, but the land and expand model. You guys don't even have to have a subscription because you guys have recurring buyers within this network and the network effect you guys' product creates. But I think that only comes with whenever you've really achieved that product market fit. So I guess my question would be around just diving deeper into that network effect you guys were able to achieve with Aura.

Yeah, so the network effect, kind of zooming, know, kind of going back in time a little bit, that network effect, I think was, I really don't know if it was intentionally created, but it's baked into the product in the sense that you have one frame, you can connect many people to it and.

all of those people, even if they don't have the frame in their home, are experiencing the goodness of aura. And they could be experiencing the goodness of aura in the app, they could be experiencing the goodness of aura in other ways in the sharing of those photos. I think probably the most impactful way people are experiencing the goodness of aura that are not in the home is that feedback.

is that feedback from the person who owns the frame and is calling them, is texting them. We have so many and telling them, my gosh, love this photo, this is so adorable. Or tell me more about what's going on in this photo, this looks like it's from a trip to Mexico. Tell me more about what's happening here. We have so many stories from customers and also just internally of family members who own the frame taking a photo of the frame.

texting it to the person who's posted the photo and saying, love this photo or, know, like, you know, when I just said like, you know, what's happening here, tell me more and really creating that connection. And, you know, I think about the, I do think about this a lot and, you know, I often talk about, or really as a joy delivery device, you know, in some ways, you know, there is a competitive advantage. Obviously it's beautiful. It fits into home.

Speaker 1 (29:43.342)
Like there are all these wonderful things about it, but really the value that it delivers is that feeling It's that feeling for the person who has it in there in their home and it's that feeling for that person on the other end of that interaction who Who is is like, know who's feeling like I did a good thing and this feels good and I made someone happy with something as simple as you know posting a photo or you know, you know putting a caption on that photo and

That is the reason, like to me, like that's why there's product market fit is that goodness. And that is the reason that it has grown and has like had this growth trajectory that it has. And so, you know, it's incumbent on us then, like on us at the company to figure out how to double down on that. How can we create more interactions like that? How can, you know,

you know, how can we continue and, you know, how can we really continue to inspire joy for people? Can we give them additional ways, you know, and that could be any, you know, you know, anything from like, can we give people additional ways to, you know, communicate like are there like other ways they could be communicating, you know, between frame owner and, you know, frame contributor, or it could be something as like, can we increase, you know,

speed of photo to frame or reliability or give people additional ways. Not everyone wants to download an app. Some people may just wanna, know, textbook. Right, know, shoot an email. Like all of these things, you know, people have family chats and, you know, where they post tons of photos. Like everyone has those chats. Is there space to have like, you know, some sort of, you know.

email.

Speaker 1 (31:34.498)
photo conductor within that app that is related to Aura that can intelligently send or direct traffic of those photos to frames. So it's all of those things. I think that story about Twitch is a great story because it is often, I think, the very simple things. I think there can, especially in hardware, there can really be this tendency of

You there's so much, there's so much new technology all the time and there are things out there and you can be, you know, exposed to them and, you know, we could build this and we could build this and we could build this. But I think when you, when you have technology in search of a problem, this is not just hardware related, but like for anyone, like for any.

This this is busy.

This is how you really get to scale because users want your product not you want users

Right, absolutely. And so for us, we have this very vocal user base. They are very happy and they are willing to talk to us and tell us both what they want. We also have to try to look into the future and think about how can we better serve these connection points? And sometimes I think it can be these basic foundational things that really drive engagement.

Speaker 1 (33:00.046)
a surprise and amazing and that's why I love product development. Or it can, you know, and it also can be sort of things they, you know, you know, maybe haven't thought about and unlocking, you know, unlocking new ways for people to do new things or new products that, I don't know, serve the mission. But people, you know, customers don't even know that they want yet. But once they're, so they can get excited about it. So.

Yeah, and I love the way you guys just, you just described your North Star, is that you guys just bring joy. And that's the North Star. Like, that's it. We could do anything else as long as we bring joy. Let's keep doing that. And what I'm hearing is the way you do it is you engineer organic opportunities for connection. Right? You have the, I'll call it the Trojan Horse Effect. You have family member A, like me, who might buy this frame because I need a gift for Mother's Day for my mom.

And we're now a multi-generational family. My sister's got kids and baby photos and all the group chats. So actually you've nailed it. And I add all of my siblings to this group chat. And we're all uploading photos to my mom's frame. And all of a sudden my brother-in-law might realize, huh, this is a really useful way to get my mother-in-law, who I'm tangentially connected with, involved in my family's life with our new son. I bet you my mom would love this. And I just wanted to go really double click on how your network effect works because it's organic.

In what your product delivers and you aren't having to market that network effect Yeah, having to have people like that share and do things. Yes No, I'm inviting you this this group experience that you might only upload photos that Christmas because it's a new toy and everyone's around the table and like throwing photos on it from for mom But it's that constant feedback that grandma now says hey, I'm so excited I got to see Levi's first steps in the photo frame like in the kitchen I woke up to that on the photo frame and that

Organic narrative bringing joy is what will encourage people to buy it for other people and because you don't have software, you need that hardware network effect to sustain the growth, but you're not making anyone do it. It's just happening.

Speaker 1 (35:02.702)
Yeah, it's 100%. And that was something really interesting to me when I started here. When I was telling people about my new job, there would always be someone who said, oh my gosh, we have 10 or frames spread out across my family. And the growth happened exactly the way that you're saying that someone bought in as a gift three months later.

you know, there was another holiday or there was a birthday and it just keeps coming up and, you know, coming, you know, coming to mind and is, it's really, it's really special. I think it's special to hear those stories. and certainly gratifying, you know, when you're out just talking, you know, and a networking event or, know, and a happy hour or dinner and people mentioned things like this. so it's, it's really, it's really beautiful in that sense, but

It's also, it's just rare air, I think for, you know, as a, you know, as a, as a product person to be working on something and something like that. That is, I would also say like uniquely positive. are this, you know, we are bringing or we're helping, you know, foster or facilitate, facilitate something that is so positive, but also able to build a business around it feels pretty.

Pretty incredible. think it feels pretty incredible to me anyway.

That's that's incredible. I'm gonna take us on a sidebar. John or sorry that I just had throughout this entire like discussion a narrative have a question thought etc. That's really Explains how the hardware is connecting the software to make the magic happen We all have iPhones or Android phones or smartphones of some kind we can all send receive photos and text I am a part of six family group chat chats between all of my you know siblings that have kids and my in-laws that have kids and I'm bombarded

Speaker 2 (37:02.062)
24-7 because my wife is Swiss so the Sun never sets on the cute photo Empire because my Swiss family is sending me photos overnight for the morning pictures and I'm Almost I I've become numb to it because it's constant. It's during my workday. It's in the wrong place if that makes sense and my phone is my work tool, right and I'm just through this car. I'm like man I really need to get an aura frame and just drop that into all the family group chats because then I could experience the family photos when I'm at the dinner table or getting home from work in the right place

And that can't happen with a pure software product. You have to have hardware that is furniture, that feels homey, that feels like the right place and space for family to deliver the experience you guys are delivering. I don't know if I, like, if you've, you guys are talking about that, but to me, this is like the magic of what your hardware offers is the right place for the conversation or the action.

and I think unlocking, you know, all those photos that you're getting in those group chats, they're staying in those group chats. They're not going anywhere. If you don't have, you know, a device like this that is able to display them. And that is really what this does. My husband will constantly say, my gosh, like I'll post stuff on one of our many frames.

He'll see a photo, like, I haven't seen, it's, know, we were both there. We were both on this vacation, but I took a different photo than he did on my phone. He said, I didn't even know you had that photo. And so I think like even, it really allows, it really allows you to like continue to experience those things and re-experience those things. Otherwise, like, you're never gonna, you're probably never gonna see those photos again.

Maybe you'll see them, you know, if they're automatically saving or if you're saving them to like Google Photos or iPhoto, they'll come up in a memories. They'll come up in like a memory slideshow. But if you don't have somewhere to display them, like you're never gonna get that. Not never, but you might be less likely to get that surprise in the light while I'm into it. And that is certainly something that the hardware provides.

Speaker 3 (39:13.922)
Join you guys on this rabbit hole because now my brain's moving a little bit. So now we've worked completely off the rails. So I'm thinking through, we use a platform called Ramp. And I'm not sure if you guys use it, but Ramp is basically a, it helps.

It's a business credit card effectively and we can assign it to everybody. Everyone gets their own ramp card.

everyone gets a ramp card and then I can take a photo of my receipt and then it will automatically jump and take it to ramp and things like that. Just the, it mirrors a little bit of the, I think the ethos you mentioned a bit earlier around how can we make it more seamless to get the photos to the platform. And in the frictionless environment, I think it kind of mirrors that. And I think what would be really fascinating and you guys might already do this. Again, we're on total rabbit hole right now, it's fine. Is if, and I'm curious, like with AI,

frictionless environment.

Speaker 3 (39:59.694)
and things like that and how if you type in on your iPhone, could say like maybe your mom or something like that, or my dog or what have you, it'll kind of show that. And how typically to get access to your photos, you can say allow access to my photos and now that the app has access to your photos. And I'm curious, even in the moment of taking the photo, if the app recognizes that it's a photo that would make sense to go onto the app, if it doesn't drop down a little thing or say, hey, is that photo you want to add to the aura frame?

You're my pet

Speaker 3 (40:27.374)
That might be something you guys already do. There's probably a bunch of red tape in terms of Apple and things like that on doing that. But it just seems kind of interesting as an opportunity.

Yeah, we're doing a couple of things. And some things are in actually more of in a test or in an experimental phase. But so just kind of baseline, when you onward onto the Aura app, you give permission like for, you know, for your entire camera roll. We have, and this we rolled out kind of at the end of last year.

right as we were kind of entering our holiday craziness, people search. So this ability, and we use this, it's all on device, but we use this for folks. If people give us full access to their camera roll, we can look at that camera roll and we can detect faces. just kind of like right now, so.

Popular faces will then show up kind of like in a lot. can filter by those faces when you're adding photos. Right now we're just using it for adding photos to the frame. There are a ton of things that we could be doing with that that we are not yet. So you could imagine like some foundational features, very similar to what you're talking about, where you're building, you you are building slideshows around.

you know, around specific people to run on the frame at specific times. Right, exactly. Anniversaries or the holidays from last year or my my every time we go to, we go to Mexico for spring break every year. And in the lead up to that, my husband's like, I just want to see photos of Mexico from previous spring break so we can get pumped about going to Mexico again. want to go great. But like that, like that kind of thing or

Speaker 2 (42:03.145)
like anniversaries.

Speaker 1 (42:28.29)
Detecting, do you wanna, like, you know, when you're taking the photo, do you wanna add something like this to, you know, to your photo frame? The thing where, so like, there's like this foundational thing, which I think caption, I would like also file captions into this bucket too. There's this foundational thing that people already expect, but then how can we build on top of that? How can we make that more engaging? How can we make that more interesting? What else can we do there?

And then another thing like kind of related to this always makes me think of ramp. We also use ramp at love right now.

Please do.

This is great. But one thing we're experimenting with right now is, so the way that most people share photos today is like in life, forget about Aura is via text message. So via these family chats that we've been talking about, or even a one-to-one interaction. So why wouldn't we not allow people to do that with Aura? exactly.

add or my group chats well I want

Speaker 1 (43:36.438)
Right, exactly. So we are experimenting with a bunch of different things related to texting to frame, both allowing people like we've worked, like we have different things that we're experimenting with right now. One is allowing like assigning a frame or allowing you to turn on a phone number for your frame that you could give to anyone you could potentially put into that group chat.

We have also worked on the inverse of that where it's more of, you do have a phone number for your frame, but it's not a free for all, so the only people who can access it are invited to your frame, so a little bit more control. we're kind of like, again, we're A-B testing all of this and kind of figuring out what's what. The challenge there though is obviously that when you send photos or any media via SMS or MMS, MMS certainly,

SMS, can get compressed. And so you could have people texting tons of photos to your frame. And even though our frame is, you know, doing like making photos look amazing, really compressed photos, we we're not we're not miracle workers, like really compressed photos, photos that get really small are not going to look great on the frame. So now we are working on and we're actually building this out right now. How can we get RCS?

which is rich communication service. As of last year, on your iPhone, you'll now start to see this when you're texting with Android users, powered by RCS or something.

The green bubble is slightly better now. Yes.

Speaker 1 (45:14.402)
The green bubble is slightly better, but what RCS like unlocks for us is nothing is compressed. So it's like fully preserving the quality of those photos in Unlinux videos. And then it also unlinux all sorts of cool functionality. You can build app-like experiences within RCS. You might have seen this in some companies are using this for marketing, but it's like, it's really like just starting to carriers have

I just unlocked some of this for companies.

in mostly, like in text shipping updates in RCS. Like it's almost like an app, web app that that message is updating.

You can tell the difference because there are interactive things. I have recently started seeing checkout for some of my know, marketing, like shopping, marketing. Like I've started to see like, you can do one type checkout in the text message. Right, super cool. And so you can imagine like if you have a, you you have these families that great, they, you know, they have 10 frames that they might be connected to.

they might not want to send all every photo to all of those frames. They probably don't want to manage like a phone number per frame. Then how can we kind of going back to like this idea of this idea of like, you know, the train conductor, how can we enable ORR be a part of that and, know, really seamlessly direct those photos to wherever users might want them to go. And I think that probably starts with like, you know, giving if they have, you know, multiple frames, like giving them a menu and choices and like ways to do that.

Speaker 1 (46:54.156)
maybe setting default frames, doing things like that. This reminds me of RAMP a little bit when you get those incessant text messages. But then the next step beyond that is how can we do that smartly? How can we do that in a way that is actually seamless where people- UX. Right, exactly.

And this is ramp the ramp I can go make a bunch of individual credit cards and give them to employees or use them for particular vendors I can then categorize them within ramp before they ever get to QuickBooks So QuickBooks already says these 12 cards are always IT and internet expenses these 12 cards are sales and marketing Just like you guys could do with your you can make one phone number that is a group of frames Right and but it's you guys in your app could have that management system where they're tied together or ramp does it on the back with all the card numbers same with you guys could do with all the frames

Right, and this is where, kind of going back to the philosophy of listening to customers, maybe customers don't want to be managing stuff in our app, and that's okay. I think really, it's like, what is that outcome? How can we achieve that outcome of connecting families? And if the way that they want to be managing that interaction or the way they want to be adding photos is really as seamless as, I just want to this one over to my group chat.

and I want the photos to be sent to X set of frames and that's how I want this to work. That's great. And if we can use technology to unlock that, that's, know, mishach hamposh.

That's incredible. I just hope for you that Apple gives you an ability to tie into iMessage so can still stay blue text threads.

Speaker 3 (48:32.056)
Well, Ashley, we went off on a little bit of a journey, which I think ended up being actually super informational. That was amazing. My last question I typically ask is just advice for people in your fields, other hardware leaders, to kind of wrap it up here. I think this entire episode was full of a lot of anecdotes and examples. But if you could give a piece of advice to someone, that's it. It's in the hardware space, would that be?

Yeah, I think, you know, start with, if you're starting out, there's lots of shiny, cool things you can do with all sorts of different like emerging technology and hardware. Make sure that whatever you are building or whatever, you know, that really you are building to solve a specific problem and that you're not being, you know,

overly entranced by, there's always gonna be a cool new gadget. And that's wonderful. And I love cool new gadgets. But unless it's really solving a problem for a customer, and unless you have that really crisp and clear, that's, you you're not gonna be successful. I think that's one piece of advice. Another piece of advice that I think Aura has done very, very well and differently.

or it sounds like differently than other companies is don't give away what could be your competitive advantage. Meaning, the co-founders did not have hardware backgrounds. both had software engineering backgrounds, data science backgrounds. when they landed on this idea, they were kind of iterating through what they wanted to build next.

they pulled in experts. we have someone who has been with us since the beginning and is still here on the executive team who understands intimately, who runs all of our supply chain operations. We have the same thing is true of our chief creative officer. He came in very, very early and has built out and designed and runs in this amazing industrial design function.

Speaker 1 (50:53.838)
Over the years, we have brought on engineers telling that touch bar story of who are really scrappy and really able to do the work in a way that I think if you can find that, find that expertise and bring it in instead of giving it away to someone else and relying, I think particularly if you don't have the hardware background, having someone that

you trust that is invested in the company in the same way that you as a founder are is really, important. Ultimately, particularly if like the primary thing you're gonna do is, you know, build this, like build your business around this, you know, first hardware product or suite of hardware products.

Listen to your customer, build for your customer, create product market fit. Everybody, this is the Hard Tech Podcast. I'm your host, De'Andre Hericus, my co-host, Grant Chapman. And Ashley, thank you so much for being on the show. Tune in next week for the next edition of the Hard Tech Podcast.