The Design-For-Hire Ecosystem

I spend a lot of time thinking about the folks that offer design services to others. I came from that space as a lowly one-person consultancy (dev shop? product development firm? what do we call these things?). It’s an interesting set of challenges, including offering opinions and expertise to others for money. Some days, I felt on top of the world, like I knew everything and could solve anything. On other days, I felt defeated and lost, trying to find a solution for my clients, who I served as best I could. I joined Golioth when I saw a solution to a problem I was trying to solve as a hardware consultant: I just created a beautiful piece of hardware; now, how do I connect it to the cloud? I was clueless about cloud capabilities, but that didn’t stop my clients from asking for them.

One of the key points in the design-for-hire game is that you need to understand your area of expertise well and deploy that knowledge confidently. That starts to get tough for IoT / connected products. Every day, there’s a new communication protocol, web technology, component, or other efficiency that could save your client money and make your dev shop look better. How do you stay on top of your game when doing so means you’re giving up dollars deploying the knowledge you already have?

We stay on top of these technologies at Golioth, as well. It’s why we maintain an active blog. It’s why we partner with silicon companies in order to better prepare you for the next generation of components (hint: there are some great products coming soon). It’s why we do free training and why we’re going to make it even better in the new year. The ground is shifting, and we shift with it. Even internally, we are making our SDK more efficient, and we’ll need to adjust to change by updating our examples, reference designs, content, and more. We will push these changes to all of you so you can have a starting point for your client designs and deliver better products faster.

IoT can be very challenging, and we’re here to help you cross every hurdle. You hopefully know (and love) our content, but the Golioth platform is designed to make you more efficient: read how the product development firm Ovyl based out of Nashville was able to prototype a solution 30 times faster with Golioth when they were building a Thread prototype.

Whether you’re a successful dev shop, or a brave solo consultant, we’d love to work with you. Golioth users often reach out to us for help, and we’d love to send them your way. We’d also love to create content both for you, and with you, the design-for-hire virtuoso. Sign up here if you’d like to partner with Golioth on content, joint customers, new opportunities, and more.