You Can Build It Yourself…But Should You?

I’m a car guy…well sort of; more of a gearhead than someone who obsesses over the luxury amenities or posh and circumstances of the high-end brands. My fondest memories from childhood are of working in the garage with my dad on whatever clunker he had recently brought home and was determined to get running again. At 10 years old I was spending my free time wedged under a car changing oil and checking grease fittings. At 16, I rebuilt the engine in my first car – a 1970 Ford Maverick with a straight 6 250 and 250,000 miles on it. 

 

What I loved then about working on cars, what I’ve always loved, was the feeling I got every time I took something broken down, sometimes well beyond operational, and brought it back to life, as good or better than it was. The beauty of the modern automobile (pre-electrification) is the simplicity and elegance of interchangeable parts, shoutout to Henry Ford! Is your oil plug stripped? Get a new one! Brake pads worn down, exhaust manifold cracked, head gasket blown? Just break ‘em down, rip ‘em out, and replace them with a new part as good or even better than what was there originally. 

 

These days I’m rarely under the hood of a car. Not because I can’t be, or because I don’t love it, but because there are other things in my life that I love more. Spending time with my family, being outdoors, volunteering, solving hard problems at the office, all of these things are simply more important to me now than the time I spend in the garage. It’s a simple question of utility – every minute I spend working on my car is a minute I can’t spend doing something else important to me. So just this morning, even though it hurt me a little inside, I scheduled my wife’s car for some routine maintenance with the local mechanic. 

 

Now here’s the kicker, the mechanic has an operation purpose built to service my vehicles. He has all the tools, the lift, the garage space, not to mention the thousands of hours of expertise working on my car and countless others like it. So not only does taking my car to the mechanic save me time and allow me to focus on what I care about most, I’m also getting better quality maintenance from someone fully equipped to look after a resource my family and I depend on. 

 

There’s an allegory here to Golioth and the conversations I have nearly every day with our partners and customers. Golioth is the mechanic down the street, there with the right tools and experience to manage your IoT devices and, when necessary, help strip away the old bulky code and replace it with some upgraded aftermarket cloud services. It’s not that our customers CAN’T build their own IoT management layer, it’s just that there are more important things for them to be spending their time (and money) on. 

 

Most of our customers build connected products from end to end. They start with hardware selection and prototyping, develop their embedded software, work through testing, trials and validation and end at production ready connected solutions. They need purpose built tools and services made by people whose core focus and expertise lies in those tools. Like a mechanic in the shop, Golioth is that purpose-built solution with the team to match. 

 

I still love working on the family cars, but these days I trust the mechanic to do what he does best. The rest of my life is simply too important to spend my time under the hood. Just like I trust the mechanic, Golioth’s customers trust us to bring our knowledge and expertise to bear and be careful stewards of their connected fleet. We give them the peace of mind to know that the things they need are already taken care of, so they can focus on the more important things.