Episode Details – Losant’s Journey from Idea to Successful Enterprise IoT company with Charlie Key
Today’s guest, Charlie Key, is the Founder and CEO of Losant, a leading development platform for enterprise IoT products and services. In this episode, Charlie shares plenty of insights into how Losant has achieved success, including key milestones that have shaped the company, the importance of having a customer-centric approach to innovation, the challenges of building enterprise-grade products, and how Losant has evolved to incorporate technologies like edge computing to better serve their customers.
Charlie kicks off the episode by sharing a glimpse into his career journey, meeting his co-founders, and the inception of Losant. We touch on the ways in which the pandemic has changed all aspects of business, the importance of adapting with new data, and why Losant is always working on micro-pivots behind the scenes. Charlie reveals the three-part thesis that fueled the inception of Losant and the surprising results of customer research during the initial phases of the company.
Next, we discuss how Charlie used the V2Mom model to build Losant: Vision, Values, Methods, Obstacles, and Measures. He tells us about the customer-centric approach he has taken to building his company and unpacks the process of selecting a target market, before talking about the value of including instrumentation in your research. We conclude our conversation with a few thoughts on emerging technologies, and how Losant has integrated them into their product offerings.
This is an episode that no Product Leader should miss!
About Charlie Key
Charlie is Co-founder and CEO of Losant, where he’s currently working to help enterprises transform their businesses to build ROI with the Internet of Things. He focuses his day-to-day responsibilities on working with Losant’s enterprise partners and customers. He has worked with a variety of Fortune 500 companies to build business-changing software and applications. His unique background as a CEO and engineer enables him to eloquently communicate how IoT can serve as a viable solution to everyday business challenges, including surviving and competing in an ever-changing landscape.
Key points from this episode
- Hear about Charlie’s career background.
- How Charlie and his co-founders, Michael Kuehl, Brandon Cannaday, came to start Losant.
- Find out how the pandemic has changed all aspects of business.
- The importance of adapting with new data.
- Why Losant is always working on micro-pivots behind the scenes.
- Part one of the three-part thesis that led to the inception of Losant: firstly, it’s really hard to build an IoT product.
- Part two: the products available today are overly costly and complicated
- Part three: the people that have to use them are not pure technical software engineers.
- What customer research revealed.
- Why it was a priority to develop a low code environment.
- How the V2Mom model informed Losant: Vision, Values, Methods, Obstacles, and Measures.
- Charlie’s customer-centric approach to building his company.
- The value of including instrumentation in your research.
- The process of incorporating emerging technologies in Losant’s product offering.
- The movement away from on-frame computing, to the cloud, and back again
To learn more about Charlie and Losant
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