Who Buys Peeks?
We’re now one year and 3 months into our venture here at Peek. As you can imagine we have learned a lot since September 14th of 2008, especially about our customers.
Initially our main theory was that consumers would drive adoption of Peek. Amongst consumers we thought mom’s would lead the way. We had an adorable character painted out called Jill. Jill was a mom with two kids, she worked from home, shopped at Target… very Mrs. Cleaver-like.
Jill has definitely showed up, we see Jill, she is there as a customer.
The surprise is that businesses have also arrived, in droves. Especially small businesses. From painting companies to lawyers we have a lot of small business owners who buy Peeks.
Why do they buy Peek? Price/frugality. Lets face it, small businesses operate on tight margins… every dollar counts. They can’t be doling out iPhones and BlackBerrys on a whim. They need a practical, no-nonsense product that is affordable.
Even more interesting though is that it changes the lens on the competition. When buying an email device like ours, the biggest competition is not other smart phones. The biggest competition is laptops! The decision is often one of these two:
“I, or my employees, have a desktop. I want to check email on the go. Should I get a laptop, or should I get a mobile email device?”
“I, or my employees, have laptops. Its such a frickin’ pain to pull out my laptop when I’m in the airport, coffee shop, car, etc. Should I get a mobile email device, or should I continue to live with the pain in the ass nature of whipping-out-the-laptop?”
I’d love to hear back from some of you on your thoughts on what would make Peek an even better small business device. Note that I didn’t say ‘business/enterprise’ device… we don’t want to be BlackBerry. Small business folks, let me know.
cbramsey | 21-Jan-10 at 5:55 pm | Permalink
The reason I bought a peek was to replace a pager that I was carrying around, I know so 1990’s. In the end the pager’s only duty was to receive email alerts from my server. Well with a pager there are numerous problems 1) Unreliability in the network. 2) Limits on the viewing area of the message.
Unfortunately, for a personal email device I have converted to the dark side, a Nokia E71x. It was a hard choice I couldn’t pass up. My family has had AT&T for a year and I was on a prepaid plan with T-Mobile that was out of minutes. The family plan had a lot of free minutes available and already had unlimited texting for my wife and son and I was able to share them also. So I made the switch.
With that here is a quick list of things I think the peek needs to be successful personal email device:
HTML Email
Web Browser (Opera Mobile 10 Beta)
Audible Player (WSJ / New York Times)
Text to Speech (New Laws TWD)
Speech to Text (New Laws TWD)
Wider Screen
Expandable Memory
WiFi
WiFi Hostpot (MyFi)
GPS (Google Maps)
Application Store ?
$99 device
$20-30 a month for service
Color eInk Display
LED reading light.
Physical Keyboard
By adding a web browser it enables a lot of capabilities without the need of an application store. However, with an application store others can create wigits that I can’t even imagine that would make the device even more powerful.
Just thought I would throw my wish list out there.
Jimmy | 22-Jan-10 at 6:59 am | Permalink
I use by peek for “business”. My job involves much e-mail and staying on top of it.
When I’ve shown the Peek to friends and colleagues they are generally positive apart from the UI sluggishness. That has gotten better, but at version 01.09.15 the thing basically “locks up” when receiving e-mails.
App wise, Peek needs a google calendar “solution” real bad. There also needs to be some method to view a URL, since it is very common for an e-mail to contain a vital URL.
Although the Peek *does* reduce my laptop time, the biggest competitor is still a smart phone.
You should also be aware that for corporate users the two major carriers are willing to offer good discounts. The math becomes difficult for peek. Assume I’m going to have a voice plan anyway and the carrier discounts the $30 “smart phone” plan to within a Starbucks of a monthly peek cost. The peek retains the no-contract and cheaper up front cost advantage, but the smart phone does much more.
dan | 22-Jan-10 at 7:29 am | Permalink
Carlton – good to hear from you. Dark side indeed!
Funny enough, my wife uses the E71 and recently went back to her Peek for email (after using the Nokia for a month or so on it). Definitely not a fan of the email app on the E71. Though the GPS app is amazing!!!
cbramsey | 22-Jan-10 at 10:23 am | Permalink
@Dan I use the nokia messenging app and it handles gmail ok. I don’t like how it notifies you of new emails. However, I now can click on links and update blog post like i’m doing now. The down side is it takeas me longer to respond back to someone because i’m only checking messages a few times a day. I picked the E71 because it has wifi. So when you make my dream peek I can drop the data plan and use it.
dan | 22-Jan-10 at 1:07 pm | Permalink
yeah, your dream device is not going to cost $99 if it has a $200 colour eink display
Check out the new LCD displays from Pixel Qi. I don’t know that eink will win the battle for displays.
cbramsey | 23-Jan-10 at 6:53 am | Permalink
@dan – I’ll check it out. I had just thrown the color e-ink in because I wanted a display that was easy to read without straining your eyes. I thought maybe for the size of the peek a color e-ink screen was possible. My list ranks the features that I would like from most or least. I do think $99 is where most people are when they want to purchase a device, my price point was free with WiFi to replace my phone. Look at the Sony pocket reader for example it is now at $178. If they would go down to $99 I think they could give Amazon (Kindle) and Barnes & Noble (Nook) a real run for it. However, the advantage they have over Sony is that they can quickly recover the loses on their device by sales from there digital book stores.
Could peek make up the cost by providing an Application Store, Charging by the byte, or is there possibly some other model that peek could use to earn revenue such as direct advertisement revenue.
I don’t know how others feel about direct advertisement. However, lets say peek collects information about where my device goes and never links that information to my person information but provides that information to local businesses and local coffee show that is a block away from a corporate coffee shop notices that I am going every morning I’m going to the corporate coffee shop and wants to send me a coupon or flyer about there business I would be ok with that, especially if I could just have them “scan” my peek for the coupon. Of course some controls would need to be put in place to keep this from becoming more spam. However, I’m ok with it because it’s a win-win-win situation for everyone. The small business is finding prospective customers, Peek is able to subsidize their hardware costs, and the consumer is saving money.
cbramsey | 24-Jan-10 at 7:44 am | Permalink
@everyone,
I was thinking this over a little more this morning and what I realize it that what makes a peek special is what it doesn’t have instead of what it has.
So bellow is a list of things that I don’t want the peek to become:
Video Player
eBook reader for textbooks (I’m ok with it becoming a pocket reader)
Larger than I can fit into a pocket
A phone (VOIP would be ok however I think an addition device utilizing bluetooth or another technology would be needed. Unless it was just a speaker phone)
That’s my quick list. What are your thoughts?
Krieg | 26-Jan-10 at 12:45 pm | Permalink
I got my wife a Peek Classic about a year ago. It doesn’t leave the house. It’s only purpose is to access e-mail in real time without booting up the laptop.
Okay, at $20 a month, that’s a bit spendy for that purpose. But other than a little bugginess occasionally, it’s a wonderful product.
Myself, I’m running for a local office, and I’ve got a website, and the peek would allow me to respond to e-mails from it in real time. I’m considering the Pronto with lifetime, which is an absolute steal at Amazon.
So… not just small businesspeople, but small politicians too!
Maybe I’ll get the Twitter Peek too!
cbramsey | 28-Jan-10 at 6:45 pm | Permalink
@Krieg
Good luck on your campaign.