Speaker 1 00:00:05 Hey there, thoughtful listener. Are you looking for introductions to partners, investors, influencers and clients? Well, I've had private conversations with over 2000 leaders asking them where their best business comes from. I've got a free video you can watch with no opt in required, where I'll share the exact steps necessary to be 100% inbound in your industry over the next 6 to 8 months, with no spam, no ads, and no sales. What I teach has worked for me for over 15 years, and has helped me create eight figures in revenue for my own companies. Just head to up my influence. Com and watch my free class on how to create endless high ticket sales appointments. Also, don't forget the thoughtful entrepreneur is always looking for great guests. Go to up my influence. Com and click on podcast. I'd love to have you. With us right now, it's Nick Earle. Nick, you are the CEO at PSI and the host of the IoT leaders Podcast. To our friend that's listing right now.

Speaker 1 00:01:16 You can search in your podcast player, your podcast app for the IoT leaders podcast. Nick, your website as s I. Com that's e s e y e.com. Nick. It's great to have you.

Speaker 2 00:01:30 Josh you got it all right first time and it's great to be here. And thanks for having me on.

Speaker 1 00:01:35 Absolutely. So you are located on a university campus outside of London. And I would love to learn what C is, who you serve and what you do.

Speaker 2 00:01:44 Yeah. So, yeah, we're we're a global company. we have offices, around the world, but we're based here in the UK, Guildford or people who know the UK, Guildford, south west London. what do we do? Well, in order to explain that real quick, what we've got to describe is what's the problem? So let's start off with the problem. So IoT Internet of Things I remember I used to do a global role for Cisco by the way, prior to doing this. And I was we were always predicting, you know, by 2020, we confidently predicted by 2020, 50 billion things were going to connect.

Speaker 2 00:02:20 I never realized that one day I'd look backwards at 2020 and say, how did we get on? And the answer was we got to 11 billion. So the point is, IoT has not filled its promises. And there were basically two problems. And we at C have solved those two problems. So real quick problem number one is IoT is like think of your cell phone your SIM card. It's proprietary. If you have a SIM card from a from a mobile network operator, you can only go to that mobile network operator and they will roam you on somewhere else. What we did is we solved the problem. So we have essentially a SIM, a connectivity capability that will connect to any network in the world. So we got rid of the proprietary lock and we made it. and I can talk about how, if you want, but basically we can connect to every network in the world. So it's always connected to your device is always connected. And then the second thing that we did again, we can get into how we did it, is that we actually have solved the problem of how to make your device, work on every network in the world.

Speaker 2 00:03:26 So it just automatically switches. So that's what we do, and that's why we've got, about 800 clients all the way around the world, using our system.

Speaker 1 00:03:35 Yeah. You know, I've done, you know, it was a couple of years ago I really got into smart home technology. And that was one of the big challenges is just things, you know, there's just problems with things. Not talking well to each other. And, you know, just even at the, you know, very frontline consumer level, how frustrating that was. And, you know just to you know, look for then solutions. And I think there are some exciting things, you know, that are happening now threads and I forget the other standard, but, yeah, it's.

Speaker 2 00:04:09 Still so.

Speaker 1 00:04:10 Critical. Go ahead.

Speaker 2 00:04:11 Yeah. No, just you're absolutely nailed it. And that's on the consumer home side. And we do. You know, and it's the same for B2B on the business side. You know the the the reason that's a problem.

Speaker 2 00:04:21 Right. If you take a step back why is that. Why is it a problem. There's so much innovation and the innovation that people are developing their own products. And actually interoperability is actually not the first priority. It's kind of like I'll interoperate with my competitors down the line. But first of all, I want to grab market share, right? So when you're building a company and you're running a company, one of the things that the, the that we did here is we said, no, no, no, no, the only way to solve this first problem that I mentioned is you've got to build an interoperability in upfront. And actually if you look at the business, statistics, the the inflection point of adoption for every technology is always when you enable interoperability with an open standards, that's actually when your market takes off, because then everybody says, oh, great, I can actually connect it to this other stuff that I've got your home. And the moment you can connect your home system, all these pieces together and there's, you know, there are some standards.

Speaker 2 00:05:19 The problem was that there's multiple standards. And so but if there was one or all the standards could talk to each other and that problem just disappeared, you'd buy more stuff and, and.

Speaker 1 00:05:30 Yeah, absolutely.

Speaker 2 00:05:31 And and that's the And that's what we did essentially.

Speaker 1 00:05:35 That was one of the again we're just talking kind of consumer home level. You know because I you know I just again recently just went through a both a lot of education a lot of frustration and then ultimately a lot of satisfaction. So I think one thing sometimes that new, smart home, hobbyists Do is they buy the cheap stuff that does not integrate with anything else, unless you really wanted to get into some really nerdy behind this. It's just completely not accessible. but, yeah, I, you know, case in point, you know, but overhead lights or canned lights for my whole house. It went through the the whole solution of, you know, installing them, then later learned that they don't interrupt, you know, interoperate well with everything else.

Speaker 1 00:06:27 So then had to rip everything out. And so yeah, it's I hope again, as both consumers and in the B2B world continue to learn, they're going to look for that. And it sounds like, you know, that you, Nick and C have been able to really sometimes that's going to be easier said than done, right? When we want our IoT stuff.

Speaker 2 00:06:47 It's not easy. It is very easy to say it's not easy to do. And I'll share a little secret with you. but it's not a secret. We tell everyone. But I'll share with you the listeners views. We actually blatantly Copied the method from the airline industry, would you believe? Because if you think about it, you go back, ten, 15 years ago, maybe, maybe 20 years ago. And, you know, I've been based in the US. I've worked, worked in, in five countries. And if you wanted to fly around the world, multiple countries, you had to choose your airline, but then you had to buy a separate ticket with another airline because they wouldn't connect you.

Speaker 2 00:07:23 And and you end up with all these tickets, and you had to pay them all separately and your bags got lost. And we said, look, why can't I just buy a ticket that allows me to fly on any airline? And out of that, that's where things like Star Alliance came. And and what happens is Star Alliance abstracted the problem up to a level and basically said, I'll sell you a ticket on all my members. Airlines, you pay once you have one ticket and then you can use everyone's connections. That's exactly the telecom answer. We sell you a connection on the abstracted level, on any network you pay once you have won one pane of glass, as it's called, one set of APIs, one data rate, and we federate it across all of it. So essentially it's Star Alliance for IoT.

Speaker 1 00:08:10 Yeah, I love it, I love it. so, Nick, this is your world. This is what you do. and for those of us who are maybe focused on, you know, hundreds of other things, would you mind maybe giving a quick state of the union for IoT right now? And also what excites you most about what we may be seeing over the next 12? You know, 1 to 2 years?

Speaker 2 00:08:35 So I think that, where we are right now is we're seeing some really, really interesting use cases everywhere from and I can, quote, use cases for our company better than other people.

Speaker 2 00:08:49 So I'll be selfish and use our use cases example. So for instance we're we're providing fresh water from automated pumps for a million people in Africa. I did a podcast on this recently. You know, if without people installed pumps in villages in Africa, but they break and there's no maintenance model, there's no money to pay for them. So what you get is eight year old girls, typically 8 or 10 year old girls walking two hours to get water and then back 4 or 5 times a day, which means they can't go to school after the age of eight. So IoT, because we are a design, a device design company and an IoT company, we basically designed a pump that will sort of can be maintained remotely over the air with software. Right. Like your car can. And what that means is the pump doesn't break. And then what you find is you find suddenly there's there's a whole generation of children who are now going to school. Right? And it's all done with mobile payments. You know, there's higher penetration of mobile phones in Africa than there is in North America or Europe.

Speaker 2 00:09:51 It's these old Nokia ones that we don't want anymore. They're all in Africa. Oh my gosh Mobile money. Yeah. The higher penetration. Right. So it's all paid for with the mobile phone and you suddenly think, oh my God, we're actually a changing society. Other end of the coin. You've got companies like Amazon. As I said, when the world's biggest companies we do all of their IoT. They that's another podcast I've done with them, but they yeah. Amazon Prime driver has about an 84% success rate of first time delivery to your house. So what they wanted to do is a way of automating gate entry to get into a condominium complex, which is secure, and you can track so that you can give permission for them to come in without you being there. And they can get through the door, without having to have a key. And, you know, they get it up to about 92% first time. Now, you know, those guys are doing tens of billions of packages a month.

Speaker 2 00:10:43 I mean, tens of billions. It's incredible that the bottom line benefit for Amazon on supply chain and distribution of being able to have that whole thing automated so that, you know basically they're trying to automate. Every door in the world is how Amazon think right now. In order to do that, you've got to you've got to have connectivity for every door in anywhere in the world. And so so that's a business example of the same principle, is that you've got to optimize the device, and you've got to be able to take all this proprietary nonsense away, make it agnostic, abstract it agnostic, and it just works. One button press and it just works. So I would say, what's happening now in IoT? To your question, Josh, is we are seeing that inflection point I talked about. We are seeing just the beginnings of ubiquitous one touch, one button connectivity. and, I think that's really encouraging because the number of use cases healthcare, coffee machines, EV chargers, vending machines, lights.

Speaker 2 00:11:54 I mean, emerging markets, I mean, the number of use cases is almost infinite. And I think, never mind 50 billion things connected if we can, if we can collectively as an industry, solve this proprietary nonsense and it generates interoperability, I think we're going to see 500 million or 1 billion things connected, because that's where the next big productivity wave is going to be.

Speaker 1 00:12:23 your podcast, I really would love to hear about your podcast because again, you know, a friend of this listening to a podcast right now if they're interested in IoT, there's the IoT leaders podcast. Do you mind maybe sharing some of the conversations you have or kind of what the. Yeah, I know we've.

Speaker 2 00:12:39 Had some great guests. you know, it came about. I was it was just before Christmas, and I was thinking how, you know, we've got this really cool solution, but people don't know about it. And, and traditional lead generation marketing was kind of like, we're bouncing off and we get all these reject rates.

Speaker 2 00:12:55 And I was thinking, this is not scalable. There's got to be another way. So what we what I did is, well, why don't I just do this like we're doing right now and I interview people, but I interview our customers and I say, you've done something really cool. Why don't you tell me about it? And, you know, Joshua, at first I thought they wouldn't want to talk, but my God, they love it. They they they all want to talk about what they've done. They're proud, you know, and we we just say to them, what have you done? What have you learned? And, and we actually don't really talk about, see, I mean, obviously we've it's that our customer. But they talk about like Amazon talked about it. You know, it's the first podcast Amazon had ever done with an outside vendor ever. so that shows how much Amazon Amazon really great relationship with them. But we do we've had customers on who are small companies just trying to solve a little local problem.

Speaker 2 00:13:49 we've had, people who are trying to do like the, you know, I recently did the one on the, the water the the water won. I had people phone me up and said they cried during that podcast. What do you think about the eight year old girl? problem that I took and now at school, you know, they've got photographs on their website. They called e water. so literally water. they've got photographs of the website of girls who are in school uniform that that could only go to school because of the solution. So we've done about. Yeah, just under 50. And I did one this morning. funny enough, with an analyst and, it's become a sort of go to place for people to understand what the what is real and what's not real about IoT and listening to the pioneers or the people who are making it happen. It's a great way of getting close. I would advise if any of your listeners, the small businesses CEOs, if you want to get close to your customers, then one of the great ways of doing it is to do a podcast with them, because you really get to know them, and afterwards you just become best buddies after the podcast.

Speaker 2 00:14:55 It's just it's inevitable. And the next time there's if there's an issue, there's always issues. If there's an issue, you just phone each other up and you've already got a connection.

Speaker 1 00:15:03 So you're you're singing my song, Nick I know. So, you know, Nick, your website again, SI.com. That's s e y e.com when our friend is listening right now goes to your website, what would you recommend they do, particularly if they're interested in perhaps having a conversation or maybe two things or something that they're looking for.

Speaker 2 00:15:28 Thanks, Josh. Yeah, I'd say two things. First of all, we're all about educating and explaining first, and then the solution follows. That's really important because most people if you go to their website, it's immediately click here for a free SIM. Click here for a quote. We're like, no, no, no, I'm like an architect or we're like an architect. I want you to tell me what your problem is. Then I'll propose a solution. Maybe I might not but but I'm not just going to say, you know, my my extension to your house.

Speaker 2 00:15:57 So the first thing is there's a resources section. And in there you can find case studies. and there's just there's dozens and dozens and dozens of case studies of, of IoT and what has happened. Like I say, we have 800 customers globally in about 190 countries. So so first of all is a bunch of good stuff. So educate yourself. Great reading, great examples and then all over the website. Thanks to my marketing guy all over the website, there's these hooks that say, click. do you want a meeting? Do you want to find out more? Click here. And that you can't miss them. In fact, they're deliberately planted so you fall over them. as as you know, that's the way it works. And so, people, they come on, they typically come on 4 or 5 times, they browse, they research, and then they say, you know what? I think I'm ready to talk. I'd never heard of this company, but it sounds cool. and so, they wonder how to pronounce our name because it's not the most obvious thing.

Speaker 2 00:16:59 And then, then they click, you know, click here for schedule a meeting or click here to find out more. Click here for Reach Out. And then the whole process starts.

Speaker 1 00:17:09 Yeah. Excellent. All right. again, Nick, the website is s i.com. That's e s e y e.com. And, you've been around for how long?

Speaker 2 00:17:24 Oh, yeah. Yeah, it's a very polite way of, referring to my age. Josh, I appreciate it. It's very diplomatic.

Speaker 4 00:17:29 Not you personally, not me. Oh, I'm sorry, I ha. Well, both are true.

Speaker 2 00:17:35 Actually, both are true.

Speaker 4 00:17:38 first of all, I've been in the industry.

Speaker 2 00:17:39 Over 40 years and have done big, big corporate roles in a lot of companies and for startups. But the, the company's been around 16 years. Quick factoid. One of the reasons we can do this is.

Speaker 4 00:17:51 Is.

Speaker 2 00:17:53 listen, I'm the hired gun. I am not the brains of the outfit. The brains of the outfit are the two founders who are still in the business.

Speaker 2 00:18:00 They're right outside the room I'm in. They created Zigbee. So if you know.

Speaker 4 00:18:05 Yeah.

Speaker 2 00:18:06 Yes. Garage remote. Your TV control, the Mars moon lander. The that the helicopter that's buzzing around Mars or whatever.

Speaker 1 00:18:15 I've used plenty of Zigbee products. Yeah.

Speaker 2 00:18:17 So our our guys pulling in, the Zigbee guys, they created Zigbee. they, they came up with the company name, which we have to explain every time. But their engineers have made sense to them. And, and, and but then what they said was, what if Zigbee can work with one button press anywhere around the world? Yeah, it just works. Why doesn't cellular work like that? Why? Because it doesn't, right?

Speaker 4 00:18:42 It doesn't.

Speaker 2 00:18:43 Yeah. So why don't we create an equivalent of Zigbee for cellular? And that's what they did.

Speaker 4 00:18:50 Excellent.

Speaker 2 00:18:50 So that's actually the Genesis of the company. And that's, that's how we can do what we do. Because they are they are a couple of really smart cookies, I tell you.

Speaker 1 00:18:58 Nick Earle, CEO at PSI and host of the IoT Leaders Podcast. Nick, thank you so much for joining us.

Speaker 4 00:19:04 It's been.

Speaker 2 00:19:04 A pleasure. Josh, thanks for having me on.

Speaker 1 00:19:12 Thanks for listening to The Thoughtful Entrepreneur Show. If you are a thoughtful business owner or professional who would like to be on this daily program, please visit up my influence. Com and click on podcast. We believe that every person has a message that can positively impact the world. We love our community who listens and shares our program every day. Together we are empowering one another as thoughtful leaders. And as I mentioned at the beginning of this program, if you're looking for introductions to partners, investors, influencers, and clients, I have had private conversations with over 2000 leaders asking them where their best business comes from. I've got a free video that you can watch right now with no opt in or email required, where I'm going to share the exact steps necessary to be 100% inbound in your industry over the next 6 to 8 months, with no spam, no ads, and no sales.

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