Company
Green Custard: Why Start-Ups Work With Us
Published on 12 Aug, 2024 by Jonathan
Working with start-ups is a natural path for Green Custard; my business partner and I previously founded and raised funding for our own start-up businesses, so we are attuned to the pressures that start-ups face. We can empathise with the common challenges of start-ups, namely customers, money, and investors - and not necessarily in that order.
Green Custard has supported and worked with over 50 start-ups, providing everything from guidance and advice to implementing complete products. The experience of deep innovation working with start-ups can be applied to larger enterprises looking to innovate, such as Britvic. In the last 5 years, most of those customers have been building connected products, which is an area where we specialise.
I’d like to introduce you to a few of the customers we have worked with:
Gardin is an Agri-tech industry leader based in the UK that develops new technologies utilising proprietary sensors so food growers can optimise their growing environments, leading to healthier crops, higher yields, and more nutritious produce whilst lowering operating costs. Gardin is an expert at what they do, however they did need support with secure provisioning of their AWS Greengrass IoT devices in the field - so we listened, and helped just with that. It’s a great example of being able to dip in and solve a problem for a customer which is outside their sphere of comfort.
“With time and development resources always being at a premium, choosing to partner with Green Custard and their team of AWS and IoT experts made both technical and financial sense, and through their support, we're delivering to our customers a secure yet seamless "plug in and go" solution for installing and connecting their fleet of Gardin sensors to our platform.”
Connor Goddard, Tech Lead, Gardin
Tech Lead, Gardin
Quensus provide award-winning water leak detection sensors. They were looking to significantly reduce the installation cost of their product by moving from WiFI to LoRaWAN for AWS IoT Device connectivity. We helped redesign their hardware and software (edge and AWS) to integrate LoRaWAN on their latest hardware revision and simplify their installation and AWS cloud solutions. This is a great case of working with a customer to understand their end goals, and selecting the right technology to help them solve it.
Pirate operates a worldwide network of 24/7 self-service studios for professional and casual use. To support this they have a fleet of IoT devices which manage those studios, for example, to cut power to key studio equipment once the booking time is up. Pirate had the majority of their solution on AWS, but their IoT kill switches were using Balena. We helped them migrate their existing Rasperry Pi based hardware to AWS and reduced their operational costs by over 90%. We often find customers unlock a lot of benefit from leveraging AWS' low cost managed services for IoT.
Many start-ups also just engage us for advice. In particular, for those start-ups who are perhaps moving to the scale-up phase we often get involved in reviewing their architecture on AWS with a Well-Architected review. This is often a great way for those customers to get cost-neutral consulting from a top AWS IoT specialist.
Over the years we have directly mentored and supported start-ups, and most notable in this group is Zaya Tech, who make PSA certified security and containerisation solutions for microcontrollers and embedded systems. We have mentored and supported them for many years, and this year supported them at Embedded World.
“Green Custard has provided invaluable mentorship support, providing advice on everything from getting investors and board advisors, and how to refine our proposition.”
Murat Cakmak
Zaya Tech
It’s exciting working with start-ups, and we’ve seen great highs and exits for customers, as well as some who sadly reached the end of the road. When writing I was asked by our Marketing Team, what’s one piece of advice you would give?
There are two really:
1. Believe in yourself, but be prepared to adapt quickly if needed. Adaptation and potentially a complete pivot, is not failure, it is normal and is more likely to lead to success.
2. Don’t reinvent the wheel, spend the majority of your engineering brain cycles on building highly differentiated products - there really is a wealth of tools and services, particularly on AWS, for accelerating your time to market and reducing your long-term costs for your connected products.
