Interview with Pavel Baiborodin - Founder of Blynk

2016-02-02 | By Maker.io Staff

Interview with Pavel Baiborodin – Founder of Blynk

What drove you to start this platform?

I was a user experience (UX) designer for around ten years, in mobile and automotive space. Around three years ago, I decided to tinker with the Arduino platform and I quickly realized I needed an interface for all of the projects I was developing. When I searched the market to try and figure out how to pair my project with a phone, I was really frustrated because everything was overly complicated. Since I was working in the IT sphere, I spoke to a few friends of mine who were also interested in Arduino and we decided to build something that could control hardware with a phone. We continued slowly working on this for some time and we realized that we should either publish what we had or just stop working on it. This is when Kickstarter became an option for us to gauge how the consumer would receive our product. We ended up getting support from 2,300 backers, so it was very successful for us.

The project grew out of frustration that there was not an easy-to-use platform available to makers. I actually see this a lot in the maker space; today, the DIY space is very similar to the early days of the Internet, when programmers were developing entirely new platforms for themselves, not thinking about how end users will interact with it. Arduino did have a great user experience and I was seeing results with the starter kit after an hour of using it—I was amazed at how easy it was.

What were some of your core requirements for Blynk when you started it?

We had a few key ideas when we started Blynk. The first was that users should be able to start a project and see results really quickly—five minutes was our goal. The second was that we wanted to work with a variety of hardware because we didn’t want to limit our users because of incompatibility. The third part was to make Blynk really flexible and customizable for people who already know how to do certain things and save time for them writing a new app for each project.

What were some of the challenges in bringing this product ready for users?

The main challenges were connecting the dots with all aspects of the product. We have three parts of our product: apps for iOS and Android, Blynk server, and libraries for the hardware. I would say that the apps were the least problematic, however, they are still challenging in terms of UI because we want to make something that is not only easy to use, but also flexible for people who want to use it differently.

Right now, the library is somewhat challenging because of the limitations that the hardware has. Arduino does not have that much memory on board, so we are trying to develop a flexible library for that. I also hope that Blynk will become more and more popular over time so that communities will pop up and start developing supported libraries for other platforms.

Building hardware libraries was quite a challenge, considering all the limited resources on boards. However, we already have libraries working with a wide range of hardware. From Arduino, Raspberry Pi, to all the boards with CC3000 Wi-Fi chip, Spark Core, and more. I hope that with the design we’ve created, the maker community will start developing Blynk libraries for other platforms.

What is the business model for the company? Are you charging for the app and delivering the platform for free?

The app will initially be free and it will come with a few widgets. The other widgets will be up for purchase, unless you were a Kickstarter backer. We are pursuing an almost identical business strategy as apps implement. The other thing we eventually want to do is license out our technology. We will test the platform, performance, and user experience with the community to develop another service, which will enable creating standalone apps for embedded products with all the infrastructure in place.

Outside of iOS and Android, do you have any plans to support Windows or Mac platforms to have these IoT products on desktop machines?

This is something we have discussed a lot. I do not believe we will develop for desktops at the moment because market trends indicate that desktops will die over time. I think user experience will migrate towards the mobile sphere. Right now, Blynk is becoming slightly bigger than it was originally—it is becoming more of an IoT hub than just an app. Right now, everyone is developing their own protocol similar to the development of the Internet in the 1990s, when universities agreed on using HTTP. I believe we will see a lot of growth and development for such hubs and at some point they might agree on a unified protocol for the Internet of Things.

If a partner wants to get a hold of you to develop a platform for their hardware, how could they get involved to ensure that their hardware is compatible?

There are three ways. First, if the request came within the community, then we will build the library on our own, but only if the hardware is open source. We would like to contribute to this community because we think it’s great and that everyone is benefitting from it. And it’s a matter of days, not even weeks for us. Also, community can easily contribute into making support for other platforms. The other way is that a manufacturer could create a library because they know their own hardware better—that would be for products that, for example, would use their own Cloud. At some point, we could create a widget that could translate all the messages from Blynk app to the API of these servers. So even if it is closed source, we could still work with them.

Where do you see Blynk at the end of the year?

We would really like to become the first really good mobile hub for different IoT services. That is our main goal for the year. Providing platform for connected product manufacturers would be a second priority. There is a lot of interest from them. We also have some hardware ideas in mind to complement our software products. We would like to build some really inexpensive, bare-bones product, which might be another Kickstarter project in the near future.