> The problem with space imagery is that almost everyone who wants it has a niche use case
But this is a good problem. It's like saying "the problem with motors is that everyone who uses them has a niche use case" (submarines, cars, airplanes, industrial machinery...). Or that "the problem with microscopy is that everyone who wants it has a niche use case". And indeed it does! Microscopes for biologists are different to those for chemists, engineers, medical doctors, physicists, etc.
The concept of "space imagery" is extremely wide. It is natural that earth observation satellites become specialized. I wouldn't be surprised to see in the near future some "CH4" or "CO2" satellites that acquire light in a handful of extremely narrow particular bands on the short wave infrared spectrum that are useful only for observing plumes of these gases. Right now, people use hyperspectral imagers (which have a dense sampling of some parts of the spectrum) and throw away most of the image data.
Absolutely. And what you do in that case is to sell motors to people who want them. If they give you feedback on how to make better motors, take it and make better motors.
What you don't do is presume that you know everything about how people want to use motors, and offer a subscription to a design service that does all of their engineering design for them, as a way to sell your motors.
It's only a good problem when your niche customers have deep pockets to pay for their varied needs and high risk tolerance. Most variations can't be protyped out by some engineer on the weekends where they just spin out a startup with minimal risk to address the gap.
The false assumption I deal with that drives me insane with so many individuals is that everyone thinks their specialized use case is a small variation on the major use case that already benefits from economies of scale. That often isn't the case and a significant R&D effort needs to go underway on just how one can leverage existing technology for their use case.
There's very often at least one, if not many, mission critical functional requirements from existing tech that require significant effort to make the jump from the existing tech to the desired use case. And guess what, all the non-niche users don't want to pay for that, so you need to be prepared to pony up the capital, accept risk of failure, and be ready to take the plunge.
I tell people with this mentality that they need to work in reverse, first understand the technology they think is close and find the problem sets that have the best match up and focus on those. These efforts can costs hundreds of thousands very easily if not millions to tens of millions if you just play it by ear that "...this thing is sorta like what we want so it can't possibly be that difficult to adapt." (Basically what I hear with technology management, many business people, and clients)
Many people pretend software and tech are just Lego blocks and since it's virtual, there's no capital needed. Good luck, because the skills needed to deal with this tech isn't cheap and the complexity often isn't low meaning expensive and difficult to find labor for long periods of time, often with a fairly good chance of failure.
>> find the problem sets that have the best match up and focus on those.
Or, abandon all of that. A space imagery company is a media company. They generate content. So do what other content creators do. Take everything you have and shovel it in front of people as fast as possible. Deliver it by any and every means available. Ask questions, but do so AFTER they have already made a purchase. Then judge what your customers want by what they choose to consume.
Is this even feasible? I imagine high resolution satellite imagery is a lot larger than your typical blog post or youtube video. Plus the surface of the earth is huge, if you push out everything 95% of it is probably irrelevant crap that doesn't tell you anything about your customers. But I don't run a media or satellite imagery company so this is just what i imagine lol
Why would that matter? Consumers get to choose which subset of the data they use. If they want to download the entire Earth at 5PB, just charge them appropriately.
My impression is that it matters because if the data hasn't been collected with a specific purpose in mind, then its probably not gonna be useful for a lot of cases.
Say I'm a farmer and for examples sake I want regular aerial images to estimate crop yield for a plot of land. That would require high resolution imaging of a particular patch everyday for maybe a few months. That would require purposeful data capturing at regular time intervals during overhead satellite passes.
From what i understand satellite imaging companies won't happen to just have those images containing the region of interest you want just lying around on their hard-drives which they can pull out with some query. If they make all the images they have available to the public, I'm guessing most of it will be useless to people considering it needs to cover the desired region of interest across time and space.
Well, this seems to cry for a big coalition. build it and they'll come. Iridium failed because it was too early (too costly, only a few specialized users had the cash for it), Starlink seems to thrive because they can go general.
> like saying "the problem with motors is that everyone who uses them has a niche use case" (submarines, cars, airplanes, industrial machinery...)
This is a good analogy. How many companies say “I’ll build a sweet motor and then find a customer for it”? They don’t. They build the motor for the application. (More often, they build something close to the final product.)
That's only true in extremis: it's not even completely true of car/industrial motors! Companies like Cummins design motors that are used in all sorts of applications, e.g. https://www.cummins.com/engines/qst30
When you look at smaller motors (e.g. DC motors in handheld consumer products), they're basically jellybean parts targeted towards the highly specific use case of making a shaft turn.
Wrong. They absolutely do. In fact I’d wager the vast majority of motors are essentially commodity goods. Even if you were thinking of just combustion engines, its really not the case, most engines get reused many times. Which makes sense, its an outsized engineering problem to optimize so you’d want to maximize your return.
But this is a good problem. It's like saying "the problem with motors is that everyone who uses them has a niche use case" (submarines, cars, airplanes, industrial machinery...). Or that "the problem with microscopy is that everyone who wants it has a niche use case". And indeed it does! Microscopes for biologists are different to those for chemists, engineers, medical doctors, physicists, etc.
The concept of "space imagery" is extremely wide. It is natural that earth observation satellites become specialized. I wouldn't be surprised to see in the near future some "CH4" or "CO2" satellites that acquire light in a handful of extremely narrow particular bands on the short wave infrared spectrum that are useful only for observing plumes of these gases. Right now, people use hyperspectral imagers (which have a dense sampling of some parts of the spectrum) and throw away most of the image data.