State of BYOD

thousands of people have built their own TRMNL device. last week we shared a survey to better understand the BYOD ecosystem, below are those results and what we're doing about it.

ease of setup

of 230 responses, 135 purchased a BYOD license. this is not necessary if you want to go fully open source (BYOS), but i'm glad we can bifurcate results by this answer. you'll see why in a bit.

the majority (54.9%) of license holders said it was easy to set up their device, but i want this metric to be at least 70%.

insight: create smarter (device model specific) onboarding versus general guides.

does size matter?

here it appears we're already in the sweet spot.

although 43.1% of responses are seeking devices larger than 11", that number drops to 35% when considering only BYOD license holders. i think can be explained by how prohibitively expensive displays become past the ~13 inch threshold.

a license holder is aware of ePaper price jumps, a non license holder may not be and is living in fantasy land. which is OK, we live there too. let's be neighbors?

larger displays are also a lot more complex to set up. as your screen interface jumps from SPI to parallel, driver boards change, so does power consumption, and of course so does the enclosure needed to fit it all. designing a 3D printable case for a large display would be a 20+ hour print and require multiple joints to connect disparate pieces.

insight: focus on 7.5 - 13.3" displays. if you need something much bigger, stay tuned for an announcement later this Summer.

ecosystem compatibility

this was a curious set of answers, inconclusive from a prioritization standpoint and an obvious indication that we (i) do a poor job communicating the myriad devices already supported.

insight: ask this question again after increasing ecosystem visibility.

quickstart wishlist

for the impulsive shopper i wanted to understand which singular optimization might have swayed their purchase decision. we're not in the business of selling things people don't need, but we are in the business of creating aha moments.

here we'll look at only non BYOD license holder responses. a whopping 58.8% said a Free Trial would have helped them make a decision, whereas only 41.9% of license holders would have preferred a free trial.

nearly double the number of license holders (31.8%) prefer better documentation to non license holders (17.6%). this makes sense given you don't know the strength of a guide until you actually try to follow it.

insight: implement a free trial or interactive demo. → free trials are now live.

open-ended requests

this is the most valuable part of the survey because it's a bummer to read. below are a few random examples, copy/pasted verbatim, along with our reaction.

clearly we have an education problem. a deep rabbit hole does no good if it's hard to find.

insight: make it easy (+ fun) to figure out which household devices can run TRMNL.

what's next

Larry Bank leads our BYOD effort. for an introduction to some of his impact at TRMNL see here and here and here.

Larry can reverse engineer and improve just about any device <> display combo, making it TRMNL friendly and power efficient.

for the past several months we've expanded BYOD largely on a set of hunches about what people want. today we're beginning to mix those gut decisions with community feedback.

to the thousands of customers who purchased BYOD licenses, thank you. a portion of your funds go directly to TRMNL Creators and your live chats, public reviews, and emails will continue guiding us.

to prospective DIY-ers: stay tuned for better docs, risk-free demos (now live), and less digging around our website to figure out if the device in your hand is TRMNL compatible.

for the raw data used in this post go here.