Ray Maker: The journey of DC Rainmaker

Ray, it's a pleasure to see you. I have been following the blog for at least ten years now, so I'm really excited about this. I would love to start with your journey and how you got started - what was your first sport?

Yes, the first sport I would say was running, or I actually was a downhill skier by early kid age, if you will. I was very competitive at downhill skiing. But in terms of this journey anyways, it was running.

I had been doing some running with basically various devices as my then girlfriend at the time, had wanted to run a marathon. And this was before I became a runner. So I figured - fine, I'll go and run this marathon once... I'll check that box and never have to do this again.

But I was also at the time I worked for Microsoft and obviously, you got a bit of a text-slant to anything. I picked up an old Polar watch, like an old Polar 625 or something like that. It was really old. It had an external GPS pod, the size of a Twinkie that you put somewhere. It was just not great. But that whole thing went from there - I'd try it out and I didn't like it. It wasn't a great experience.

Then I went off and bought the Garmin Forerunner 305, which is this infamous watch or famous watch that's a red, orangey red color, big blocky thing.

Most people would say it was the starting point of the GPS watch generation. Lots of people back in that 2008 or 2009 era had these. You'd find them at marathons everywhere.

I was using this for a few months. At the time, again, working for Microsoft, there was an internal distribution group for triathletes. I started getting into dabbling into triathlon a little bit. That deal I had sent out was effectively a product review about this watch, which was only six paragraphs long without pictures or anything. It was not very long.

But I ended up just taking that and copying and pasting it into a blog post one day. I started my blog the same day I signed up for Iron Man Canada back in 2007. That was back in the days when you had to go to the races in person and sign up. You couldn't just do it online. You had to go a year before the previous year's race - signed up in person, and that was my first post. Then a few months later, I decided just to copy and paste that email that was my product review into a blog post.

That became my first product review for what was then the first Garmin watch I tried. For that era, back in 2007, product reviews were mostly done by magazines that were advertorial in nature. It was one hand washing the other thing and usually pretty useless. For me, coming from a tech slant, I took that. I had pictures in it, lots of details. At that time, that was like, insanely detailed. If you look back at that same post now, you're like, That looks pretty short compared to your user reviews. But that was the journey.

Then from there, with every new stupid sports gadget I bought, I typed something up and posted it online.

How the wearables space has become dominated by a few large players and why early contenders like Adidas, LEIKR, and TomTom failed

Which wearables went out of business that you really liked?

That's a tough one. There were lots of wearables that had good concepts but challenging executions. I would say there was a watch about 8 to 10 years ago called Leikr, which was like this small square display watch that sat at an angle under the wrist - a super interesting-looking design. At the time, it was crazy. It had maps. It was almost like a Kindle-style display on it. Really cool.

I think they made it barely into shipping before they went out of business. And I would say that was one of the first companies to really run headfirst into the realities of making a multi-sport watch is really hard.

Back 10 years ago, companies like TomTom and Adidas. I mean, Adidas made a really cool watch at the time, way ahead of its time. It had music connectivity. It had an LCD M1 display. It had a like... Yeah, it was insane. Nothing like it. But one of the challenges when you make these watches that are so advanced or theoretically advanced anyways, is that you're judged against what was, mostly at the time, the Garmin bar.

In other words, does it have an X feature or a Y feature? People get really entrenched in the features that they have, and they won't switch watches without that feature.

Garmin at that point had figured out how to make a watch-watch. They knew how to make a watch, so they got over that initial bump. And thus, every year, they just simply added more and more features, and they were at increased quality versus a new watch company has to first get over the hump of making a watch, something that's waterproof and usable and all that stuff, and all the software to go with it, and the updates and the apps.

That's a huge bar to get to just a basic running watch, let alone to get to a multi-sport watch, or to get to a hiking watch, a mapping watch, or music. All those things, and so Leikr, and to a large extent Adidas as well, learned, unfortunately, that it is very hard to compete with Garmin, and also with Garmin's complete vertical integration. They have their own factories, their own manufacturing facilities. They own those facilities in Taiwan, and they can easily go from a production line of one watch to the next watch overnight if they want to.

They can ramp up here and ramp down there and so on. It's a huge chunk of their success. The same goes for the reuse watch models. You look at a Garmin Forerunner watch, which gets reused as a golfing watch, a Marine watch, and so on. All the different areas that as a fitness person, you'd be like, I don't care about a dog tracking watch, but Garmin does. And they reuse that exact same watch with some new firm on it, and now it's a dog tracking watch.

The battle of the titans - Apple vs Garmin - software vs hardware and how Apple's superior software comes down to hiring

In terms of software vs hardware - I'm personally always using Garmin devices, but the software is not great...

I think it comes down to a hiring thing. Garmin is getting better and better at it, but they're based in Kansas, right? Years ago, Garmin bought a company, MotionBased, which was the precursor to Garmin Connect. Back 13 or 14 years ago, there was Strava just starting out and there was something called MotionBased, which was like MapMyRun at the time.

MotionBased got really popular and Garmin decided to buy MotionBased - the company. It was roughly 25 or 30 employees from the Bay Area. Garmin said, okay, now you need to move to Kansas... All these employees in the Bay Area said, no, we're not moving to Kansas.

Garmin took that platform and that team, you can actually read my old post about it, the team literally put themselves up for sale. They sold off the platform to Garmin. Garmin had now rebranded as Garmin Connect, but it was still MotionBased. You could find little things here and there that reference MotionBased. But the team sold itself off to the highest bidder, which ended up being basically Magellan, more or less their TPS competitor for the personnel value of that.

Garmin then had a period of a couple of years where they only had literally two people on staff to deal with garment connect issues. They would admit now, they haven't admitted anyways in the last 5 or 6 years or so, that this was arguably one of their biggest mistakes - letting that happen... Because in doing so, they really let Strava eat a lot of what could have been in Garmin's lunch.

Now we see Strava as the neutral territory, right? The Swiss of devices where everything fits into that. That was certainly the case way back then. But Garmin could have really expanded Garmin Connect 10 years ago and just made it so much bigger that it might have deterred people from other platforms and they didn't. People obviously moved to Kansas, but there's still a reality that Garmin tends to want a lot of people locally there which I think might be hindering some of their growth.