DGS 24: Protecting Properties with Video Doorbells from Ring

We’re living in a Prime nation, more and more of us receive packages delivered to our doorsteps every single day. But with great convenience comes greater opportunity for crime: Statistics show that mail theft is on the rise.

In this episode, we’re joined by August Cement, tech guru at video doorbell company Ring. You’ll learn how Ring is the future of doorbells, and how creating peace of mind is the most important part of protecting your properties.

You’ll Learn…

[2:20] What is Ring and what are the features and benefits?
[5:00] How Ring protects against package theft
[8:15] Why peace of mind is more important than security
[10:30] Integrating with home automation systems
[13:00] The story of Ring’s conception and why it’s not a gimmicky product
[14:55] Taking neighborhood watch to a higher level
[19:05] How Ring helps property managers and tenants
[26:40] Do you need to be tech savvy to use Ring?
[28:00] Using Ring in extreme circumstances
[29:35] What happens if a thief steals your video doorbell: Ring and customer service
[33:50] Community interaction
[36:00] Responding to a knock on the door from anywhere in the world

Tweetables

Resources

Buy Ring on Amazon

If This Then That

Want to talk more about how Ring works and if it’s right for you? Email neighborhoods@ring.com to get connected to August and his team.

Transcript

Jason: Welcome DoorGrow Hackers to the DoorGrowShow. If you are a property management entrepreneur that wants to add doors and expand your rent roll, and you are interested in growing your business and life, and you are open to doing things a bit differently, then you are a DoorGrow Hacker.

At DoorGrow, we are on a mission to grow property management businesses and their owners. We want to transform the industry, eliminate the BS, build awareness, expand the market and help the best property managers win. If you enjoy this episode, do me a favor, open up iTunes, find the DoorGrowShow, subscribe, and then give us a real review. Thank you for helping us with that vision.

I’m your host, Property Management Growth Hacker, Jason Hull, the Founder of OpenPotion, GatherKudos, ThunderLocal, and of course, DoorGrow. Now, let’s get into the show.

This is episode number 24 of the DoorGrowShow. I’m talking today with August Cement of Ring. If you haven’t heard about Ring and seen these super cool video doorbells–the future of doorbells, who would have thought that doorbells could protect properties, create more peace of mind, and make your tenants and owners feel safer about the property–this is, I believe the future of doorbells. We’re gonna get into this with August Cement.

I recently installed one on my own property and wanted to reach out to them and they said, “Yeah, let’s do an interview.” I’m hanging out with August Cement of Ring–their first employee and one of the technical wizards over there at Ring. You are going to hear all about how these doorbells came about and what they’ve been doing to make communities safer. Let’s get into the show.

I’m here on the DoorGrow Show with August Cement of Ring. I’m really excited to have you here because I recently got one of your devices. Tell us a little bit about you and Ring.

August: Sure. My name is August Cement. I’m actually Ring’s very first employee. I’ve been around since the garage days. What Ring is is a Wi-Fi enabled video doorbell. It streams audio and video allowing homeowners to see and speak with guests from anywhere using their smartphone. It has motion detection, cloud video recording, night vision, and several other features that really enable it to be an effective tool for reducing break-ins, mail thefts, property crime, as well as just the general product for convenience and monitoring your home well while there or away.

Jason: I was at Costco and you guys must be doing something because it was there at Costco and my wife was like, “Hey, see this? I’ve heard about these.” I was like, “I haven’t.” She was like, “These are really cool. One of my friends has this at her house. One of my other friends has this at her house.” I was like, “Alright, let’s get it. I like new tech, let’s try it out.”

Got the thing and set it up and it’s been really cool. It pops-up on my phone and says, “Hey, there’s somebody creeping around your door.” There’s some motion detected, or it says, “There’s somebody ringing your doorbell.” It pops-up on my phone and I can see who it is. I can even talk to them. I don’t even have to be home and be like, “Hey, get away from my door.” Or I can be like, “Hey, yeah. Just leave the package there,” or whatever.

August: It’s truly a magical experience. I would agree. I actually credit Costco for that. They’re a pretty amazing partner. They’ve done a good job. They really know how to select the right products. We are big fans of Costco ourselves. But yeah, it truly is a magical experience.

I think it’s something where when you start to use the product–a, you realize how cool it is, b, you realize that where you really can’t believe that there’s a day that you didn’t have something like this. It really is something that whether or not you realize the value upfront, you definitely realize it very quickly after setting it up and using it for a short period of time.

Jason: We actually, here in our neighborhood–and I’m in Southern California, I live in a really nice neighborhood up on the hill–but down, this view at night of the city, it’s gorgeous. It’s really fun to look at. It’s not super amazing during the day but it’s nice at night to see all this.

But what I’m seeing down there is San Bernardino. This is one of the highest per capita poverty areas in the US. Everybody’s heard the name from the recent terrorist event that happened and this sort of thing. But a lot of riffraff come from these areas and come up into the nice neighborhoods and we’ve had the neighborhood mailbox, several mailboxes broken-into, we’ve had people that package is stolen, I’ve had my car, one of our cars has been broken into. They didn’t take anything. I’m guessing they were just like getting numbers and things like this to do stuff or maybe they’re planning to come back, I don’t know.

But these kinds of things have happened and so it’s made me concerned. I think it’s not atypical I think around the US for people to be dealing with this kind of stuff–package theft. We have packages delivered constantly now, more so than ever. There’s this Amazon culture, getting these boxes. Everytime something happens on my porch, I have a notice.

August: Yup.

Jason: I look at the video of it, if I don’t have time to look at it right then, I can see, “Oh, there’s a package sitting down there for me.”

August: Yeah. It really is, to your point, we become a prime nation, really, it seems like everyone you know, as an Amazon prime account. But to your point, I think you touched on a few different things that we really hear a lot from our customers. That is this type of crime is becoming more and more prevalent. I think you can attribute it to a variety of different reasons or factors or whatever you may. But what we see a lot is that non-violent crime is being incentivized a little bit more just based on our current kind of criminal system that we have in place especially in California, there’s been some laws that are passed where we don’t wanna keep non-violent criminals in jails and whether or not you agree with it, the reality is these crimes have become much more common as a result, I mean, the knock-knock burglaries.

What some people would maybe even consider petty crimes such as mail theft and package theft, a lot of that stuff is becoming much more widespread in part because they’re not getting punished, or they’re not getting severely punished, I should say. For these slap on the wrist-type crimes, people are really taking that risk, or criminals, I should say, are taking the risk much more often.

I know you mentioned that you’re at adjacent to San Bernardino and so you get some of the spillover criminals into your neighborhood. What I think a lot of people see in terms of the value of our product is not only its ability to reduce crime, but what we think of as peace of mind in terms of being able to provide the homeowner that feeling that they’re connected to their home even when they’re halfway around the world.

Peace of mind means something different to everyone. Maybe to the person who’s adjacent to a community where a lot of criminals come over and break-in the homes, maybe it means ensuring that they can prevent a burglar before they come into their home.

For other people who live in safer communities, maybe that means getting to see the nanny bring home their kid everyday at [3:00] PM after school and saying hi to their son, or hi to their daughter and knowing, “Hey, you know what? I’m at the office, I’m working hard, but I know that they got home safe. I know that it was a good day.” To them, that’s really the value that our product adds.

This idea of peace of mind really is about something so much more than just security, it really is about maintaining that connection to your home, to your family, to your neighborhood, regardless of where you are.

Jason: There’s so many different fears that we can create in our mind when it comes to our family, our kids, and our home, and having the transparency and the visibility of knowing what’s going in and out of your home, and when, and being able to see what’s happening around your property is great. I actually even went out, I was like, “This is so cool. I wanna see what’s going on in my driveway.”

I went and got another Ring device that’s not the doorbell one, just the camera and set that up right on the corner of my garage like it see what’s going on in my driveway out in front of my property.

August: Yup.

Jason: That pretty much, with my property, giving me a fairly decent visibility around my property and what’s going on and the main entry point to the home which is generally the main place that crime occurs, coming in. Then also I’m seeing my vehicles and my driveway. Who knows maybe eventually I’ll have cameras in my backyard and everywhere else.

There’s this whole movement right now towards home automation. It’s starting to become more mainstream and this connection and I notice that it looks like Ring can also connect to some of these home automation hubs as well.

August: Yeah, absolutely. We do have integrations with several lock companies. Then IFTTT. We’re definitely moving more towards opening up our technology and allowing it to talk to other devices.

Full disclosure, when we first came up with this idea, the classic entrepreneurial tale of it was much harder than we had ever thought it would be.

Jason: Right. I could imagine.

August: A lot of people when they hear about the idea they say, “Wow, I can’t believe that something like that doesn’t already exist or where did not already exist at the time that you launched Ring.” If you worked at Ring, you would understand why. It’s very challenging technology to produce, especially at the cost and everything that we need to manufacture that and everything else.

The way consumers view hardware, you’re immediately compared to Apple and Samsung, and Sony’s of the world. They’ve really set the bar high and so as far as integrations go, we spent a long time because we’re still a relatively young company, we spent a long time really perfecting our own technology and really trying to optimize the experience for our customers in regards to the video doorbell that we’re just now really starting to explore what integrations are out there and how we can really work with other technologies and products to create a better holistic experience for homeowners.

But really this is something that is still relatively new to us and we’re really gonna focus on building it out. But we do have some pretty cool stuff going on with locks, we have an integration with AT&T which is definitely pretty neat, you can make your home more secure from the in-call screen from a Ring event so you can lock your locks, turn on your lights, arm your system, assuming you have an AT&T pulse system.

Again, that’s definitely something that we’re looking to build out and add more partners in the future. But for now, I think we have some pretty cool integrations done.

Jason: How did Ring come about when there are Apple and Samsung? These people, “Why didn’t they do this?”

August: It’s a great question. I don’t know if a lot of people really had the same vision that we did. When we first released the product, I think some people thought that this is a product that should be in SkyMall. This is just something that’s kind of gimmicky, it’s not really a necessity, it’s something that’s nice to have but not a must have. I think that a lot of that was because people underestimated how widespread these types of crimes really were and how many different homes they were affecting.

I think it was also because some people think that crime is something that is much more maybe not brazing but people think that it’s kind of this huge ski-mask and kicking down the back door and doing something that’s much more complex than it really is.

What we’ve seen at Ring is a lot of the crime that we’re able to prevent, there are crimes of opportunity. There are people that go during the day when the homeowner’s typically aren’t there, they’re out working, they’ll knock on the door, should the homeowner happen to be there, then will make up some story about looking for someone that doesn’t live there using a generic name. But oftentimes, when the homeowner is not there, then they’ll case the property and they’ll break-in.

I think that our product has really brought to light how common this type of crime really is. I think in part, it was that the bigger players–these Samsung’s and Apple’s of the world–maybe overlooked this opportunity because they really didn’t understand how big it truly is.

Jason: I think they’re focus was just elsewhere. I wanna touch on one thing, one thing I noticed is there’s this culture that’s gotten away from knowing your neighbors, from there being this connection. Now we’re seeing this shift back to that–we’ve gotten less social even though we’re more involved in social media or social network, real life network has dwindled and we’re starting to see the shift back. You’re seeing these things like Ring creating this peace of mind and then you’re seeing a lot of Facebook groups for cities and things like this that are very neighborhood oriented.

I’m seeing people post their Ring videos on these Facebook groups, “Has anyone else seen this person snooping around their property?” Then you’re seeing things next-door social network pop-up that is very similar to these Facebook groups without all the downsides and distractions the Facebook is very focused on–it verifies and its real neighbors. I think you’re a pioneer, you’re the forefront of all of this. It’s really exciting to hear that things are integrating.

August: Yeah. I think for a long, long time, really until a couple of years ago, people thought of home security in a way that was very isolated in a sense that a lot of traditional security companies have taught us that if you build a huge wall around your home, then you will be safe, figuratively speaking. If you protect your home with every last bell and whistle out there that you will be safe, I think a lot of people lost or stopped believing that that was the solution, and now, neighborhoods are starting to realize that crime isn’t reliant on an individual home as much as it is at the neighborhood level. We feel that Ring kind of plays one piece in creating a safer neighborhood but ultimately crime and safety, that really occurs at the neighborhood level.

What we see in terms of a safe community or safe neighborhood, it is a neighborhood where there’s a lot of engagement, a lot of interaction where they have email distribution list, they know who their neighbors are, they interact with each other using some centralized platform–again, even it’s just a big email list where people can ping each other when they see suspicious  behavior, or when an incident has occurred that they want their neighbors to be aware of–having something in place that really brings them altogether, that’s really the biggest step in terms of reducing crime in neighborhoods.

And then for us, we see our technology as just being a tool for increasing that engagement and allowing others to interact in terms of audio/video surveillance and using the same app to talk amongst each other. We’re just allowing them to do what they should already be doing in terms of taking a step to reduce break-ins and property crime.

Jason: Yeah. That goes right along with your mission. I was looking on your About page before the call. It says your mission is really simple–I love this because I’m a big fan of Simon Sinek and start with the Why and having a Why statement and this sort of idea. Because most companies have big lengthy like garbage mission statements that are like real fake and nobody at the company probably knows that–but the Ring mission statement says, “To reduce crime in communities.”

August: Yup.

Jason: Really simple. I love that. It’s taking neighborhood watch, this old idea of neighborhood watch to a whole new level because it’s there protecting and looking at your little area on your porch when you’re not there. It motion activates and does this.

I wanna connect this to the property management industry for my audience. The property managers, one thing they should be aware of–going back to what you said earlier–you mentioned peace of mind. Property managers that are savvy, they understand, this is the homeowner’s number one concern. If they’re going to sell these homeowners on the idea that, “Hey, we’re gonna manage this property for you.” Their biggest concern is peace of mind.

I see a real advantage for property managers to say, “Hey, one of the things that we do when we onboard a new property is we’re gonna install this really cool Ring doorbell into your property. If we do this, you’re gonna be able to see this, do this, and this, and this. You’re gonna have this greater peace of mind.” I don’t know how that people work this currently between the tenant having the control and access versus the landlord because I don’t think that’d be really cool if the landlord was always seeing when you’re going in and out.

August: Right. One of the features that makes our product appealing is that it’s very flexible. You can obviously share access if you choose. We have for example people who might get a Ring doorbell for their parents who are slightly older and so they might want to share access with themselves on their parent’s device. My 87 year old grandfather has a Ring that he uses everyday. I’m shared on it just so I can ensure that I see what’s going on and that everything is okay.

But back to the property management use case, I think what’s something that’s very interesting as well about the Ring is that, especially from a property manager’s standpoint which I know very little about in full disclosure so, everyone out there that’s watching this.

From what I’ve seen, I think one of the other values that we can really bring is that we can help provide video and audio evidence for disputes that might come up. I know that’s something the property managers will deal with or at new instances or annoyances that they’ll have tenants report to them about maybe their neighbor smokes cigarettes late at night and talks really loud right next to their front door and they’ve told their neighbor continuously to stop doing that past a certain during sleeping hours, let’s call it. If the neighbor doesn’t stop doing that, then it becomes problematic and then they raise the case to the property manager or to anybody for further review.

If they don’t have video evidence of this happening or they’re not able to really prove their side, I think it becomes this kind of he-say-she-say type of case when in reality there’s a much easier way to figure out if these things are happening and that is, “Hey, I saw you just standing on my doorsteps smoking cigarettes with your roommates at [1:00] AM and this happened after the time that we had a conversation where you said you’d stop doing this.”

I think you can really help tenants in a variety of different ways and it can really hopefully prevent some headaches on property manager’s side where they don’t really know how to deal with the dispute because from time to time they don’t know who’s side to take or who’s telling the truth about what’s happening.

Jason: Yeah. The way I would imagine this working for most property managers that are managing like single-family homes, I would imagine that they would setup the Ring doorbell, this gives the owner additional peace of mind about the property that is gonna be taken care of but not giving the owner access due to privacy related issues, but giving the tenant full access. Then I would imagine that the tenant would have video to backup any sort of issues, this will be helpful for the tenant should there be any claims that need to be filed, any sort of legal issues, they can also show this to the property manager to back up things like you’re saying like noisy neighbors, stuff like this or problems in the area.

Then also, for the property manager there’s added level of peace of mind because the property manager could always subpoena legally access to any video stuff that might be relevant. They could go and try to delete it but if they were claiming that they’ve had this here, at least be the evidence that they’ve maybe destroyed the evidence, I don’t know.

August: Sure. I think with our device, I don’t think anyone here will say, “Hey, this is the end-all-be-all of security and our ability to provide video evidence in certain circumstances. There’s always going to be a way that you can circumvent the technology or get around it but at the end of the day, it’s a huge step in the right direction.

If you’re a property manager and you’re looking at different options to protect your homes and to protect the homeowners and to provide a solution for video/audio evidence and everything in between, again, it’s just a very affordable simple DIY solution that I think any homeowner and/or property manager could benefit from.

Jason: Yeah. While we were talking, I just got a notice on my phone–I don’t know if anyone watching the video can see this–but I just got a notice on my phone saying, “There’s motion at your front door.” I can just open it up, it’s opening up the Ring app here and that’s popping up the video. You can’t really see this but here’s my porch and you can see that maybe somebody came in or something went by.

August: Yup.

Jason: It’s pretty cool. It’s so simple and it just pops-up and makes it so easy. It’s so intuitive and I think security systems can be so complicated. They’re so expensive and I just bought this thing and snapped it on the front and it was pretty easy. It connected to my phone and the app walks you through everything and it was just such a different experience. You took something that was so big and cumbersome and difficult and put in this little box–it’s a doorbell. I think it’s simplicity that makes things genius.

August: Yup, yup.

Jason: Now, for property managers, vacant properties are big deal. This is where I see something like Ring could be a game changer for vacant properties. There’s a lot of people that are using these self-serve showing systems like Rently and ShowMojo and these sort of things. Eventually, maybe you wanna integrate with these guys.

But what’s really cool about having something like Ring is that somebody in your office could be responsible for this as a property manager and each vacant property could be popping-up sending you this notice, “Hey, it’s this property, somebody’s at the porch, somebody’s ringing the doorbell.” You could say, “Okay, it’s the maintenance guy.”

Then if there’s an integration with like Prempoint which I’ve interviewed on a previous episode where you can then unlock the door for them using a locker or something like that, you can allow them access. You’re gonna have this video evidence of people when they go in, when they’re going out. If there’s ever any issues, it’s creating a greater level of peace of mind for the homeowner and for the property manager in doing a good job for the homeowner. I see this is a win-win all around and it’s quite affordable.

August: Yeah. Hey, I appreciate the positive feedback. We totally agree. It really is just such a simple solution that anyone can quickly learn and benefit from and you really don’t have to be tech savvy. You don’t need to be someone who’s very handy, the installation process is simple. The setup process, pairing it to your Wifi is very simple. The whole process is very user-friendly. We proud ourselves on designing the app in a way that really anyone can learn it and use it within a few minutes of setting it up.

The feedback that you just gave is something that we hear from a lot of our customers and that’s why people like it and recommend it to other people because it is so easy yet it can provide such a tremendous value to your home and really give you that feeling that I think a lot of people are looking for in terms of staying connected to their home when they’re away.

Jason: Cool. Any plans in the future for something like if Wifi goes down?

August: Right now we don’t have anything. We’re always looking at different possibilities for things that we can potentially do. But there are definitely, the future, there’s a lot of different possibilities for things that we can include in case of those kind of extreme circumstances. For now we’ve been fully focused on perfecting this current version of the product in terms of the Wifi for video/audio pieces but I’m not gonna rule it out for the future.

Jason: Yeah. Okay, cool. My brain thinks like, “What if somebody came up and like somehow killed my Wifi?” But what’s funny is, I’ve got this kind of circle of protection and they have to get pretty close in order to do anything and by then I’ve already got a picture of them.

August: That’s all idea. People say what if someone comes up and tries to destroy the device. You’ll capture them walking up right. You’ll have pretty clear video of them walking onto the device and attempting to destroy it and all of that video will be stored in the cloud and accessible for you.

Jason: You know [inaudible [00:29:26] that like to alleviate people’s fears–

August: Yes, yes.

Jason: Of the device getting stolen, they’re like, “If I’m gonna invest a couple of hundred bucks for this device, and then they could just break it off and steal it–what have you done to counter that?

August: We have a lifetime theft guarantee. If your device is stolen, we will replace it free of charge. We stand behind the product, we stand behind the brand and the most important part of anything that we do is ensuring that we provide an excellent customer experience. We want our customers to be happy.

It will make or break the company, and it sounds so obvious yet I don’t think enough companies really put their money where their mouth and for us we stand behind what we say and so we don’t ever want someone to look at our technology and say, “Hey, this is something that can really benefit me, and my family, my home, but I’m concerned about someone stealing it and have that be the reason that they don’t want to purchase it and really benefit from it. We want to alleviate those concerns and that’s exactly why we do the lifetime theft guarantee and it’s definitely people really appreciate it.

Luckily we don’t really have to go down that path too often. We’ve been fortunate there. But hey, you know, if and when it happens, again, we’ll send you out a new device and we’ll get you back up and running in no time.

Jason: It’s pretty silly of a criminal to think, “Hey, they probably got my picture, oh, crap, I’d better take this thing because it’s already in the cloud.

August: Yup.

Jason: It’s stored already into the cloud, and that’s what’s really nice.

August: Yup. More often than not, what I think when people see that they’re being recorded or they suspected that they’re being recorded, the path of least resistance is to simply walk away. That’s what we see a lot, they’ll get up and maybe they’re thinking about doing something mischievous or whatever it is. They will realize that they’re being recorded and immediately they leave and they go to the next home and they go somewhere that’s much more vulnerable than a home that has a Ring video doorbell product on it.

Jason: That’s exactly what I’ve seen, recently you launched your Ring neighborhood.

August: Yup.

Jason: You have the live view which is cool. At anytime I can hit either of my cameras and I can see what’s going on right now which is really cool. For some reason we’re wondering what’s going on right there right now.

The other thing is all the videos that I’ve seen posted to the Ring neighborhood thing feature that you have or to Facebook groups or the Nextdoor app, it usually sees like some creeper walking out, looking around and then they see the camera or whatever and they’re like, and then they split. You see this little [inaudible [00:32:22] and then they’re out of there.

August: Exactly.

Jason: Yeah.

August: Yup, yup.

Jason: Then they get posted and everyone’s like, “Who’s this guy? Anybody else seeing this guy around?” Yeah.

August: It’s great. We love it. We love to see the interaction, we love to see neighbors coming together because again we understand that our device alone is not enough to have a significant impact on neighborhood crime, it really does take neighbors coming together.

There is no silver bullet unfortunately, it really is a collective effort, and part of that effort is implementing technology that can really help keep my own things when you’re not there. A big part of it is the old school, getting together with their neighbors and knowing who they are and knowing how to reach them, trusting them and continuing to have an open line of communication.

Jason: Yeah. Quick, short anecdotal stories. On one of the Facebook groups that I’m on for the local area that I’m in, somebody posted that the mailbox had been broken-into. You see the whole back of this multi-property mailbox that was crowbarred opened or whatever and somebody stole the mail.

In the same feed, a day or so later you see somebody posting, “Hey, I saw this video of this SUV. We caught this video from our property of this SUV driving by and throwing mail out the window.” I guess the two are linked or whatever.

But when these things get posted and combined, whereas normally there wouldn’t had been any communication like maybe they would have given the video to the police, maybe the police would have had time and said, “Okay, this mail is linked to this mailbox.” But it’s just really cool to see like things come together like this that normally wouldn’t have been possible without technology.

August: Absolutely. We love seeing the full circle of life. If our product can contribute to that, that’s amazing. For us, just hearing those stories, that’s why we do it.

Jason: I feel safer, I feel greater peace of mind having these things on my home. I feel like my property is less of a target. If that does that to somebody–and I’m renting, we’re renting this property here in SoCal–if that does that for me, I imagine it would also do that for the landlord in terms of the property being vacant and knowing all what’s going there. They would do it for the property manager.

Property managers, business owners, we’re always looking for a competitive advantage as a business owner. Property managers that are willing to have that little extra, that makes them memorable. They’re like, “Oh, yeah. That’s the property manager that they do the Ring door things and they do the Nest Thermostats and they do this and the property’s really cool.” If you’re doing this–or if they’re doing Prempoint so there’s no rekeying and all this cost–if they’re doing these cool things, this is the competitive advantage.

Those property managers that are listening, this may be a way to easily distinguish yourself from some of your competitors that may not be as progressive or high-tech.

August: Absolutely. I think this is the way of the future. When we first launched this I thought to myself, I don’t know when it might be, 5 years, 10 years, 20 years, there will be a day when people look back and say, “I can’t believe that there’s a day when all doorbells did is go ding-dong.”

Jason: Yeah. Just making noise.

August: Absolutely.

Jason: What’s really cool about that is you can answer, respond to the ding-dong without even being anywhere in the property.

August: Yup.

Jason: I can do it from my phone. I could be 100 miles away and it could pop-up and I could respond to it, hit talk and I can be like–and I can see that, and I can say, “Hey, yeah. Can I help you?” They’re like, “Yeah, we’re just here talking about solar panels.” Or “whatever” their story is.

August: Yup, yup.

Jason: So that they can case the property and they’re like, “Well, I’m a little busy right now and we’re renters and we’re not interested.” Then they go away. They’re like, “Oh, I guess, they’re there.”

August: Yup, yup. They know that they don’t wanna take the risk. That’s really what matters. It’s a calculated risk and to them, it’s the severity of the crime is just so much more extreme if they go into a home where someone’s there. Not only for potential criminal sensing, but I mean what if the homeowner has a gun? They just don’t know. Not only for the risk that they will be committing the crime that is much more serious, their own safety. Again, it’s a calculated risk and what we’ve seen is that the math on that risk is not worth it to them.

Jason: Yeah. I love it, I love it. Cool. I’m excited to see where this technology goes and what sort of stuff people are doing in the future. You mentioned IFTTT earlier so for those that aren’t aware of that, that’s like, If This, Then That, and it’s this cool technology or website or whatever where it allows you to create rules and workflows that integrate different things with other things like technology and different things like that. That’s really cool. You guys have a Zapier integration coming down the pike as well?

August: I’m not entirely sure. I could maybe send you a follow-up note on that one.

Jason: Alright.

August: But I’m not…

Jason: The next one you should look into.

August: Okay.

Jason: I don’t know if that would be relevant, it’s more for business but maybe when you have a business or a commercial-focused doorbell, that would make more sense. Basically, Zapier is really cool like, If This, Then That, it allows you to connect and integrate a lot of different online apps like cloud-based software.

August: Got it.

Jason: They’ve got like 500 different apps and so you can connect like your Gmail to your webcam for example, it’s an email or whatever. Kind of like If This, Then That. Cool. I really appreciate you coming out and hanging out here on the show the DoorGrow Show.

August: Of course.

Jason: Keep in touch and keep me informed as to your integrations that you’re doing. I’m sure property managers would be really keen and interested on what’s going on with the properties and the potential of doing this kind of technology on the properties.

August: True.

Jason: Yeah.

August: But if any property managers are interested, they want more information, they wanna understand maybe some specific initiatives that we can roll-out with your communities, neighborhoods, individual properties, whatever it is, people are welcome to email neighborhoods@ring.com and that will go to my team and we work with communities across the country doing a variety of different custom solutions.

If anyone’s interested in how our technology works and if this is something that’s right for you, I would encourage you guys to email neighborhoods@ring.com and we’ll jump on the phone and answer any questions and figure out a good plan of action for moving forward.

Jason: Yeah. It would be interesting to see someday a software where you can have hundreds, or thousands of properties of Rings in there to manage and [inaudible [00:40:00] control. I think this will spread, it’s just a matter of time and what will happen is you’ll see some weird little industries popping-up, answering services maybe, for ring doorbells that you can give access to. You’re not able to do it, somebody else’s gonna be answering, “Oh, hello. Yeah, I’m here.” These sort of things so they can respond immediately to anybody coming in and out of the door.

August: Yup, yup. Maybe, you never know.

Jason: It’s already happening with live chat on the websites, it’s happened with phones in businesses, and have people have Rings, I can imagine why that it wouldn’t happen there. Maybe I can even get my call center that I use to answer my doorbells for me, I’ll have to ask them.

August: It’s certainly possible. It’s certainly possible.

Jason: Cool. Excited to see what the future of this unfolds and again, August, thanks for coming on the DoorGrowShow.

August: Yeah, thank you, Jason. I appreciate it.