Gladys Assistant
A privacy-first, open-source home assistant
After 2 months of work, I just published a new website for Gladys Assistant, based on Docusaurus v2.
The website is available at https://gladysassistant.com/
The goal is to put the documentation at the center of the project, so the new users understand better how to use Gladys.
I'm finally launching Gladys 4 Beta, the biggest upgrade since I started Gladys in 2013 🚀
This release is a full rewrite that I started in December 2018.
In June 2019, I was releasing the alpha version, and thanks to the feedback of Gladys community, the beta is now live :)
Almost five years after the beginning of the project, more than 32k downloads on Gladys, and a community of 3 000 developers, it was becoming harder and harder for me to answer all messages, handle all developments, give conferences, ....
It was clear: I needed to clear my calendar, spend less time at work (I'm Engineer in a startup), and spend more time on Gladys.
As the project was bringing revenue since one year, I took the decision to go part-time on Gladys, and launch a Patreon to ensure that the project would receive a recurring revenue.
Since a few years, I was giving conferences all across France to talk about Gladys and open-source.
As Gladys community was growing, I felt it was a good moment to organize a first official Gladys Meetup in Paris.
And it was crazy! Many people came. People I was talking to on the internet: on Twitter, on the newsletter, on the Gladys forum.
This was the first time I was meeting this community in person!
Four years after starting Gladys, the project was beginning to cost me a bunch of money every months, so I needed to find a way to generate revenue to be sustainable.
So I launched the Gladys Starter Pack, a pack of 9 videos + a 60 pages ebook explaining how to automate a home with Gladys.
This pack was sold 39€ in pre-release, then 49€.
And on launch day: Surprise!
It worked!
One year after creating my blog, I finally released a first version of Gladys: a smart home assistant built on top of a Raspberry Pi.
This was my first experience with launching a product on the internet.
So I wrote a press release, and sent it to 10 french website, and waited.
I was surprise to see that almost half of them published the press release on their website without even touching the content of my press release. There was even a link to my website on their article: Crazy!
In a couple of hours, my project was getting famous in the french home automation ecosystem, and I was getting visitors, downloads, it was crazy!
Several days after releasing this, Gladys was download more than 1 000 times. Not bad a first launch :)
In 2013, as I was just a student, I wanted to build a Jarvis assistant for my small student apartment.
My parent had bought me a Raspberry Pi for my birthday, so I wanted to do something with it. I began by controlling some Phenix connected switches with a simple 433Mhz emitter bought on AliExpress for 1$.
Quickly, I created a blog where I was explaining how I was building my own Jarvis assistant. It was called "Build Your Own Jarvis".
People began to ask if I could share my coding skills and release an open-source program that would do exactly what Jarvis does.
This was the beginning of the Gladys Project.
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