A Startup idea to accelerate the transition to smart-things
Last time, I was in my kitchen, looking at my google home and the 3 lights + thermostat it was able to control. I felt quite underwhelmed with the effort I had to go through to find and install these. Amongst the many objects in my home, there is still a few, mostly expansive objects that I could call “smart”. 10 years after the beginning of the smaart things revolution. 60 years after the first ideas of the smart home. Why so little progress? Why is it so expansive? why do I always need yet another app, yet another complex IFTTT API to just be able to turn off my light bulb from my phone?
The obvious reasons
The core issue is fragmentation — and it runs deep. Walk into any electronics store and you’ll find lights talking Zigbee, locks running Z-Wave, thermostats on their own proprietary Wi-Fi protocol, and plugs that only work inside their brand’s walled garden. Each of these companies built a separate kingdom, and none of them particularly want to talk to each other.
Part of the problem is structural: appliance manufacturers are hardware companies. They make washing machines, ovens, and door locks. They don’t make phones, and they don’t have the software culture to ship great apps or APIs. So when they bolt a Wi-Fi chip onto their product and call it “smart”, what you get is a barely-maintained app, a cloud service that might disappear in three years, and zero interoperability with anything else in your home.
The other issue is that making something truly smart usually means disrupting an existing market. Smart locks threaten locksmiths. Smart thermostats threaten HVAC installers. Every company entering this space has to fight entrenched incumbents who profit from the current complexity. That friction slows everything down.
The solutions
The open source community got tired of waiting. Home Assistant, now one of the most active open source projects in the world, basically built a universal translator for smart home devices. It runs on a Raspberry Pi in your closet and lets you connect everything — Zigbee, Z-Wave, MQTT, cloud APIs — into one coherent system. It’s powerful, but it’s also deeply technical. Setting it up is not something your parents will do on a Sunday afternoon.
On the corporate side, some big players are finally making the right moves. IKEA deserves credit here: they’ve been quietly building an affordable, Zigbee-based smart home lineup that actually works — and they’re not trying to lock you into an IKEA cloud subscription to use your lightbulbs. That’s rare.
The most promising development of 2022 is Matter — a new open standard backed by Apple, Google, Amazon, and Samsung. The idea is simple: one protocol to rule them all. A Matter-certified device should work with any Matter controller, no matter who made it. The first version launched in October 2022, and while it’s still early days, it’s the first time I’ve felt genuinely optimistic about the smart home space. But standards take decades to fully roll out, and the current device selection is still thin.
Which brings me to the gap in the market.
The company
Here’s the startup idea: a company that only does smart things — and does it right.
Not a platform play. Not another hub. A vertically integrated company that manufactures and sells a curated line of smart home products built on open standards (Matter, Zigbee, or Thread), with a single, beautiful app, and an explicit commitment to local-first control. No cloud required to turn on your lights. No subscription to keep your thermostat working. No data harvested from your home.
The value proposition is simple: you shouldn’t need to be a home automation enthusiast to have a smart home that actually works. This company would cover the full stack — from the hardware design to the firmware to the UX — with the same obsessive attention that Apple brought to the iPhone. Premium pricing is fine; people will pay for things that just work.
The timing is good. Matter lowers the technical barrier. Consumers are frustrated with fragmentation. The open source community has already proven the demand. What the market is missing is someone willing to make it boring, reliable, and beautiful — all at once.
Further reading:
Leave a comment