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This is the Home Tech Podcast for Friday, December 4th from Denver, Colorado. I'm Jason
Griffin. And from Sarasota, Florida. I am a probably 20 or 30 pound heavier Seth Johnson
after Thanksgiving. Did you have a good one? I had a great one. In fact, I had two because,
you know, the first turkey wasn't good enough.
We decided to just make another one on Saturday.
That's right.
You guys do like double time.
I mean, I can't complain.
I mean, it's hard to complain about that.
No, it's all good food.
And we had pies both times.
Like, I mean, pies are great.
I don't know if we talked about this on the show, but pies great like we that should be our our home tech podcast pies are great done
what's not to love although i gotta tell you we got a we you gotta we usually get pies from
costco but we usually have family around and like the costco pies are really good but they're huge
like everything from costco right and so this year was only going to be us and so we we got them from a
different place where we there's a bakery here where we get our kids like birthday cakes and
stuff they make really good cakes and cupcakes so we thought their pies would be good and
the apple pie was great but the pumpkin pie was a little disappointing yeah and that put a damper
on things because i gotta tell you i love pumpkin pie yeah you gotta have. Yeah. And that put a damper on things because I got to tell you, I love pumpkin pie.
Yeah, you got to have a good pumpkin pie.
We typically stick towards squash pies,
believe it or not,
the squash pies instead of pumpkin.
Oh, interesting.
Use that and yeah.
Not sure how I feel about that.
You actually won't even notice a difference and there's a little more tangy taste to it.
I've never tried it.
I've never even heard of it,
to be honest with you.
It's like you squash instead of pumpkin
and I think it works the same.
There you go.
Cool. Well, very quickly, we won't linger on it but i cooked my first turkey this year i think i
mentioned on the show last week and everything went to plan seth other than the carving of said
turkey that was a that was a bit of a fiasco i was not prepared for that i um i've quartered lots
of chickens.
Like we get rotisserie chicken fairly often.
And so I thought, how hard can it be?
And I just didn't anticipate,
like we don't have good knives here.
We desperately need some new knives.
And so I did not have a good knife
to carve the turkey with.
And yeah, it looked like a murder scene
in my kitchen once I was done.
It doesn't matter, turkey i think but yeah that's that's that's the project manager's nightmare you get
90 of the project done you got that last 10 you're like oh i don't have tools like there was literally
a point where i like had my hands and i was just like ripping the parts of the turkey off because
there's nothing wrong with that you do what you got to do that's that's how uh what's that keto thing like uh the cro-magnon thing like you only
eat things that was that they had in the uh the olden days yeah no great yeah paleo diet there
we go there's like a modified version of paleo where you only eat what they ate when there were
cavemen and you only eat how they ate when they were cavemen, and you only eat how they ate when they were cavemen.
It's like that restaurant with the English, whatever times, medieval times,
where you only could eat with your hands, and they'd bring your food out,
and you'd have giant turkey legs with your hands.
That's it.
But otherwise, it was good.
Yep, yep.
Well, big news this week, Jason.
Huge news.
I opened my Spotify app this morning and uh
got my top songs of 2020 and as you can imagine as uh having a um three and a half to four year
old they were all off every single one of them all of them were off of the frozen 2 soundtrack. Every single one of them.
Every one of your top five?
Every one.
That's funny.
Most of the top 20 songs were either off Frozen or Trolls.
Because what happens is when we were ringing her to daycare,
we'd get in the car and she goes,
listen to Frozen 2.
She doesn't say.
She says New Frozen.
And then there was also New Poppy. So between those two, we always listened to the songs that she wanted to listen
to off those. That's really funny. I'm, uh, I'm just, just looking at mine here, but mine,
mine aren't going to really resonate. I, I only, I use Spotify constantly, but I use it on my
computer when I work and all of our, like, if you were to look at my top five on our Amazon Music,
that would give you a more representative story.
Toddler Time.
Yeah.
That whole thing.
But yeah, my top five on Spotify were all very obscure.
Lo-Fi.
I'm into Lo-Fi.
I didn't know it was a thing until recently.
And I've heard some people say it's
like basically modern day elevator music that makes sense yeah but yeah i disagree i mean i i
like it it's mellow it's it's instrumental it's kind of electronic stuff so it's in the background
you don't have to put too much of your brain power to listen to it yeah it's not distracting
i can't do lyrics when i'm trying to work i like having music on but it's got to be instrumental yeah yep i was i was testing that the other day we we played
like i actually do uh i think some of my best work with like pop type music and on in the background
that i'm just not paying attention to and i don't hear the lyrics but i remember you saying that i'm
like let me just try and see where my brain sits and yeah i just put that on and i just started
ignoring it um the christmas music though my wife had that on today and I'm like, we're going to have to find
something different for whatever reason. I was just listening to that full time and just staring
at my computer screen going, what am I doing? So yeah. Yeah. All right. Well, let's, let's jump
into our business at hand here very quickly before we get into Home Tech Headlines. I did want to tease the interview that we have coming up. So we had Eric Hines, one of the founders over at Inovelli. And a really fun conversation. Inovelli is a smart lighting company. They've got a lot of neat products in that space, a Z wave platform. So very big and popular with a lot of the enthusiasts and, and, and hobbyists out there.
And I was really cool to talk to Eric about his journey into the smart home, very scrappy company,
especially in their early days. And really the big theme I picked up on that, that you'll,
I won't give away too much, but just the transparency, the engagement
with their community and their users was really cool to hear about. So be sure to stay tuned for
that. But in the meantime, Seth, what do you say we jump into some home tech headlines?
Let's do it. This year's Cyber Monday set a new record for online shopping in the US,
customers spending a whopping $10.8 billion, making it the largest
online shopping day in the nation's history, according to the data from Adobe Analytics.
The spending marked an increase of 15.1% on last year's Cyber Monday and follows a record-breaking
Black Friday three days earlier that saw shoppers fork out a total of $9 billion by the way of online purchases, which was an increase of 21.6%
from last year. Jason, I'm not surprised. I mean, mostly because there's really no place in town
that I was going to go shopping. So yeah, everything was online. Yeah, definitely. And
the story talks about that. I mean, a big uptick, presumably due to COVID. I
think that's a pretty safe assumption, but still some pretty staggering numbers. I'm always curious,
and I know we've talked about Adobe Analytics probably in this exact context before,
following Cyber Monday last year and previous years. But if you're curious, they arrive at
these findings. It says, analyzing 1 trillion visits to US retail sites, 100 million stock
keeping units and 80 of the 100 largest retailers in the US. So a very large sample size here in
terms of how they're analyzing the data. And then the other thing that I noticed that jumped out at
me, like, I think just as humans in general, like, we have a hard time wrapping our head around the
size of billion with a B is a's a very, very large number.
And to put it in context, even million, I think,
is kind of hard to wrap your head around.
But to put this in context or a little bit of a frame of reference,
they said online sales peaked between 8 p.m. and 9 p.m. Pacific time
when web orders across the U.S. reached a staggering $12 million per minute.
Wow. Wow.
These are big, big numbers.
Yeah. It's like a lottery winning every minute, right?
It's wild.
State lottery. Yeah, that's crazy. Wow.
So big, big numbers here. But like you said, no major surprises there.
Moving on here, Cedia has announced Giles Sutton, Senior Vice President of
Member Success and Sales, and Corey Dickerson, Senior VP of Operations, will step up to take
over as interim co-CEOs, replacing Tabitha O'Connor, who departs the association in January.
So I know that news of Tabitha O'Connor leaving was fairly surprising to many in the industry. I had
several conversations with colleagues who were surprised by that news and were wondering really
what was behind that. Obviously wish her the best moving on. And I guess, you know, congrats are in
order. I don't know Corey, but we have had Giles on the show before. I've gotten to know Giles
pretty well over the years and and i trust that
they'll do do a great job carrying the association through this transitionary period yeah i've never
really heard of co-ceos but we were talking about this before the show and it's interim co-ceo so
it's basically like they just need someone to have the ceo title until they find a new actual CEO, I guess.
And so like some of these, it's a big job.
It's not like anybody can just fall into it.
So they're going to split the responsibilities of that.
And I guess their day job as well.
And keep moving the organization along those lines.
So not a bad plan.
Like you said, we know Giles and he's a good guy.
So, you know, best of luck to CDF to find a new CEO.
Yeah, and I think the biggest thing that jumped out at me here, and nothing shocking, but I just hope the association can maintain their focus.
And I was happy to see that, you know, it says from the article that the focus will remain on the implementation of the CDF strategic plan with its pillars around education, workforce development, and cross-industry collaboration. And I personally think that those are the areas where Cedia
really should be focusing. And I think the biggest risk for any association like Cedia is that you
try to please everyone. You try to be everything to everybody, and you can't do that. You have to
focus. And I think, to me, I feel like Tabitha O'Connor had really led the association in the right direction in terms of the focus on these particular areas.
And I hope that Cedia can maintain that through this transition.
Yep, well said.
Well, Comcast, yuck, has announced it will cap data for customers in multiple states, charging extra fees for high usage.
Specifically, Comcast plans charge clients $10 for every additional 50 gigabytes
used over 1.2 terabytes.
With the continuing trend of work-from-home situations,
the plan could hamper some of their clients.
Yeah, yeah, I got a notice the other day.
I'm 75% there.
Are you really?
How do you get to
that level of that's a lot of data i don't know i'm on zoom a lot and i'm on uh i do back up my
computers so i think that probably could have something to do with it but i don't know i don't
know i mean i say that but i have no idea what i use This would have been on the 30th. So I was 30th. I was at 75%. So as long as I don't go over that 1.2, I'm fine. Yeah. Like I said, I say that, but I
have no personal frame of reference on this. I have no idea what I use. I've never actually
looked at that, but it does. The article does say that 95% of Comcast users, it says says let's see the median monthly data usage for 95 of comcast users was
around 308 gigabytes i will say if you watch a lot of like streaming things which it's all i can do
um you you do start especially if you're watching the 4k stuff like if you buy a 4k movie or
whatever you do start you know creeping your uh your numbers up a lot faster than just like the average
users using 308 gigabytes i don't even know how you do that
yeah greg is uh saying porn hub in the in the chat thanks greg
you've got to get the uh the weekly porn hub reference in here yeah
that's funny all right right, well, yeah,
I don't think I'll be worrying
too much about that one.
We'll see.
Moving on here, Quibi,
the day after announcing
it will shut down
less than seven months
after launching,
told customers this week
that it expects to shut off
the streaming service
on or about December 1st.
So that's in the past
as you're listening to the show. The company led
by founder and ex-movie mogul Jeffrey Katzenberg and CEO Meg Whitman also said it doesn't know
what will happen to the dozens of original shows on Quibi, which it had licensed from a range of
A-list Hollywood talent and media companies. So it's the end of the road here. Eddie says in the chat room, are we still
talking about Quibi? Who cares? Fair question. Fair question. This was a flash in the pan. If
there ever was one. A very expensive flash. I just logged into the app or I just tried to log into
the app and I don't think my thing is working anymore. I mean, cause it just says sign in and
I don't, I don't think I ever even had a sign in to make so now I'm kind of confused but
oh well if it's not working it's not working and uh we'll be interesting to see what happens to
those like original content things like they'll probably pop up on you know one of the other
streaming services Netflix or or Hulu or whatever and maybe uh if there was any good ones i keep i keep hearing the one about liam helmsworth and christoph waltz
but i i don't know like if if those are going to be made into like more long form conversation
content that would be like better on platform like netflix or hulu will be interesting to see
what happens with that those those programs yeah yeah it says that quibi's partners had no advanced
warning about its shutdown and
many are scrambling to find new homes for their productions.
And then it does mention CBS studios,
specifically the most dangerous game being the one that you were referring to
there.
So maybe that'll end up on the CBS app that no one pays for either.
Except Richard.
Cause he likes the,
the star,
the star war,
Star Trek,
Star Trek,
the new Star Trek thing, which he says is excellent.
And I haven't seen it, and I am curious as to what it's like.
Star Trek? Is that what you said?
Star Trek. I'm not a big Star Trek fan.
Yeah, I've never been able to do Star Trek.
He's a big Star Trek fan.
I think it's like a generational thing.
People right before our generation tend to be Star Trek fans.
And then people in our generation tend to be like Star Wars fans trying to not mix them up.
And then I don't know what the kids these days like.
Like TikTok or something.
I don't know.
No idea what fans they're in.
Yeah. Like old movies or something.
I know.
Feeling old.
TikTok makes me feel old.
TikTok is great though. I just posted a video earlier. You probably did not see that,
but it was about Costco. Uh, and, and some of the most creative, uh, creative stuff comes off with TikTok. I I'm very impressed. I, I need to try it out. I've, I've dabbled like so briefly.
Um, and like, I get the gist of it i understand what it is
i'm not like that quite that clueless although i'm close uh but yeah it's uh it's still a bit
of an enigma to me yeah it's there's there's you can get down the wrong rabbit holes there don't
get me wrong uh but i got on there one day and there's these these these guys like riding uh
riding in this boat uh and screaming
in spanish and another boat is ramming it from behind and like uh it it was just like one or
two videos posted from this account and uh it's like in the comments they were like did we find
cartel hook tiktok it's like and the next couple days all all we would see on tiktok were these
cartel videos of you know guys standing in these in these mountainous areas in Colombia with nothing but plants growing around them with dark green leaves on them.
So it was just like, it's amazing what the little algorithm will do to get the video.
Yeah, that's wild.
That's funny.
Oh, boy.
Oh, boy.
Saved the best for last here.
You did.
You did.
Wyze has announced the debut smart watch uh the wise watch will be
available in two sizes when it ships in the u.s in february 2021 and like the rest of the company's
lineup it's priced affordably at 20 dang dollars oh my gosh wise's announcement follows the release
of the company's uh first fitness tracker a $25 Wiseband. You don't need the
fitness stuff. Just get this thing. It's $20. Why pay $5 more to work out? It's insane. This is
nuts. I don't even know how they're making this thing at this price. This is crazy.
Yeah. I feel like they got to be selling this at a loss. I just don't get it. I'm scratching my head
and Eddie's commenting on the wise trend we're on.
I mean, they're just coming out
with products left and right.
Like, and it's crazy.
I mean, how can you not just scratch your head at this?
But looks robust, $20.
It's got everything you would expect,
you know, a blood oxygen monitoring,
heart rate tracker,
IP68 water and dust resistant
nine-day battery life activity and sleep tracking and integration with google fit and apple health
so i don't know man this this might be what it what it takes for me to get a smart watch i've
never owned a smart watch but at twenty dollars i feel like why the hell not? Oh, man, this is insane.
Why not?
I guess, indeed.
I think it embarrasses everybody who's been paying,
including myself, who has been paying hundreds of dollars
for an Apple Watch or whatever.
I don't know.
This probably is very underwhelming, the performance.
But you know what?
All it really has to do is tell the time and, uh, and keep up with the time.
So, yeah, honestly, the only reason, and Eddie's trying to talk me out of it,
maybe there's a grand conspiracy here with wise.
I don't know what they're up to over there. I am a little suspicious, but,
um, yeah, the, the only reason I would actually consider it would be for the,
uh, I think the health tracking stuff is kind of interesting. Like heart, like i work out at home a lot and i don't know if i'd like enjoy working
out with a watch on but like i don't have a heart rate tracker and that would be kind of good to
know i'm into the high intensity interval uh stuff and so that that's kind of the only thing and at
like 20 bucks like even if i only used it for that right right so anyways just crazy it may get a
you know a 20-day battery life if you just use it for your 30 to an hour minute you know hour
30 minute to an hour workouts and yeah you may get a longer battery life and you never have to
charge the thing this is crazy they did come out i think wise did come out with a fitness tracker
as well so the 20 25 wise man but a fitness tracker as well. So the $25 Wyze band,
but the fitness tracker is more expensive than the watch.
That's crazy.
I don't know.
I would say if you're interested in a smartwatch,
get this one and see if you like it.
And if you don't break it within the first 20 minutes,
you know, you want to.
Yeah, exactly.
I mean, the Apple Watch is a lot more.
You can do like intercom stuff from it, I guess.
And it does, no, it does literally the same thing.
I don't know.
I don't know what this does.
$20.
Yeah, it's pretty wild.
You can't go to Target and buy one of those dumb,
like Casio watches for $20.
Like this is crazy.
Pretty wild stuff.
Well, that'll do it for our headlines.
All of the links and topics we've discussed on this week's episode can be found on our show notes at hometech.fm slash 330.
While you're there, don't forget to sign up for our weekly newsletter.
We'll send you show reminders and other occasional updates about all the great stuff going on here in the world of home tech.
Once again, that link is hometech.fm slash 330. Hey, and don't forget, you can join us in the chat room live Wednesday, starting
sometime between 7 and 7.30 p.m. or even closer to 8 Eastern. You can find out more about that
at hometech.fm and following us on Twitter at Home Tech Podcast. All right, Seth, well, without
any further delay, let's go ahead and jump straight into our interview. Once again, we had Eric Hines from Inovelli, and we hope you enjoy.
Hey, Eric, welcome to the show. How are you?
Good. How are you?
Doing great. We appreciate you taking the time to come on and join us,
and we look forward to jumping in and learning all about Inovelli.
But before we jump straight into that, why don't you take a quick minute to give our listeners just a personal introduction,
talk about a little bit of your background and what brought you to where you are today in the smart home.
Yeah, definitely. Thanks, Jason and Seth.
I appreciate you guys having me on the show and just really looking forward to kind of sharing a little bit about ourselves and the company.
So me personally, my name is Eric Hines.
I'm the CEO of Inovelli.
And my background is basically in marketing, branding, anything but smart home automation,
which is funny because here I am leading the smart home automation company in a valley.
So a little bit about the company.
We started about four years ago.
I started it out of my garage, which was fun.
And where that came from was it was a passion of mine.
I loved home automation.
I love just what it can do for not only yourself, your family, convenience, all that stuff.
I just loved it in general.
And so where that started was every year I take a trip down to Florida.
And I don't know about you guys, but Michigan is cold.
It's real cold.
And so we take a journey down to Florida.
And we just really wanted the house to be, you know, not wasting a ton of energy. So I invested in a Nest thermostat.
And from there, the hobby just kind of grew. And that turned into, you know, buying a hub,
buying smoke alarms, buying everything you can imagine out of the sun to just really deck out
the house. And I had no clue what I was doing imagine out of the sun to just really deck out the house.
And I had no clue what I was doing, but just really wanted to just make everything as automated as possible.
So and so, yeah, I mean, so from there, it kind of grew into not just a passion, but let's just see if we can make some money doing it.
And so at the time I was working at Kellogg in the brand marketing department.
And so I kind of used those skills to take alongside the home automation passion and just started in a valley.
It was a rocky start, but to say the least, here we are.
Yeah, and we'll get into a little bit of that rocky start. We'll want to hear some of those stories.
But before we get too far ahead of ourselves, give us a quick elevator pitch. Who is Inovelli and what makes you guys unique?
Yeah. So we're a group of smart homeowners. So it's not just your typical corporate company.
There's seven of us. So between the seven of us, we all own some sort of smart home
and we all have different platforms. And so we have a real passion for the industry. And we I believe that we're pretty close to our customers and we really think about kind of what what's what do they want, kind of what we want in our own homes.
And we just kind of put that into products. And so we don't just kind of put out white label stuff that's produced in mass.
We take our time and we really focus on what others want. And you'll see that from, I think we'll get into it later, but you'll see kind of where we were in generation one and kind of how we used that mindset to get to our generation two products.
And so, as I mentioned, we are a company of home automation people and we develop products such as light switches, bulbs, and sensors for the home automation DIY market.
Awesome. And take us back to the beginning, elaborate on it a little bit more. I know you
touched on it high level as far as connecting your marketing experience with your passion for
the smart home and turning that into a business. But talk a little bit more specifically about what
gave you the idea to start Inivelli and what what was that very, you know, very, very early stage
of the company like? Yeah, totally. So one of the things that Kellogg wanted me to do was go back
to school for a master's. And that was just something that they believed in, in higher
education. And so as I was taking my master's courses, we had a marketing class where it said,
I'd take an existing company and put a marketing plan together and take them to the next level. So at the time I had chose Wink of all companies. I guess they probably could have
used my marketing plan. And fun fact, I did send it to them, but they did not take it. So anyway,
so I chose Wink, kind of did a market analysis and said, all right, here's what's going on in
the market. How can we improve this company? And while I was doing that, kind of did a market analysis and said, all right, here's what's going on in the market.
How can we improve this company?
And while I was doing that, I noticed that there was not a lot of smaller companies out there.
There was a lot of the big brands such as, you know, Philips, GE, Osram, all those guys.
And they're doing a great job.
But there wasn't a lot of real little companies that can kind of come in and really specialize in certain areas.
And so that's where I got the idea to start Inovelli. And it was, let's just take something simple,
like a smart plug. Everyone wants a smart plug. It's something that everyone hasn't
probably had in their house. They could use it. And let's just make it as unique as possible and
really just focus on that. And so I did some research. It's funny how it lucked out, but I got super lucky. I went on Alibaba of all places. I do not recommend this.
You're still getting emails? Is that what you're saying?
Yeah, exactly. I'm sure my social security number's out in China somewhere, but oh well. you know um so um found a couple manufacturers landed on one and they had what was called a
two-channel smart plug and what that meant was there was actually two sides that were smart on
it and so there wasn't one at the time out in the market and so um landed on that and really just
said let's just see if this works and um and it and it did and it was it was it was a fun ride
for sure and that's that's how I met my CTO too.
And I guess we can get into that as well.
Yeah.
I mean, so you started off, it sounds like you started off small.
I think that's how a lot of businesses are started these days.
I went on Alibaba and found something to see if I could make it any better or sell it.
So obviously you didn't start in a giant corporate office.
Where did you start off in the village?
The living room and my garage, for sure.
I had my daughters packing boxes.
And it's funny, we would take it all to the post office, which is down the street. And every night, we'd just dump about 20, 30 boxes into the post office and fill up their little container.
And it was fun.
It was a good family experience.
And I wouldn't trade it at all, but it was, it was
started off with a, with a loan that I didn't tell my wife at the time. And, uh, well, here we are.
So it worked out. Yeah. We got to zoom into that one a little bit. You can't just, you can't just
hang that one out there and, and, and not tell us more. So it sounds like you had a lot of faith in the company here to tell us about
this.
Yeah, sure. So, I mean, not only in the company, but I had a lot of, you know,
faith in the community as well.
So one of the things that where I started off was really in different Facebook
groups. And just, just cause it was just something that was,
that interested me. And so we, we, I listened to kind of everyone's feedback.
And at the time, again, when was at um studying for my master's I had pitched to the um
to the various Facebook groups and just said hey guys like what what do you what would you like in
a smart home product and what is something that that you guys all need and what would you like
in a company and so nine months later something came out uh not a baby, but an actual smart blow came out. And, and I just
said, Hey, guys, like, we've got this, we've got the I got this product, what do you guys think?
And they said, this is this is an excellent idea. And so yeah, I went to went to the bank,
just say, Hey, how much can you give me? And they were able to give me about $25,000, which is
great. Half of that I did get scammed on
Alibaba. Half of that I got scammed. But the remaining half is where I invested in the first,
I'd say like 500 units, which is not a big order at all. But in fact, I couldn't even afford to
put the Innaveli name on it. I had to use their manufacturer name. And I presume that one of two things is true.
Either your wife knows about the loan now
or she doesn't listen to the show.
Yeah, both.
Wow, Jason, I'm trying to get into trouble
right before the holidays here.
Yeah, right?
Yeah.
Cool stuff.
Well, talk a little bit about your early growth. I mean, I think you kind of alluded to it there with the community approach and really building the product from the very beginning based on customer feedback. Obviously, a great thing to do if you're in a position to do that as a young startup company, you can be scrappy and really be hyper tuned in to customer feedback. But talk a little bit about that early growth,
the importance of community and what you think really caught on about the product.
Yeah, the early growth was good. And so we started off with a smart plug and just really
got a lot of positive feedback around it. Again, it was the first two channel smart plug in the
market. And I think the approach that I take and still take is that just be very transparent and just say, I don't need to have focus groups.
I don't need to have all these market analysis.
I just basically, we are the market.
And so we understand what they want.
And so where the growth came from was really just connecting with people and saying, what are some products that you guys want in the house?
If you could take any smart home product out there and make it better, would you do and so that growth kind of came from that we know we expanded
into light switches and at the time there was just basically just on off dimming and that was about
it and so we added all sorts of different features such as scene control where you kind of double tap
a light switch and all your lights turn on off you can shut your garage door all that stuff we added that
we added the ability to a lot of times people had said hey our um our light bulbs don't necessarily
work with a lot of um uh these these smart smart switches out there and what happens is the lights
flicker at a certain level and so we added in a minimum din level so you can adjust the um the
switch to really compensate for the bulbs
flaws essentially. And so you can put basically any bulb in there and calibrate it towards a
switch. So we just started adding all these things and adding and adding, and just continuously
updating our firmware and what that, and then the word started spreading a little bit more about,
Hey, these guys aren't just, you know, your typical, um,
huge company. That's not really listened to. These guys are, are actually smart homeowners,
like smart homeowners like us. And they really want to want us to succeed and have a good,
a good smart home. And so, so I think that's kind of where the, the exponential growth started. Um,
and then it has kind of parlayed into what it is today, which is just a full-fledged community.
I mean, these guys, there's so many cool people in the community that have such amazing ideas that I'm so thankful for them.
Yeah, I think that's the good thing about, especially the smart home technology crowd
that Jason and I know, and we have a community as well.
And there's plenty of great ideas that come, that come from these guys that are, that are just sitting there chatting, you know, on a coffee break or when
they're at work and whatnot, uh, or you get great ideas from them. And I think having that feedback
loop coming in and saying, Hey, no, you know, you can do this, but you should really do this.
And then getting, you know, seeing what the support is around that idea really does help
develop products. Yeah. And then, and then not just listening, but acting on it too. I mean,
that's the thing that is huge. Um,
and we've had so many great ideas that come in that we have put into, I mean,
I think over the past year we launched our generation two switches probably
about just over a year ago now,
and we've gone through about six or seven different firmware iterations just
based on feedback from people. I mean, there's a book that I don't know if you guys have heard of.
It's called The Show Me Way.
They're a great company out of China.
I don't know if you've heard of Show Me.
They're a pretty big company.
Xiaomi, maybe it's different.
Jason will tell us how to pronounce it.
Yeah, you're amongst a friendly crowd here when it comes to mispronouncing names.
So no worries.
It's a good, it's a good book in there. And their, their belief is a thousand project managers are better than one. And that's kind of the thought process that we take too. I mean, yes, of course
we have an internal project manager, but we've got a thousand project managers in the community
that really are there to help create products with us. And a perfect example of that is our
fan and light switch, which that was
the first one we really laid out in the community and said from, from start to finish and said,
all right, let's develop this together guys. And you can see it in the community. It's called
project hurricane. And it shows literally from start to finish everything, all the thoughts that
went into it, even the production videos of it going down the line. I mean, it's, it's pretty cool. So, um, totally agree with you, Seth. Yeah. I, I, it's, it's funny you mentioned this
particular product cause I'm on your website and I'm just kind of perusing while we're talking,
I'm perusing your product line and I'm like this, I've been asking certain home automation
manufacturers in my industry for this exact product for, I don't know, five, 10 years. And here it is.
It's so funny. It is because that was literally during my MBA class about four years ago,
that was the number one product that people asked for was something that can turn a fan
and a light that's in one gang box together. So we're excited that no one came out with it,
except for us. So you've got it here. I mean, there's all sorts of like uh i can tell you there are all sorts of um like hoops i had to jump through by
like locating those switches for the fan and light in a closet and then putting a more expensive
keypad by the door so we only have one switch there but the two switches are hidden away it's
just ridiculous and here you are with a with a product that what i think it was like 60 70 dollars
for this thing i mean this is this is I mean, this is what we need.
Yeah, this is really cool.
I just want to jump in here really quickly
because I pulled up this Project Hurricane page
at community.innavelli.com.
And wow, like, you're not kidding.
I mean, you've got it all laid out here
and you can literally scroll through
and see how the whole product developed
and how the feedback came in and talk a little bit to our listeners about just the thought process behind this level of transparency and how you went about kind of managing and orchestrating an effort in such a public way like this.
This is really cool.
Yeah, totally.
It really stemmed from that book, quite honestly.
Their thought process, again, was just just a thousand project managers to one and for me what it what it also like hit home was there's obviously competition
out there that's gonna they're gonna look at it they're gonna get ideas from it and they're gonna
maybe even run with it but if i have people that are invested in in this project with me they're
not going to go to the competition in fact halfway down the page somewhere in there i remember one of
the guys said hey Hey, if I think
one of our competitors came out with a fan and light switch, it's not the same. It's,
it's a little bit different, but it's, it's close. And he said, you know what? I'm sticking with you
guys, even though you guys are still three months out, I'm sticking with you guys because I'm so
invested in this project because I've seen the progress. And I know that you're still a couple
months away because I can see that you're updating us weekly, basically. So that's kind of the strategy behind that was
not only to, you know, obviously, fend off competition a little bit by being super transparent.
And then hopefully people can give us a break sometimes when we have when we're late on
deadlines, or we're and they can see exactly why we're late. We're not just making it up. It's we are legitimately late on things because of X, Y, and Z. Um, and then
obviously to, to just make it the best switch it could possibly be or best product it could
possibly be off the bat, instead of having to, you know, take six or seven iterations,
we can literally develop it with people, um, as it's being made.
This is, this is really cool. I, I, I saw the top part of this and then
I, I didn't look at the sidebar to see how far I could scroll down. And it just, it's like,
it's one of those endless scrolling things. Like I could just scroll back into time,
uh, way back in time to the very beginning. But wow, that, that is, that is wild. And it's really
cool. Like you said, to get that much in like investment like it's
not financial investment it's time you know having that passion for it uh from a from a group of
people of course of course you're gonna stay around you you've been taking my feedback and
actually implementing it of course i'm gonna stay around and see what you come up with but yeah this
is great yeah and one of the things too that i really that i really like as well as like we also
i'm trying to look.
Oh yeah, you can see it.
It's like halfway through the page or halfway through my little intro where I'm kind of
updating.
It's like April 17th where we actually put like signatures of people who have contributed
to the project in the box.
Just want to recognize them for the hard work that they've done and really see that, you
know, hey, you are a part of our team, whether you work for indirectly, you're, you're part of it. So this is something big. It's the
first product that went out that, um, that, that is able to do what, what, uh, what we've been
asking it to do. And so it's just, I don't know, it's just cool to kind of really use the community,
um, in a positive way and really just give people, um, you know, something to be proud of.
Wow. This is really neat. We'll include this in our show notes and really just give people, you know, something to be proud of. Wow. This is really neat.
We'll include this in our show notes so people can go check this out because
it's really neat to see. I mean, just from a manufacturing standpoint,
it's really cool to see all the steps that you're involved in,
things you probably don't even think about as, you know,
as you're building a product like this out, a physical product like this out.
Yeah.
Yeah. And you even got pictures in here I see from the manufacturing facilities,
so people can kind of get a glimpse into that.
So really neat stuff.
Yeah, we'll definitely include a link to this in the show notes.
Well, it's nice, too, because it also does hold the manufacturer accountable, too.
I mean, they're awesome, and they're one of the best manufacturers
that I could possibly ever have worked with,
and a great group of guys and engineers over there.
But they see this, and they're like, wow, people really are fired up about this product. You know, it's not just like for some random company in the U S like this is,
this is really cool that we're making history and we're really a part of something bigger than just,
you know, coding or just, you know, putting a screw in, in the switch or whatever it is.
This is something that's, it's a lot bigger and, you know, it's this is something that's it's a lot bigger and
you know it's just it's it's nice for them to kind of see that too to get excited about it
absolutely well we talked a little bit about two of the products that you have um what what it's
2020 what does the product line look like now like what how many products do you have on your website
and and what all categories are you in yeah Yeah, well, it depends on your definition of products and what's in stock and what's not in stock.
I feel like we're always out of stock, which is that's the thing these days.
That's the thing right now. Nobody, nobody's nobody's holding your feet to the fire on that one.
We all understand. I appreciate that. But so technically, so we've got four, four, four switches, not including the fan and lights.
So we've got two.
We have a red series and a black series.
The black series is more catered towards kind of the basics functionality, nothing too crazy,
just someone who wants on-off dimming and a couple other fancy features.
And then we have the red series, which is like our super premium line that's got all the bells and whistles into it.
So there's in the black and red series. In the black series, there's an all the bells and whistles into it so there's uh in the black and
red series um in the black series there's an on off and dimmer red series there's an on off dimmer
and then the fan and light switch that you saw so there's five switches total and then we've got a
four-in-one sensor that we put out at one point um and then a an rgbw and cct light bulbs and then we just opened up pre-orders for a light strip it's a first z-wave
fully addressable light strip which we're super pumped about yeah that's that's great i saw that
on the website talk a little bit more about uh the light strip and getting into that maybe some
of the challenges and and how you kind of brought your own unique approach to developing that product.
Yeah. So I'll never forget this moment. It's like ingrained in my head. Nathan and I, Nathan,
he's our chief sales officer. Him and I were sitting down at the table one day, we're just
talking about light strips. We all love LEDs. I mean, it's something that I think like,
I feel like everybody loves LEDs, the color and all that stuff. And so we thought, well,
like what is the major selling point? If we were to get into this market,
obviously we're competing with Hue, LIFX, all these big brands that are great and very,
very great companies. So how can we compete with them? And we, we started going through a lot of
the negative reviews on, on all sorts of different light strips and thought, all right, like, what
can we combat here? What can we overcome some of these negative reviews? And the biggest thing that came up was, I don't want
to pay 70, $80 for a light strip, and then I have to cut it in order. And then I'm just wasting,
you know, three quarters or a quarter of my light strip, I can't use it anymore. And so what we
thought was maybe what, what if we made like one foot sections um so that people can not waste any of their light
strip and they could just put those ones one foot light strips together put different um adapters
90 degree adapters t-shaped whatever adapters and they could just basically create something
without having any waste um and so that's kind of where that that idea came from of putting this
all together in pieces rather than having this um having this two meter light strip that they have to cut to size.
And so we've got one foot sections and then we have a six inch section as well to really just make it so it's super easy to fit into a place.
And then not only that, so what can we do to make it even more differentiated and that was having the addressable leds and having all the the um the color plus the tunable white is like true tunable white not uh not when you blend the
colors together to make white it's there's separate leds on there um and so really have that that cool
animations um that that people like for um uh what do you call that the the effect behind the tv i
can remember what's called ambient lighting um so so yeah so that, the effect behind the TV, I can remember what it's called,
ambient lighting. So yeah, so that's kind of where the idea came from was, wow, let's get
those sections together. And it just so happened that our manufacturer is one of the larger
lighting manufacturers. And so they already had a light strip created. They just used us to
come up with a one-foot section. And then from a controller standpoint, that was all Eric Maycock.
The other Eric, he's, I think, a literal genius.
He's our CTO.
He's the one that kind of came up with all the ideas behind the controller, all the animations, the firmware, just everything that he wanted in an LED controller.
That's what he brought to the table on this one.
Yeah, when you were asking what the hardest thing about these things are and
first thing that came to my mind was installation and of course yeah yeah this is this is kind of
the worst part of owning like once you get it up it's cool but like getting i can't tell you how
many of those strips i've had like the giant strips and i've had to cut them and i'm like
now i'm holding on to them for some reason like I'm never going to use the other 10 feet but there it is yeah exactly and that's the thing so if you buy like
a six foot kit or the starter kit comes with six feet and you only need five you can save that one
foot section and use it if you if you uh buy another controller and you can tack that other
one foot section onto those that six feet and you don't have to waste it which is which is nice
that's a great idea.
This one is not, is this one Z-Wave?
Yeah, so it has Z-Wave,
but it also integrates with other smart home,
smart controller products like SmartThings,
Hubitat, Fibaro, Home Assistant,
things that we're pretty familiar with here.
Are there any other,
I think you had some smart light like smart light bulbs as well. Are
those, can those be integrated into these systems as well? Yep, definitely. Everything you see on
the site will work with any of those systems you just mentioned. Any Z-Wave compatible hub,
basically, it'll work with. Now, it doesn't depend on that hub. One of the things that we
say internally is, you know, our stuff is only as smart as the hub you attach it to. And so, you And so you can have a very basic hub, and so you'll only be able to use the basic features of our switches.
But if you have an advanced hub, something like a Hubitat, SmartThings, Home Assistant, you can use all the advanced features.
Gotcha. Gotcha.
So I don't know if we've mentioned this.
Where do you get all this?
Is it just on your website?
Yeah. So Amazon, you can get an Amazon or our website. Sometimes
you'll find stuff on eBay. So then, and then that's in the U S and Canada. We actually have
a distributor up there. Our tech, they sell it for us up there. So that's where you can get it.
If you're, if you're Canadian. Cool. And we're And we're starting to run up on our time here, so I want to zoom out a little bit and talk to us a little bit about your thoughts on just the smart home in general, specifically around the area.
This is the age-old topic in the smart home around openness and integration and compatibility.
Talk a little bit about your personal and company beliefs around
those topics. Yeah. So there's a huge initiative that you guys should check out if you haven't
already. It's called CHIP, Connected Home over IP. And that is, it's a group of large companies. So
you've got Apple, Samsung, Google, Philips, all those guys are working together to kind of create a common protocol.
Because right now you've got, you know, Z-Wave, Zigbee, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, and then proprietary
protocols, which they're all great in their own way. But these guys are really coming together
to create one common protocol. And so that's not to say that any of these other ones are going away,
but it's just going to make it so it's much easier for someone who has these different
products from these different companies to co-mingle with each other. And so that's kind
of our vision too in the future. Right now, obviously we're a Z-Wave brand and we will
continue to be one because it is an amazing protocol, especially from a security standpoint.
So a lot of security companies use it. So we are going to stay there as well, but you're going to start to see us pivot as well to this new protocol, and that's going to start with Zigbee.
So Zigbee, the chip is going to use the same – it's confusing, so chip and chip.
So there's a chip module inside the light switches and products. So that chip is a Zigbee
chip, but it's going to turn into a connected home wherever IP protocol. It's the same chip.
So we're going to start with Zigbee. And then basically, it's just a firmware upgrade when
you want to get into the new protocol releases. And so you start to see a lot of our products
that are already Z-Wave come out in the same out in the Zigbee version in the next couple months, few months.
And the reason being is because a lot of people, and maybe you guys are as well, start with an Alexa or a Google Home or something to kind of branch out from there.
No one really starts, to my knowledge, unless you're really into it, with a hub.
They kind of start with something like a gateway product. So that's kind of what we're moving towards, too, is to really target that
mass market and go from there. Yeah, I think that goes back to the beginning of the show,
when you were talking about how you got into this. You said that you got a nest. I can't count
on two hands how many people I've heard
over the past five years
they've gotten into this business
or they've gotten interested in the smart home
because they picked up a Nest thermostat.
I think that's going to be one of those products
that we look back in history on
and write a bunch of master's theses about.
Yeah, exactly.
You're right.
All right, Eric.
Well, this was a lot of fun.
Again, we really appreciate you coming on the show
and sharing a little bit about the company and your background.
If anyone listening to the show wanted to connect with you or learn more about the product, what would be the best way for them to do that?
Yeah, they're more than happy to reach out to me directly.
I mean, my email address is my first name at nva.com.
And then, you know, I'm very active on Reddit.
If you ever want to connect there, I'm happy to.
Or just, I don't know, just wherever you want.
Our community is a good place as well.
So you'll find us in all the areas of the web.
So we're watching.
But yeah, you can find us anywhere.
Feel free to reach out.
We're an open book and we're excited to talk to you about anything.
Awesome.
All right, Eric.
Well, thanks again.
We appreciate you coming on the show.
All right.
Thanks for having me, Jason and Seth.
I appreciate it.
That'll do it for our interview with Eric. Well, thanks again. We appreciate you coming on the show. All right. Thanks for having me, Jason and Seth. I appreciate it. That'll do it for our interview with Eric. And like I said at the top, I really enjoyed hearing about the company and kind of the scrappy beginnings and
the way that they've really embraced building that brand and community and the transparency
in the relationship that they have with their users. Really, really cool stuff.
Yeah. That type of feedback loop, I love.
I love that.
Like where you can, when you invest yourself in like,
oh, this would be a great piece to have on this product.
The company listens to you and starts working on it
and then saying, hey, does this look good?
Hey, does this look good?
And man, that community page with Project Hurricane
and all the other stuff.
I mean, some of the other projects they have on there. That's just amazing to see. I mean, you don't, you don't see that
type of transparency from any other company I can think of. Yeah. It was really, really fun to get
a peek into like how, uh, how a small company gets started in the smart home and builds their way up
through, like you said, that, that sort of feedback loop and engagement with the audience.
So really cool stuff. You're not going to see that from Apple.
You're not going to know.
Definitely not.
Definitely not.
All right, Seth.
Well, we got two picks of the week this week.
Looks like too good to pick one.
Too good to pick one.
The first one's kind of short,
but I ran across this on the internet and it's the Onion's Guide to Streaming Services.
And man, I-
This is too good.
I just thought they were,
we always talk about streaming services
and maybe people don't know what they are.
And I think the Onion has laid out a pretty good guide
of what these streaming services are
and what they can offer.
There's a really good list here
and some highlights.
Sling, same shows as cable,
but over spotty internet you buy from your cable
provider hulu the best place to access shows that aren't on netflix that is so true shutter i haven't
even heard of shutter but this was a pretty good description horror themed streaming service that
allows users to experience the nightmare of scrolling for hours and hours without ever
finding a recognizable title.
Yeah, that's the horror movie one.
I've run across that one a couple of times.
And then Netflix hosts the vast library of email accounts that people fabricated to score the free 30-day trials.
That's pretty true. They also host a single account that may share a password off of three different countries.
It's pretty interesting what they do there.
YouTube premium offers a wide array of exclusive ad free right wing
radicalization videos.
That's true.
Peacock.
If you learn birdwatching,
prepare to be very,
very,
very disappointed.
These are good.
And then finally Disney plus eventually there will just be this one.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's,
that's true. It's, it's all gets combined into the Disney plus app eventually. Disney Plus. Eventually, there will just be this one. Yeah, that's true.
It all gets combined into the Disney Plus app eventually.
Too funny.
Good find here.
We'll include that in the show notes.
Share it out with your friends.
Get a laugh out of that one.
Yeah, and the next one, Jason, this one is for you.
This is the pick of the week for Jason Griffin.
This is what I'd like.
Oh, just for me?
I'm going to relabel this.
This is going to be called Tactile Interface Porn.
The title alone has got me clicking frantically.
A brief compendium of when buttons ruled the earth.
And this is one of the most fascinating articles.
Somebody has gone through and grabbed a couple of screenshots off of old.
Maybe this is Star Trek.
I don't know.
But old interfaces that were used in both electrical control rooms,
telephones, computers, cars, anything you can think of.
Just kind of like when people were designing futuristic products or interfaces in the past, they used buttons.
This is really cool.
Because that's what they had.
And we've moved on to the day and age where we use these glass planes and type buttons and have virtual buttons.
This was before then, of course.
And man, there are some gorgeous examples of what equipment can look like when all you have to work with is buttons. This was before then, of course. And man, there are some gorgeous examples of what
equipment can look like when all you have to work with is buttons and LED lights.
Yeah, this is really, really cool stuff and lots of retro sort of aesthetic in here. I like this
Honeywell kitchen computer, especially for the, I mean, just like the advertising advertisements back then and
like how the culture has changed like you just imagine this um ad in a magazine these days
the headline of the ad if she can only cook as well as honeywell can compute oh man that's uh
wow uh that is of an age isn't it it? Yes, it is. This computer cost $10,000.
When they never sold one because of that ad.
And if you scroll down a little bit further,
you'll come across the Zenith Space Commander,
which is a TV remote for their color TVs.
There's 600 color TVs.
Oh, there you go.
Yeah, look at that thing.
Four buttons is all it took to run a TV back in the day. Yeah, this is really fun. This vintage 1970s big button telephone. So some good stuff
on here. We won't belabor it because we're an audio show and you'll have to go check it out.
So we'll include a link to that again in the show notes at hometech.fm slash 330. A couple of good
finds this week, Seth.
If you have any feedback, questions, comments,
picks of the week, buttons, or other great ideas that you can give us a shout,
our email address is feedback at hometech.fm
or you can visit hometech.fm slash feedback
and fill out the online form.
Absolutely.
And as always, we want to give a big thank you
to everyone who supports the show,
but especially to those of you
who are able to financially contribute to our efforts through our Patreon page. If you want to
learn more, head on over to hometech.fm support and learn how you can support the podcast for as
little as $1 a month. Any pledge over $5, we'll give you a big shout out on air, but every pledge
gets a private invite, an invite to our private Slack chat, The Hub, where you and other supporters
of the show can gather every day
for inside conversations
about all aspects of home technology
and button porn.
Button porn is definitely
going to be on there.
Wow.
If you want to help out the show,
but you can't support financially,
we'd appreciate a five-star review
on iTunes or positive rating
in the podcast app of your choice.
Those ratings help others find the show
and we'd appreciate it if you do that.
And Seth, I think we set a record,
definitely set a record this week
for the number of times we said the word porn.
Yeah, I think that's going to have to be our show title.
Sorry, Eric.
We're going to have to make our button porn.
It's got a strong contender.
Button porn hub.
Wow.
Wow, wow, wow.
All right.
Well, good stuff, Seth.
I hope you have a great weekend, and we'll look forward to getting back in action with
you here next week.
Sounds good, man.
Thanks, everybody, for tuning in tonight and helping us out in the live channel there.
Greg.
Well, not so much Greg for mentioning porn so many times, but Eddie, Anthony, thanks,
guys, for tuning in we appreciate it
gotta have Eddie there giving me a hard time about stuff
yeah no doubt
alright Jason have a great weekend
alright man take care