'Understand & Influence Consumer Behavior'

Today, a lot of efforts are needed just to understand the consumer behavior. Understanding of consumer behavior inspired a serial entrepreneur  --  Mr. Dhaval Doshi to launch Smarthome NX, a discovery platform that offers homeowners an easy way to find products and services in the rapidly evolving and fragmented smart home automation industry. With Smarthome NX, his vision is to make it easy for consumers to adopt Smart homes. In an exclusive interaction with SMEStreet, Dhaval spoke about the evolving behavior of Indian consumers and the need to know this subject better.

When did you decide to start your company?

I decided to start this company as soon as I quit my last stint at a digital advertising agency. The idea of starting something in the Smart homes industry was something I was toying with since over 3 years but I was waiting for the right time to kick start this third venture of mine.

What are the basic parameters for any startup?

I think an idea, a business model and the right team are the basic parameters for any startup to be successful.

What are the key challenges that you face?

Finding good talent is one of the key challenges that one faces as an entrepreneur. I would say in the age of innovative business models and new domains that one enters into as a startup, it is even more challenging to measure success. While one may think that they have cracked it or have achieved success, unless and until that happens at substantial scale it may not really mean long term sustainability. Therefore, validating your business model is a challenge for a startup.

Please share a glimpse about your organizations strengths.

1. Our Team: I am proud to have folks in my team who are proud of what they do and come from diverse backgrounds. Most of them have learnt their functions - be it marketing or strategy or content right on the job. Therefore, they bring fresh ideas to the table, a new perspective and most of all.

2. We are outsiders in this industry: Smarthome NX is started to change the way Smart homes are perceived and to make it easy for consumers to adopt Smart home tech. However, our background has little to do with the industry that has been around for ages. While most of our peers are engineering and innovative R&D labs, we pride ourselves in building the storefront by having a keen understanding of consumers and what they really want. We think us being outsiders of this industry is a strength as that allows us to bring a different perspective to the industry and help streamline it.

Which are the key focused industry verticals for your business?

We are building an end consumer discovery platform for technology products which is coupled with technology services. This vision is still just on paper but our next website iteration is going to come very close to this vision. With this new website, we will be adding features for customers to not only discover but also share ideas. While I can’t reveal much about this now, all I can say is that it will be the most simplest platform for Smart home buyers to find Smart home products and services

What is the future roadmap for your business?

Our future roadmap is to build a Smart home aggregator that spans across Asia having the latest and the best products in the category of Home Internet of Things. We want to be the go-to platform for brands to launch new, evolved products to an audience that cares to adopt new technology. While the journey has already started, we are building new tech that will help us scale this further.