You and me both my friend lol.
It’s a great question!
I guess the best way to answer this from our perspective is to go back to late 2019 / early 2020 (ahh the good ol’ days when lead times were 12 weeks, our manufacturer loved us, and we were naive to what was to come from a supply chain standpoint).
We had just started gaining traction from our Gen 2 switches and people were loving the, “Smart Bulb Mode” (known at the time as, “disable internal relay”).
We were also in early talks with Signify (owns Philips Hue) around making an in-wall smart switch for them that would work with their Hue bulbs. They loved our Z-Wave version and wanted us to create a ZigBee version.
Unfortunately that fell through due to the pandemic hitting and they pushed out that project bc they were more interested in the Aurora switch by Lutron bc there was no wiring needed, but we agreed to talk further when they wanted an in-wall switch.
However, we saw the huge potential of creating a ZigBee switch bc there are 1000x more ZigBee bulbs than Z-Wave and we could easily convert our Z-Wave firmware into ZigBee.
Around the same time, CHIP was announced (Connected Home over IP – now Matter) and we saw Philips was a part of that project.
CHIP/Matter aside, we felt ZigBee was still the right play bc while Google and Apple do have thread (I didn’t know about Apple, thanks!) we’d be stretching into an area that seemed a little off-brand and didn’t really have a, “hook” to convince people to buy our switch. If we went Thread, our major selling point, “Smart Bulb Mode” seemed hard to explain to people who are newer to the market and likely hadn’t experienced the pain of having a smart bulb with no smart switch. Whereas the Hue users know this pain all too well – if someone turns off the Hue bulb from a light switch, it doesn’t work.
Hopefully I’m explaining this well – I’m not sure the caffeine has hit yet lol.
The interesting thing is that we actually put ZigBee on hold for 1.5 years lol. We had the idea to come out with it back in late 2019 / early 2020 when we were in talks with Hue – and we even promoted it at CES, but ultimately had to scrap it due to the pandemic and all the issues that came with it (that still are there).
When CHIP was announced, I wanted to bring this back bc I thought it was important to be on the leading edge of something that has the potential to be huge. Imagine if we were one of the first switches that came to market and all these big dogs are now fighting over exclusivity? That’s super exciting for a small company and honestly has kept me up at night for a long time. To top it off, we were told that certain ZigBee chips would be easily converted to Matter (not so much true now, but it can still be done), so it felt like a no-brainer to start with ZigBee to work with Hue and then convert everything over to CHIP/Matter when the time comes.
We finally found a manufacturer that would take us on as our current Z-Wave one had no interest in working on innovation for us (rightly so, but that’s a story for another day) and we kicked off this project with them.
The thought process was this:
- Best case scenario – we launch a Matter switch first and the market goes crazy bc all the other major companies put out their usual white-label stuff, whereas ours looks a lot different and we also know and understand our customer (bc we’re customers too)
- Worst case scenario – Matter fails to come to fruition and we’re left with a ZigBee switch that still fills the need of Hue users and can still tap into mass market a bit (whereas we now play in a niche, Z-Wave/Power-User market) via Amazon Echo’s that also support ZigBee
So, to hopefully summarize, we’ve always wanted to have a Hue compatible switch bc of the sheer market-size that we can tap into and the problem that we’ve already solved (smart bulb mode) is easily translated from a marketing standpoint to our new target (mass market). We originally wanted to start with 100% CHIP/Matter when the project was announced, but since being delayed, we decided to stick with ZigBee and develop Matter firmware in parallel.
Haha, all good – I saw you typing while I was typing and figured as much
Loving the dialogue btw, thanks for asking your questions!