I’m leading a team focused on making smart homes more accessible through a device that uses an app to consolidate everything people need to do at home, from turning on appliances, to ordering food online, to booking services, etc. Think of our product as an all-purpose solution for smart homes. Our device has passed quality assessment and is most compatible with our app.

The key challenge is to execute our business model of increasing sales by increasing app usage. Revenue should be primarily driven by the app however, app functionality is not yet complete.

Another challenge is to keep our product competitive despite it being more expensive than what’s already available in the ecommerce market. Their devices are legal, tested, accredited and went through customs – going through these processes increases our costs. But buying the device from an ecommerce platform bypasses all those processes making our costs very low. Thus, the device’s challenge is a price and incentive battle.

Our key questions are: how do we penetrate the Philippine market if ‘smart homes’ are a relatively new concept here in the Philippines? How do we encourage partners to integrate into our app? How do we incentivize people to shift their behavior to increase their usage of our product?

We call our stakeholders the “Miguels” of the family, the tech savants who serve as the family’s go-to consultant for anything related to technology. There are different types of Miguels too – the Migue who lives alone, the Miguel who is the head of a new family with their first infant, and a young, tech savvy Miguel who still lives with his family.

We’re looking to expand the app in the future from booking “yaya” services through our #beattheyaya program to partnering with pet experts to serve people’s pet needs.