How to save a smart home company

The smart home can be scary. It seems like every other month, we hear about another smart home company going out of business, leaving you scrambling for a new way to turn on your lights. Why is it so hard for smart home manufacturers to keep the lights on? And what can they do to stay in business, so we can continue to enjoy the benefits of home automation? 

This week on The Vergecast, The Verge’s smart home reviewer, Jennifer Pattison Tuohy, chats with Ken Fairbanks, a longtime customer of Insteon who ended up buying the smart lighting company when it went bankrupt.

They trace the rise and fall of the early smart lighting protocol, born in the post-X10 era when home automation shifted from wired to wireless, and how he and a group of former employees — who were also users — revived it. He shares lessons learned on how to keep the lights on, from fostering customer loyalty and managing the realities of subscriptions, to navigating new tariffs and musing on how closely some IoT hardware companies come to resembling pyramid schemes.

Then, in a special and supersized (and we mean SUPER) Vergecast hotline (call 866-VERGE11 or email [email protected]), Jen is joined by Richard Gunther, cohost of The Smart Home Show podcast, to tackle a bunch of your burning smart lighting questions. They answer everything from how to move your smart home lighting, to how to choose smart switches or bulbs, to which Thread border router you should buy for your Matter setup. Plus, they run down how they have smart lighting working in their own homes. 

For more on the topics in this episode, here are some links to dig into:

• Insteon’s troubles are a smart home tale as old as time
• Insteon customers turned Insteon’s lights back on
• Smart switches or smart bulbs? How to choose the right smart lighting for your home
• Thread count: Ikea is stitching together a smarter home
• Taming Wi-Fi in the Smart Home
• How to move a smart home
• Moving a smart home – The Smart Home Show
• Binding should be the next big thing for smart home devices
• Google TV Streamer review: smarter than your average set-top box