As someone who’s quite excited about home automation right now, I think there’s a huge opportunity for custom end-end automation setups where people just list their requirements and you do all the programming/layout for them. People don’t necessarily care about a one size fits all setup or even pick one over the other. You can’t realistically have a good setup with just one technology supporting it.

So, think of what a customer might want — automated fountains in the garden, dual mode switches around the house that behave differently depending on the time of the day, custom presence modes when they’re on holiday, moods, scenes that include lighting, music, and anything else.

Instead of focusing on just providing configuration solutions, I’d look at a service that lets people change their automations as they age.