A great idea brings a newventure to an entrepreneur, the venture brings people and these people represent entrepreneurs to the market. And as we all know, a good idea has no monetary value, just a whole lot of bursting potential. The concept of Smartnode, a product by Vertical Dots Technologies germinated at a time when Parth and Dhruv developed a prototype helpful in production based industries to measure production. The prototype was developed and effectively utilized by one of the cable manufacturing companies in Vadodara until they received lucrative job offers. After a period of nine months, they both quit their jobs to rejoinder their call of passion. They worked on the prototype, converted it into a product and gave out to clients like Torrent Cable and Apar Industries. During this time, they read different technology related articles and startups. After adequate market research on Home automation, they found out that it was a growing industry with a lot of potential and increasing awareness in India, but most of the products in the India market were from foreign companies not actually suiting the Indian home environment. They started to develop the prototype and were successful in converting it to a product. Then, the time came to make a tough call to quit one product and scale the other. They went ahead with the SmartNode Retrofit Smart Home System and are now successful in creating a range of products in this ecosystem as well as generating decent revenue. "In product development, our initial models developed were not actually suitable for actual use. They used to get damaged on site. We had to change many variants after we got a perfect market accepted products, which is still running perfectly. Persistence and optimistic thinking of overcoming such obstacles lead to where we are today," mentions Parth.

The company provides provide a seamless and user friendly SmartNode application experience such that each and every user can use the products easily. Its retrofit home automation solutions eliminate the need of re-wiring or renovation to convert any house into Smart Home. The application is available for free on Play Store as well as on the app store. "We have lighting automation which can on/off, Schedule and Lock any appliances. This includes compatibility with noiseless Fan, Heavy Loads, Regular Loads and Dimmer Loads. We have a Curtain controller module that can control both Curtains and Blinds, an RGB controller which can enhance the ambience of any place, an IR Blaster that can control any appliances that can be controlled via an IR Remote and a range of customizable touch switches which can enhance the interior of any place," he asserts. What makes the product stand out in the crowd is the combination its hardware and the application response time.

SmartNode has installed over 2000 + devices and has 2000 + app downloads, 7 distributors and a chain of 100+ dealers under them

The Growth Story
The company launched its product in mid 2018 and till date it has installed over 2000 + devices and has 2000 + app downloads, 7 distributors and a chain of 100+ dealers under them. It has its presence in North and West India and further plans to expand its reach PAN India by June 2020. SmartNode also plans to make its offline presence PAN India with a dept in each region. The team envisions creating the biggest chain of offline partner to boost its presence in each and every corner of India. "For this, we have target a minimum one distributor in each state and more than 100 dealers under each of the distributor. In this way, we will be able to make a minimum of 30 distributors and 1000+ dealers,"he concludes.