I understand how you’re thinking, but you’re wrong. Sorry, but I don’t think I can explain the problem in any shorter way than this.
This is about your target audience. It is never as simple as to start building a product and then expect people to start buying it (ie an invention vs an innovation). There must be a reason for buying. This is why we need to look at the target audience, and the primary as well as secondary users.
You have a primary target audience group, which you can define in a very narrow manner. They are usually quite few, and won’t alone be sufficient as a customer base. There aren’t any sales volumes to talk about in this group. But when they start buying your product they also act as ambassadors that will make many others with less specific demands buy your product. The secondary group.
The primary target audience for Homey are the advanced users/geeks that knew exactly why they wanted a Homey. Many of them are systems developers, solution architects, designers, concept developers, and so on. People who are used to work with requirements and analyze available solutions. They are the ones that are able to build really cool and/or geeky things with their Homeys.
The secondary group in your target audience are the users who want some kind of HA-solution, but aren’t able to build very advanced automations by themselves. They bought their Homeys because the people in the primary group did. Often after having Homey recommended to them by someone in the primary group, who might also act as a mentor/support and provide inspiration and help.
I don’t know how big these groups are. But if you count percentage of the total user base, the primary target group usually shrinks over time when the product are being adopted by more and more secondary users. But it’s still the primary users that sell Homey for Athom.
This is the problem with the mobile-first decision. The web/windows app in 1.5 was targeted at the primary group, while the new mobile app is targeted at the secondary. But if you lose your primary users you will also lose the rest as well because you will lose the ambassadors for your product.
Think about supercars. Only a professional race driver can drive a supercar to the fullest. Thus, many race drivers own supercars (often provided for free by the car makers). When they drive them on closed tracks or highways with no speed limit they draw attention to the car brand. But it’s the billionaires that buy these cars that are the bread and butter for the companies that build them. Would you imagine Ferrari capping their cars at 180km/h because the majority of their customers can’t handle them at higher speeds? Of course not. They’d lose all their customers then, even if only a fraction of them are actually affected by the decision.
