The evolution of dizmo

At dizmo, we’re all about the future, and we’re often meeting people and speaking at various events about our future-gazing plans. Last week however, we were excited to be presented with a different opportunity – this time speaking about the past dizmo and how it has evolved to the present. From idea to concept, to product today, our CEO Matthias Aebi and four other founders welcomed students and entrepreneurs to their talks at this year’s START Session in St.Gallen, held on October 4th.

START Session is a sister event of START Summit, Europe’s leading conference for entrepreneurship and innovation. This year’s 2016 summit united 1500 founders, investors, students and corporates.

Matthias spoke about how the idea of dizmo was born, and what challenges he faced when turning the idea into a real business. He realized at the time that controlling devices in smart home felt too limited, and that dashboards were not innovative or flexible enough for their use – and in his words, something needed to change.

We caught up with Matthias after his talk and asked him a few questions about his presentation, his thoughts on dizmo now and his recent trip around the world!

Hey Matthias! How was your presentation?
It went really well, it was nice to be able to speak widely about dizmo, and also inform new audiences about the concept. After the talk (using dizmo to present), we were also able to show people how dizmo works live on one of our digital touchscreens, which was great for people to get first hand experience of the software.

How was the idea of dizmo born?
I was growing fatigued of the inflexible and very limited dashboards for smart home installations which were the ones leading the marketplace at this time – something felt wrong and I wanted to change it. From there, the group working on the project set itself the goal to create the best smart home UX in the current market.

What challenges did you come across while turning the idea into a real company/business?
Building a business comes with a lot of financial pressures of course, and maintaining focus throughout the highs and lows. Also finding a good name was challenging, we initially reserved about 250 domain names!

What was the personal advice you gave out to audiences at the end?
I said to do something that you believe in is really important and focus, be persistent but not stubborn. You will work hard and spend money, possibly sacrifice most of your private life, but it’s worth it once you succeed. I recently went on a trip around the world and visited many countries. I spoke to the audiences about a meaningful phrase I learnt whilst in China, and I thought that it could be applied to lots of things in life, especially when speaking about building a business like dizmo.

Looking back, is there anything you would do differently if you could
One is always wiser in hindsight. With all the knowledge and information I have today, I would certainly make better decisions. But with the knowledge I had then, I still would probably make the same decisions because I’d still be the same person. However, so far I believe that we didn’t make any fatal errors – hopefully!