Case study
01
02
Real revenue, all of it from network and referral. Nothing repeatable. The brand foundation did not exist either.
Roughly $4B in India, growing at a ~15% CAGR toward $25B by 2030 — and no major player holding the category.
Roughly ten competitors, most white-labelling hardware and putting a name on it. DOO built the full stack — firmware, cloud, app, hardware — which made it a genuinely connected system rather than products that couldn’t talk to each other.
Every competitor sat in home automation or smart homes. DOO was building a different category: a connected home experience.
Against that, a smaller brand than the market leaders, fewer SKUs, no regional presence.
03
Sharpen your landing before you spend money on running ads. No amount of targeting fixes what happens after the click.
Real rooms, real people, the switch as evidence rather than subject. Reels as the format, different faces for different segments.
Product education, use cases, customer proof, customisation, blogs, etc. — so the brand did work beyond the feed.
04
What ran before was boosting — broad terms, no structure, no way to read what wasn’t working.
Not people interested in smart homes, home tours or interior videos, but people already spending money on their house — buying a first home, renovating, researching interiors.
Age, gender and persona each behaved differently, so the segments kept splitting until the buying roles were visible — the decision makers and the decision influencers. The two need different messages, and targeting and creative followed that split.
05
With a buyer that held up, the question stopped being who to reach and became where to put the next rupee.
New geographies added one at a time, budget concentrated where acceptance was clearly higher. Splitting a national campaign into city-level campaigns cut cost per lead on its own — metros stop reading as one market when you average them.
Cold prospecting feeding retargeting beneath it, so expensive top-of-funnel reach produced a cheap pool to convert from.
Return on ad spend across the account: ~4X.
06
Positioning was written after the brand surface was rebuilt and after the ad account had run long enough to say something. Locking it earlier would have caused missing out on some important market sentiments. Holding it open cost nothing when you are early.
Each layer carried the alternatives considered and the reason they were set aside, based on the product vision, market sentiment, brand goals, and competitors.
Final positioning
A claim competitors who were white-labelling couldn’t make. Behind it, 150,000+ hours of R&D over 6 years of IoT research.
07
I worked with the sales team through the period to pull consumer insight out of conversations and turn it into targeting decisions and inputs for the product roadmap.
For a large share of buyers, the reason to consider home automation at all was security — and the first product in that category is a door lock, followed by security cameras. DOO didn’t sell either, and buyers were choosing competitors on that gap alone.
Buyers who did choose DOO kept naming the same reason: the features in the app. Those features existed because the hardware, firmware, app and cloud were all built in-house — nothing about them had to wait on someone else’s roadmap.
08
Once the top of the funnel works, it stops being the constraint. Every lead now had to survive a consultation call and a demo, so the work moved to finding and fixing what leaked below it.
Structured how the team communicated over WhatsApp, kept brochures current, and built whatever material sales asked for on the way to a close.
Including producing specific reels when sales needed one for a particular objection, segment or conversation.