Smart home technology has a content problem. The products are genuinely useful. The demos are genuinely boring. The people who make them keep showing the interface — the app, the dashboard, the settings — instead of showing the thing the product actually changes: how you live.
Hoobs is a smart home hub that makes complex home automation accessible. 74 million organic views later, here’s exactly how we cracked the category.
The insight that changed everything: features don’t go viral, moments do
Every smart home brand shows the same content. Here’s the app. Here’s the setup. Here are the features. It’s technically accurate and humanly invisible.
We stopped showing the product entirely. We started showing the moments the product creates.
Not “Hoobs connects 2,000 smart home devices.” Instead: a Siri automation that detects it’s 3am, refuses to let you open the fridge, and threatens to text your crush something embarrassing about you if you don’t go back to sleep.
That specific video — the 3am fridge-lock automation — worked because it hit three psychological triggers simultaneously. It was relatable (everyone knows the 3am snack spiral). It was funny (the threat to text your crush is absurdist enough to be entertaining). And it was useful (people genuinely wanted to build this automation after watching). Content that scores on all three of those at once is almost impossible to scroll past.
Why we wrote scripts instead of briefs
Most content agencies give clients a brief. We gave Hoobs scripts. Fully written, character-driven short skits with a setup, a turn, and a payoff. The automations were the product. The situations were the entertainment.
This matters because the “unseen before” requirement for virality is not about doing something nobody has ever done — it’s about combining familiar elements in a configuration the viewer hasn’t seen. A smart home demo is familiar. A smart home device that psychologically manipulates you into healthier sleep habits is not. Same product, completely different framing.
The most common mistake brands make when they finally decide to invest in short-form content is copying what’s already working. They see a format trending and immediately produce their version of it. The problem: by the time you’ve seen a concept enough to recognize it as “working,” the algorithm has already saturated it.
Audiences have an incredibly sensitive detector for “I’ve seen this before.” The moment they feel it, engagement plummets. The only content that truly breaks through is the content that shows them something they haven’t seen configured this way before. That’s not a creative luxury. It’s an algorithmic requirement.
How we used the retention graph to tune the skit format
The first few skit versions showed a distinct retention pattern: huge drop-off right after the setup, before the payoff. People were leaving because the setup took too long to pay off. Short-form audiences have essentially zero patience for a slow burn — they’ll leave before you get to the good part.
We tightened every script to put the “unseen moment” — the fridge lock, the embarrassing text threat, the unexpected twist — within the first 4 seconds. Set up the premise immediately, deliver the punchline almost immediately after. The retention graph became almost flat on the restructured versions.
74 million views for a smart home hub. Not because smart home content is inherently interesting. Because we made the moments interesting, and let the product live inside them.