What we learned building a mobile & IoT system from scratch: 5 takeaways
Smart connected things are becoming ubiquitous
I have been in the Connectivity industry for over a decade and this is the first time we have attempted to build a ‘smart product’ from scratch. We have learned a few brilliant lessons. As with the Smartphone becoming ubiquitous; the connected world is also seeing the connected cars, the smart-office, smart-city to smart tech on the wrist: the smart-watch while more ‘smart things’ are to come for sure. The promise of the Internet of Things (IoT) is to connect billions of things small and large to the Internet. As the popular Cisco 2020 prediction puts it IoT will span across every vertical and disrupt in some way most traditional industries.
The promise for the consumer is new services not possible before while the promise for the Enterprise is: Data (the currency of the digital era).
If you are within product management of an enterprise or in charge of building a new product to do with mobile, cloud services, hardware or apps for your SME or possibly exploring what the IoT buzz is all about- then I would love to hear your thoughts on this. While there are various ways of building and deploying an IoT solution, it all comes down to the business case for your Company. The article takes the example of SmartTags product while the learnings apply to any smart products that use a sensor, connect devices and an app. The application software could be something running on a gateway device: a router, a tablet/ PC or a mobile device like a smartphone. Standardized technologies will play a large role in providing a seamless IoT experience for the user. I have covered this as part of a separate blog post:
http://blog.bluetooth.com/2020-the-next-element-in-mobile-and-what-it-means-for-us-today
If you are building any new IoT product your design team gets creative control and the experience of building something from nothing where everything is done internally. The trade-off is that it’s a slow, sometimes painful, and often an expensive process. You have to iterate and learn as you do things and this learning is an investment. A typical IoT product like a Smart Locator or something that looks relatively simple as a Bluetooth Finding Tags and Apps can be upward of a million dollar including Design, Tooling, Manufacturing set-up to establishing stable Supply and yield without having much of an insight into Demand: does the product in its form and function resonate with your particular customer base and when can you start to measure and learn. That’s cash that could have gone into multiple other profitable investments for your company. While creative control is great, it comes with extra work, requires extra patience from your team and especially comes at an added price tag.
The Lean Approach to IoT
Where you can in-license not just the technology but also the product/ solution for IoT proposition, you’ll sacrifice the original creative control and the founder/ starter’s experience but you can get a revenue stream fast — a lot faster. You can start testing the key hypothesis — the product-market fit with your initial target audience in form and function, the growth hypothesis for the market & your team’s marketing assumptions and start gathering real data almost overnight by finding the right partners, this is following the Lean Startup approach to innovation by Eric Reis and how we can apply it to IoT. So you can focus the time for the things that truly matter for your business. Compared to building, buying a startup where they can complement your in-house experience is less risky because you have managed to de-risk the heavy up front R&D capital for a quicker income stream and more importantly save one of your key asset — Time.
Is buying/ licensing cheaper than building an IoT solution?
If a suitable technology/ solution is available and only needs small tweaks to make it work for you and your customers then scanning the market to in-license the technology, domain expertise/ knowhow is by far your best bet. This is likely to mitigate the risk and also save in time and money. When buying another market player you are able to quickly source in the market insights and knowhow, the email lists to test and validate, the software code, the brand, and so on which already gets you to your core objective and focus on your strengths. Imagine the investment it would take to build all of that from scratch. Compare that with one of your former R&D projects in IoT.
In the absence of an ‘IoT agency’ in the market it is common for companies where IoT is not a part of their core competence area to approach different agencies to put the building blocks together for their IoT solution. As an example: a Product Design agency may develop the Industrial design with PCBA/ hardware and firmware; a Mobile App agency the software/ Apps; the company may have their own Cloud solution or services while a creative agency develop the marketing assets incl. graphics and key messages before a feedback loop to understand key user proposition, benefits, technology and its limitations and/ or iterations needed.
The disconnect between Design, Engineering and the Market/ Customer is often solved by the ‘Product Management’ function in modern companies. An IoT project however needs much more than that. There is no one size fits all when it comes to IoT and a “one-roof” approach is quite key…
A recent IoT World Forum survey revealed the top five challenges in a deployment of IoT solutions: a. time to completion, b. limited internal expertise, c. quality of data, d. integration across teams, and e. budget overruns. The Cisco study found that the most successful organizations engage IoT partner ecosystem at every stage, implying that strong partnerships throughout the process can smooth out the learning curve.
At Connect-In our team has the experience and expertise of building an IoT product from scratch with close to key 25 decision-touchpoint across the IoT stack that can make or break any product.
Earlier in the year, I shared our journey in this ca. 10 mins IoT Talk with key takeaways for Product Leaders and Innovation Managers.
To sum them up:
Begin with the end in mind: what tangible benefit does the user get and what is its value (think about the data, not just revenues)
- Design for and across the IoT stack: design for the ‘Connected Product Experience’ not islands of disjoint systems
- Measure and iterate quickly to arrive at the Product-Market & Problem-Solution fit always with the Customer/ Users
- Do we really need to build it? Where the option exist consider in-licensing not just the technology but the product-solution system
- Bring Design-Development-Marketing under “one-roof” for your IoT projects to provide the most value for your users & partners.
About the Author: Raj Sark is a former MIT Fellow who is recognized for contribution to technology and innovation that solves a practical issue/ problem. As an engineer who like learn things by doing things he like games but unless they can solve a problem in Education/ Healthcare, etc. it is not his thing. Having Co-founded several lean startups and via Connect-In ltd. his team has licensed IP to help create IoT solutions for startups and Fortune-500 companies. The articles have been made possible with the efforts of the design and engineering team at Xupo HQ: www.myxupo.com