Creating an IoT product
This post is for engineers / builders / startup founders / makers who are working on their next big idea for an IoT product.
Creating a product, any kind of product is hard. It requires a lot of sweat, hard work, understanding exact needs of potential customers, getting feedback from the field, iteration, re-iteration and doing these in an extremely intensive fashion with fast pace.
Building an IoT product is not different. In fact, building a hardware product requires a lot more attention to detail than building a software. The output is a physical thing so updating or upgrading it and maintenance is a lot harder.
Anatomy of an IoT Product
An IoT product contains 5 major components:
All of these parts require a different discipline in themselves and certain level of understanding of how things work or should work.
Say you have sufficient expertise on hardware, you need to figure out a way of communication. After choosing a medium (i.e. 3g / lte, LoRa, XBee, WiFi) you need a software backend which would collect the data from your hardware via that medium. And then you need to develop an application to process the data and offer various services. Only then the product will mean something to the user.
You need to do all these fast enough to not miss the train on your niche.
For Startups:
After doing all of these and getting your product in the hands of your customers, you’ll face with what we call the “IoT’s 3S”:
- Stability
- Security
- Scalability
To maintain customer relationships and to further develop your product you’ll need a team of software engineers, technical support specialists, cybersecurity engineers and more, depending on the product.
You were creating a hardware product, you remember?
Now you’re dealing with stuff that you need to learn fast, execute fast and orchestrate fast.
Why would you deal with all these when there is a much more efficient way to accomplish even more results?
Value-Maturity Curve of IoT Products
According to iot-analytics.com, there are 8 maturity levels of any IoT product which would determine its value to customers.
Figure above shows an example of a “dumb” car turning into a controlled car, which over time with increased maturity becoming an autonomous vehicle, eventually evolving into a cross-ecosystem enabled “thing” which would offer most value to users. Of course, there is still time for cars to be cross-ecosystem enabled, but it is possible for other products targeting Smart Cities, Agriculture, Waste Management or Smart Healthcare.
IoT Platforms
An IoT Platform is basically a software backend, preferably running in the cloud, which would / should cover everything in between the hardware and applications, including security.
After adding communication module to your hardware, you need to collect the data, store it, analyze it and then develop your application on top of the result.
Also you need to all of these in a very secure and efficient (i.e. stable and scalable — see “3S’s of IoT” above) manner.
IoT Platforms come handy at this point, because they handle all of those things and lay out a playground for you to develop your own niche.
A startup’s main objective is to offer high value by spending as minimum resources as possible, such as time, money and energy.
For hardware maker the whole process of building something is fun but finishing a product is much more fun than that.
Yet focusing on multiple things, a.k.a fighting in multiple fronts won’t get things done, or won’t get things done neither in small amount of time nor with minimum effort.
Talking about achieving maximum results with minimum effort we need to look at how an IoT Platform can almost immediately mature your product and enable you to offer higher value propositions.
Call For Creators
At Herni we are inviting all makers, builders, creators and startup founders to come and join us in our journey to create best, easiest-to-use, most secure and most mature IoT Platform there is.
We are offering 6 months of free service with all under the hood.
Enter herni.co, click “Request Demo”, fill in the form and we’ll contact you in no time.
Keep building ✌
Cheers,
Metin.
P.S: Follow us on Social media
