The Internet of Trash
Why some IoT products fail
IoT market seems to be a chaotic boiling broth, with new products coming up and dying every day. But don’t panic — its secret recipe is well-known by our master chefs at THINGS. Today we serve some fresh out of the oven insights about why some IoT startups never reach your plate.
When IoT gets too physical
— So, you have a Smart Condom prototype for me?
— Oh yes, sir, I do! It’s like a FitBit but for your penis!
— No way!
— Yeah, aha pretty crazy! It’ll show how bad you are!
— Oh, it will?
— Oh, yes, future is already in your bedroom!
— Well, Okay then!
That dialog might sound familiar to those who have seen one of the Screen Rant’s very popular Pitch Meeting videos. As the name states, the youtuber role plays pitching of some modern lame movies, like Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker.
This is the type of video that makes you LMAO and cry at the same time — decisions behind these cinematic failures seem ridiculous and yet they raise a lot of money.
Ambitions VS reality
Similarly, this imaginative Smart Condom pitch might seem funny but it’s a real IoT product, though. i.Con is a small band that detects STIs, tracks “performance” data and sends it straight to a smartphone. However, the only thing it was capable of was to spread media virus across Internet and apparently never go on sale.
So, why did it fail?
“Because it’s just bulls**t!”, you’ll say. Absolutely! But how did it come to this point? i.Con is just a wacky illustration of why so many IoT startups fail. There are several reasons but all of them can be gathered under the main one — creators of these products have put their vision over execution. That is to say, their ambitions got misaligned with reality.
Below we’re going to further elaborate this statement, breaking the story into 4 reasons, supported by corresponding examples.
Reason 1: Solving problems that don’t exist
…Saturday, lazy morning. Smell of fresh coffee. Yawning, you open the fridge to find some eggs for a sunny-side up that will smile to you. You fry them, make a blissful bite and…Ba Dum Tss, it tastes terrible because the eggs went bad. Damn, you haven’t checked them! Seems like we need a real superhero to deal with it!
Maybe that is how the founders of Quirky Egg Minder were thinking. They designed a smart egg tray with LED lights to tell you when eggs were going bad.
Sounds great but the reality is you don’t want to pay $16 to check the expiry date stamped on an egg or to use an old-good trick and put it in water. The product might not have been a complete disaster but Quirky had to drop the price from $100 to $11–16.
To put it simply, they were trying to solve an issue that didn’t really exist.
Reason 2: Hotch-potch without value
“Why is your product smart?”. If you answer is “You can control it with your phone!” or “It’s highly customisable” or “It’s all you need in one!” you might have gone wrong direction. There is nothing bad in those features, in fact they are great but they should surve as tools which answer a specific need.
A perfect example is SMALT — an interactive…salt shaker. SMALT allowed to play music through Bluetooth speaker, set the ambiance with colour-changing mood light, and dispense salt. The users were ably to shake, pinch or choose the measurement of salt via mobile, Alexa or device itself.
Wow, what a complex way of seasoning your dish! As a result — no added value because one does not simply put a bunch of features together to make a product smart!
Reason 3: Screen as a cure-all
Another common misconception is that you can make a product smart by putting a screen on it.
To illustrate, let’s take Kuvée — a smart wine bottle. Briefly, it’s a bottle-shaped sleeve with a WiFi-enabled touchscreen in front. It would keep wine fresh for up to a month and let you order new bottles straight from the screen.
Once again, sounds nice but:
- the screen has everything you can find on an ordinary wine’s label, like a logo, the grape etc.
- the charge lasts 5–6 hours;
- it’s not transparent, so you can only see an estimation of how much wine is left;
- it’s only compatible with proprietary wine cartridges.
In other terms, not only Kuvée failed to improve user experience, it actually made it even more complicated.
Reason 4: Overcomplicating what just works
You might think that the Internet of Trash consists only of weird concept sounding like a joke. But things can get really serious.
Imagine top investors like Google Ventures and others pouring $70M in a startup. Those guys love money, so they can’t be wrong, right?
Meet Juicero — a dead example of Silicon Valley blindness and one of the most overhyped startups in the tech history.
When launched, it was claimed not just a Wi-Fi-connected juicer but a whole platform for a healthy lifestyle. The business model was based on selling a $400 machine, expensive and complicated to produce, and a subscription for juice packs.
The founder, investors and newborn fans got so mesmerized by a great vision and a great beauty that didn’t notice the machine being completely redundant. To open the Juicero’s pack you simply need to squeeze it with your bare hands onto the glass. No need to scan the QR code. No need to sync the app. No need to insert the pack into juicer. Boom!
In his dream to become new Steve Jobs, the founder craved to create a gorgeous piece of engineering thought but end up taking a traditional product and adding so many bells and whistles that lead him to a dead end.
World-old question
You never know whether your brilliant product idea will skyrocket or hit the ground. There is no guarantee that after conducting a comprehensive research, designing a disruptive solution and marketing it like a god your startup will become another WhatsApp or PayPal. However, you can at least try to use the above mentioned examples not to repeat their mistakes.
IoT products are meant to be contextually-aware — to react in real-time to changes in the environment and patterns of behaviour. They should anticipate user’s need and respond to them.
Unfortunately, despite “user-centered approach” becoming a buzz expression, user research and testing still hasn’t become a norm. Many issues of these failed startups could have been solved by answering a simple yet crucial question: “Does my product satisfy someone’s unmet need?”.
Want to learn some practical tips on how to design a successful IoT product? Stay tuned, a new article’s coming soon!
This story was inspired by the lecture of Pier Bardoni, CEO Things, at IED, Milan.
