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Actions to Turn Smart Devices into Smart World

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According to a research, the majority of consumers (87%) haven’t heard of the term IoT or Internet of Things. But I wonder if it’s not already there. We expect toasters, coffee machines, and driverless cars to communicate with each other and that’s IoT for us. But we continue to control our home security system with a mobile app on our smartphone or track our fitness through a wristband. If you use a mobile device, chances are that you are already connected to the IoT and smart devices, it’s just that you still don’t know about it.

Mobiles are actually the first level of interaction with IoT for most of us, and therefore, mobile enabled IoT solutions will also be the first one to ride the IoT success wave. So what should be an expert checklist for looking to build mobile-enabled IoT solutions?

Sensing the future of your idea…

Thanks to the start-up boom, there are thousands of ideas floating around that give us excitement to start something on our own. Before defining a goal for your product, you should spend enough time on research to get more clarity and groom a successful business idea. There’s a big checklist, but your questionnaire should start from here:

Are you going to invent a new business market?
If not, are you going to build product in one of the existing market?
If not, are you going to build duplicate model of an existing product to capture the big market demand?

It is going to expand, but is your business scalable?

Investors will tell you that they love to put money into businesses that are scalable and creating IoT solutions will need huge investments. But what does scalability mean? Scalability is the ability to build a system that can grow along with meeting the rising demands and generate higher sales volume without increasing the cost significantly. It’s tempting to focus on cheap and quick solutions in the beginning but think ahead to what will serve your business best in the future.

Creating personas to bridge the gap

Without customers, there’s no one to buy your product and to generate revenues, so what your customers want is an important question you should ask before starting a business. But actually who’s your customer? Buyer personas will help you in understanding your prospective customers better. It will make your job easier by tailoring your product according to your targeting persona even before you start making them. It’s important to establish buyer personas for your business not only to segment your audience and creating stronger marketing campaigns, but also to drive innovation in your product development and services to the specific needs, behaviors, and concerns of different groups.

Why you need a platform to succeed?

Everybody is talking about sexy IoT products, and platform usually takes a back seat. But platforms are actually the crucial elements for connecting things. You must make sure your platform has the IoT device-to-network intelligence, analytic tools to deal with large quantities of data generated, device management controls to cope immense flow of information and security systems capable of protecting financial, strategy and IP information.

Competition will be fierce

Competitor analysis is a critical part of your marketing strategy. By doing the analysis, you can find the strength and flaws of your competitor and also formulate how to run your business overcoming mistakes done by them. You try to figure out which situations became an opportunity for them and find situations which are likely to become a threat to them as well.

You need to think from customer point of view to see what customers prefer in your competitor; their quality, advertising or their way of doing things differently. You can evaluate their past strategies and how their strategies will affect your business and also how aggressive they are. Competitor analysis will help you in finding your current competitor and also gives you an overview of your future potential competitors.

Pricing, never a big factor, but still holds the key

The Internet of Things is making everyday objects smart, but also expensive and therefore, pricing will be a determining factor to turn aggressive in the IoT space. KeeLight showed off its Wi-Fi enabled smart light bulbs at CES that you can control with an app remotely. Sounds awesome, but each smart light bulb costs $100. Get your pricing strategy right and it will create bigger opportunities for your business.

Flexibility is the key

To ensure success, you have to do regular analysis of your product performance and customer needs. Sometimes even after so much research, you may fail to meet the customer expectations and that’s when you should be flexible enough to change the track of your business model and enhance your product offerings.