Overview Before defining the profitable business model for the IoT Startup, you need to estimate the initial investment and operational costs. The initial investment covers the design and implementation of the following: Connectivity and IoT Backend infrastructure. End-user Software and Backend. Hardware and Firmware. Security. Those are substantial costs, but what makes IoT initiatives fail are the operational expenses, including: Connectivity. Cloud resources. End-user support. Consumption model. After estimating those costs, we are ready to define the business model.

Definition: A framework is an essential supporting structure that allows building things upon it. Whenever I help customers design and build an Internet of Things solution, I typically recommend starting with the IoT Framework. Beginning the solution development without defining the framework introduces significant risk. The created functionality delivers the expected business outcomes but (often) does not support adding new capabilities. As a result, the code base becomes challenging to manage, hindering future extensions and error-prone.

Do not sell your IoT offerings as Products! Most customers do not buy IoT Products. Depending on the segment, they buy Services or Experiences. I recommend adjusting the marketing messaging accordingly. B2B offering Let’s start with the Business Owners (the B2B Customers). I will use a Restaurant Owner as an example. B2B Customer That person is not interested in Technology or IoT Devices. There is no value in positioning your offering as a Connected Fridge Appliance.

The MQTT is one of the most popular protocols in the Internet of Things domain. It facilitates message exchange between various parties of the IoT system. MQTT provides bi-directional communication between Devices or Applications and the MQTT Broker. Bi-directional communication means that Devices can send and receive messages via the MQTT Broker. On the contrary, one-way communication refers to Devices sending telemetry data without accepting incoming transmissions. For security reasons, some customers request to protect Devices from external access and are concerned about using the MQTT protocol.

We access our bank accounts daily via the Public Internet, so connecting IoT devices to the network is not the real issue. IoT devices are exposed when they accept incoming connections “from the Internet”. Sending telemetry data from devices to the backend system utilizing the Public Internet is totally valid approach, provided that: Devices are the active participants of communication. We establish mutual authentication between devices and the backend endpoint. Transmission is encrypted.

Most of my materials describe various technical aspects of IoT. I am sharing my experience so you can leverage it to improve your solutions. Additionally, I want to assist newcomers in entering the exciting Internet of Things space. During this presentation at the IoT Alliance webinar, I wanted to emphasize that the mindset is more important than technology in IoT initiatives. Spreading that message deserves more attention from my side. I witnessed spectacular failures of massive IoT undertakings.