Meet the new face of business. A few young, bright, hopeful innovators start a company on an Internet-of-Things-idea. They need someone hardware oriented, one software developer and a CEO. Most importantly, they need a huge PRE-ORDER-button so the project gets funding without the hassle of dealing with inquisitive VCs. The need to share product idea photos and videos is easily addressed by just linking to a public Dropbox-folder and by only prefixing the Internet site with “blog.” and starting a free Youtube-channel, you’ll have the standard formats of marketing for free. The company has virtually zero startup costs. This is cloud at its finest.

Check out a couple of typical Internet-of-Things-startups on typical Internet-of-Things-startup sites. Same format even down to the PRE-ORDER-button!

iotsites

You’ll find plenty of almost identical setups on IOTLIST.

I’m thrilled to have the privilege to once more witness a new wave of technology innovation and hopefully really successful companies. My only advise to all of them, on behalf of the entire market, is to stay true to the passion of creativity, innovation and long term business focus. Don’t go to market with sloppy, half baked ideas, and the hopes of a quick buck through a lucky PRE-ORDER-process and a fat buy out from a bigger fish. It’s more than OK, it’s even a necessity, to experiment through shipping and then tweaking, but planning on customer interactions based on premium early adopter prices and virtually no quality assurance in production will put a broader adoption at risk and just delay the real breakthrough of adoption.

The threat to the Internet-of-Things is hype driven by sloppiness induced by low quality free stakes. The world is still virtually disconnected and we’re about to connect everything. Let’s do it with real passion for innovation, business focused creativity and long term sincerity.

PS. Note that I’m not saying the above mentioned companies are sloppy or insincere. I picked them only to highlight the identical go-to-market approach.