Why Most IoT Proof-of-Concepts Never Become Products

The first time an IoT proof-of-concept works, it creates a very specific kind of confidence. It’s not excitement, exactly. It’s quieter and more dangerous than that. It’s the confidence that comes from watching data appear on a dashboard and thinking, without quite saying it out loud, that the hard part is over.

At EurthTech, we’ve learned to treat that moment carefully.

Not because proof-of-concepts are meaningless — they aren’t — but because they answer a much smaller question than most teams think they do. A PoC doesn’t tell you whether you have a product. It tells you whether an idea can be demonstrated under supervision, under power, under ideal connectivity, and with engineers standing nearby.

Products don’t live in that world.

Products live for years. Often five, sometimes ten. They live through power outages, network changes, firmware updates nobody remembers pushing, component shortages, regulatory changes, environmental drift, and human forgetfulness. They live in places where replacing a battery costs more than the battery itself, and where a truck roll can quietly erase a quarter’s margin.

A PoC never sees that world.

This is why the conversion rate from PoC to production is so brutally low. Industry numbers vary, but across industrial IoT, smart infrastructure, and enterprise sensing deployments, the figure that keeps showing up is uncomfortable: somewhere between 70 and 85 percent of PoCs never reach meaningful production scale. They don’t fail loudly. They simply stall. Budgets move elsewhere. Teams shift focus. The prototype keeps working, right up until it doesn’t matter anymore.

The gap between those two states is not technical complexity. It’s intent.

A PoC is built to convince. A product is built to endure.

Once you understand that, you start seeing the warning signs everywhere.

The first sign usually appears in hardware, even though it’s rarely recognised as such at the time. Development boards are generous by design. They smooth over power problems with oversized regulators. They tolerate grounding mistakes that a cost-optimised PCB won’t. They hide clock instability behind good crystals. They ship with memory and flash configurations that quietly absorb inefficiencies. They come with antenna layouts that are forgiving in ways real enclosures never are.

So the PoC works. Cleanly. Reliably. Impressively.

Then the custom board arrives, and something subtle changes. The sensor that behaved perfectly begins returning strange values once every few hours. The radio range drops just enough to cause retries. The device resets only when transmitting at full power. The firmware image that fit comfortably now feels tight once OTA partitions, rollback logic, and secure boot are added.

Nothing looks obviously broken. But nothing feels as solid as it did before.

Teams often describe this as “unexpected hardware instability.” What it really is, is exposure. The development board didn’t lie; it simply protected them from reality.

Power is where reality becomes unavoidable. In PoCs, power is usually an abstract concern. The device is plugged in. Or powered by a battery that nobody plans to ship. Firmware wakes frequently because responsiveness looks good in a demo. Sensors stay on because accuracy feels reassuring. Radios transmit eagerly because latency matters when someone is watching.

And then the product conversation begins.

Someone asks how often batteries need to be replaced. Someone asks how many devices can be deployed before operational costs explode. Someone asks what happens when a technician has to climb a pole, enter a factory floor, or access a sealed enclosure just to swap cells. At that point, power stops being a technical metric and starts becoming a financial one.

This is where many PoCs quietly die.

Because battery life isn’t a detail you optimise later. It’s something you architect for. A device that lasts six months instead of five years doesn’t just cost more in batteries. It can increase lifetime maintenance costs by 3× to 7×, depending on access difficulty. In industrial environments, a single service visit can cost anywhere from ₹3,000 to ₹15,000 once travel, labour, and downtime are accounted for. Multiply that by thousands of devices, and suddenly the “working PoC” no longer looks viable.

Real products internalise this early. They treat sleep as the default state. They assume radios are expensive. They transmit only when something meaningful changes. They measure current spikes instead of averages. They design firmware around energy states, not features.

This is why product teams spend days staring at current traces using tools like Joulescope or Nordic’s PPK2 long before the product feels complete. They are not optimising yet. They are learning how expensive their assumptions are.

Firmware follows the same pattern. PoC firmware is exploratory by nature. It grows like a lab notebook. Things are tried. Assumptions are made. Error handling is optimistic. Retries are generous. Logs are verbose. If something goes wrong, someone reflashes the board.

That approach collapses the moment devices leave the lab.

Field devices fail in ways that don’t look like bugs. They lose connectivity at the wrong time. They reboot during a write operation. They wake up confused about time. They receive partial OTA updates. They operate for months in conditions nobody tested together. And when they fail, there is no one standing next to them with a debugger.

Production firmware is not about doing more. It’s about behaving predictably when things go wrong. It’s about knowing when to wait, when to retry, when to fall back, and when to stop. It’s about surviving long enough to be fixed.

This is why mature systems feel conservative. They wake less often. They transmit less eagerly. They retry patiently. They log sparingly. They choose boring solutions over clever ones. From the outside, they can look underwhelming. From the inside, they are calm.

Security is where the cost of PoC thinking becomes most visible. In early prototypes, shortcuts feel harmless. Shared credentials. Hardcoded keys. Unsigned firmware. Open debug ports. Everything moves faster, and nobody gets hurt in a demo.

But security is not something you add when things become serious. It’s something you either designed for or didn’t. When a PoC is asked to become a product, especially in regulated or industrial domains, those shortcuts turn into blockers overnight. Suddenly there are questions about device identity, key rotation, firmware authenticity, and audit trails. Retrofitting trust at that stage is painful, slow, and expensive.

This is why real product teams treat secure boot, device identity, and OTA integrity as non-negotiable foundations, even when the early versions don’t seem to need them yet. Not because it looks good on a slide, but because undoing insecurity later can delay production by months.

Manufacturing is where all of this finally becomes undeniable. A PoC is built by hand. A product is repeated. Repetition exposes everything that was vague before. Firmware flashing flows. Calibration steps. Test coverage. Serialisation. Traceability. Failure isolation. Recovery paths.

A device that works once is a demo. A device that works ten thousand times in roughly the same way is a product.

This is the point where many teams realise that what they built was never designed to scale. Not in volume, not in time, and not in responsibility. The PoC didn’t fail. It simply reached the edge of what it was meant to prove.

At EurthTech, we don’t see PoCs as mistakes. We see them as unfinished thoughts. A PoC proves that something can exist. A product proves that it deserves to keep existing.

The difference between those two states is subtle. And it’s everything.