12 Questions to Ask Before Hiring an IoT Development Company
IoT projects fail differently from software projects — hardware lead times, certification, field failures. These 12 questions expose whether a vendor has really shipped devices.

Plenty of agencies claim IoT capability because they once connected a Raspberry Pi to the cloud. Real IoT — devices that survive factories, weather and three years on a battery — is a different discipline. These questions separate device shippers from demo builders.
Hardware reality checks
- 1. How many units of your designs are deployed in the field right now?
- 2. Show me a PCB you designed — walk me through the antenna placement decisions
- 3. What is your plan when our chosen microcontroller hits a 40-week lead time?
- 4. How do you power-profile? (Right answer mentions real measurement tools, not datasheets)
Firmware and field-survival checks
- 5. How do OTA firmware updates work, and what happens when one fails mid-flash?
- 6. What is your provisioning process for manufacturing 5,000 units?
- 7. How does the device behave after 48 hours with no connectivity?
- 8. Show me your factory test fixture from a previous project
Certification and compliance checks
- 9. Which certifications did your last product need (FCC/CE/BIS/BQB) and how long did they take?
- 10. Have you failed a pre-compliance scan? What did you change?
Vendors who have really been through certification talk about failed pre-scans matter-of-factly. Vendors who have not will promise 4-week certifications — reality is 6–12 weeks per mark.
Business-model checks
- 11. What does per-unit cost look like at 100 / 1,000 / 10,000 units?
- 12. Who owns the design files, firmware source and cloud code? (Answer must be: you)
Why this matters more in India right now
With electronics manufacturing booming across Noida, Sriperumbudur and Pune, more companies are building products locally — and discovering that hardware mistakes cost 10x software mistakes because they are welded into physical inventory. An hour of hard questions saves lakhs in re-spins.
Ask us these questions
TechNexusGen has shipped 50,000+ units across NFC, BLE and industrial RFID — and we enjoy answering all twelve. Consultations start at just $1.
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