Positioning Innovation for an Old-School Industry: How Nexxiot Sold IoT to a Risk-Averse Market

In the SaaS and tech world, launching a breakthrough product is hard enough. But when your target industry hasn’t significantly changed in over a century — and doesn’t believe it needs to — success depends on more than just great technology.

Daniel MacGregor, cofounder of Nexxiot, faced exactly that challenge. His company’s hardware-enabled SaaS platform tracks cargo assets in real time, with the potential to save billions in lost efficiency and hit a lofty sustainability goal: reduce global CO₂ cargo emissions by 5%.

The technology worked. The challenge? Positioning it so a tradition-bound industry — rail freight and logistics — would believe in it, invest in it, and integrate it.

Lesson 1: Lead With the Buyer’s Blind Spot

MacGregor knew the market didn’t need another “IoT device.” They needed a solution to a business pain they didn’t fully see:

• 40% of shipping containers on roads are empty because of inefficiencies in asset utilization.

• Accidents and damage often led to finger-pointing and court battles because no one had a single source of truth.

Instead of selling features (“energy harvesting,” “mesh networks”), Nexxiot’s positioning started with “We give you the truth about your assets — in real time — so you can cut waste, reduce claims, and meet sustainability goals.”

Buyer-Centric Insight: Lead with the expensive problem your buyers didn’t know they had, not with your feature list.

Lesson 2: Lower the Adoption Risk

In a market where big capital investments stall deals, Nexxiot packaged hardware, connectivity, and the cloud platform into one subscription.

• No upfront CapEx.

• Customers start seeing ROI from day one of deployment.

• The complexity of device management, connectivity contracts, and data processing was invisible to the buyer.

Buyer-Centric Insight: The fastest way to “yes” is removing every point of buyer friction — including how they buy and budget.

Lesson 3: Translate Tech into Business Value

Early on, Nexxiot sold data. Buyers didn’t know what to do with it.

So they evolved to deliver meaning from the data — not just dashboards, but actionable insights:

• Predictive maintenance from shock-event data.

• Route optimization to avoid wasted mileage.

• Automated claims support with impact detection patterns.

Buyer-Centric Insight: In emerging tech markets, buyers don’t want “raw capabilities.” They want ready-made value that speaks their operational language.

Lesson 4: Position as a Market Maker, Not a Vendor

MacGregor’s team didn’t just talk about IoT — they moderated industry panels, drove conversations about the “digital twin” future, and positioned Nexxiot as the company defining the next era of logistics.

That thought leadership made them the safe choice in a risky market — even for companies that had never bought technology like this before.

Buyer-Centric Insight: In complex, high-change markets, your positioning must make you the obvious future, not just “one of many” options.

Key Takeaways for SaaS & Tech Founders

1. Identify and own the buyer’s blind spot. If they don’t see the problem, they won’t see the need for your product.

2. De-risk adoption. Remove financial, operational, and cultural barriers to saying “yes.”

3. Package meaning, not just capability. Buyers want decisions, not data.

4. Lead the market narrative. Thought leadership isn’t fluff — it’s market conditioning.

Why this matters for your SaaS or tech company: Even world-changing innovation can fail in a market that isn’t ready for it. Nexxiot’s success came from understanding how to meet the buyer where they were — and move them forward one value-proof step at a time. That’s the heart of buyer-centric positioning, and it’s a discipline every tech founder should master before scaling.