How to Avoid Common Pitfalls In Your Cat Toy Business!

Hi, I'm Evan Carmichael. Welcome to another edition of Ask Evan. In today's episode, I'm going to answer a question from one of my newsletter readers, Kim, who has a cat toy idea and wanted to find out how she can sell to the major cat toy manufacturers or companies to help them launch her company. So she wanted my advice on how to do it. She thinks she has the next great cat toy and wanted some help on how to make this company take off. So Kim, thanks for the question. A couple things for you in terms of getting on the radar of a lot of these bigger companies who are in your market. The two things I would try to do: one is look if they have demo days. And not all companies will have this, but a lot of them will. Well, they're looking for new suppliers and they have a demo day that they'll They'll have everybody come in to a certain location, could be their office, it could be a hotel room, and you pitch your idea, you bring your product, and you have 5 minutes to talk about what it is you're doing and why they should partner up with you. So that I would look at to see and try to get on their screen if they do have demo days. If they don't, then you can start just contacting individuals at the company and try to find somebody who's in procurement or is on the purchasing side. A website that you can use is Jigsaw, and there is, you know, lists of different people who are different companies. You can search by company name and by position, find the person. You pay, I think, 50 cents a lead to get the telephone number and email address, and you can just start reaching out to some of these people. In terms of what they're gonna look for, it's a good idea to have some momentum built up. You don't— I wouldn't recommend just going in cold, not having anything beyond just an idea, but try to build up some momentum to give you some extra leverage, and they're more willing to, you listen to you and take you seriously. So you want to try to build up as much momentum as you can. What I would try to do is produce some of this product, try to get it in stores, even local areas, show that it can sell, right? Show that people are willing to buy it, even on a small scale. Just having a little bit of sales will separate you from, you know, 90% of the other entrepreneurs who are pitching who just have an idea. So that's what you want to do. We said from the venture capital world that I come from Most entrepreneurs that came and pitched us never had any sales. They just had a business plan idea. And the ones who had sales, immediately, you know, our ears perked up and we got a little bit excited because if you can show you can make even a little bit of sales, it separates you from almost everybody else. So try to get a little bit of sales going on, even if it's only in your local area. Uh, 2 is try to build up momentum from there. So as an example, my website, we have almost 7,000 people who write for my website. And when we first started, it was a bit of a struggle to get people to want to contribute content. And I had a goal of wanting Donald Trump to be on my website. And, you know, he was one of the biggest names in entrepreneurship, but I didn't go straight to Donald Trump. What I did was I started on a smaller scale. So I started local here in Toronto and got people who I knew who were business coaches, marketing experts to contribute content, and then built up from there, showed that we were able to get some traffic, able to build up you know, some business benefits for them to be a part of it. And then started going after bigger name people. So we got Guy Kawasaki and Seth Godin involved, Tom Peters, and we just started building up from there. And by the time we were ready to go after Donald Trump, we had lots of traffic, lots of authors, we had some big name authors, and so he was, you know, able to come on board and say yes, because we had all this momentum built up behind us. So, that's what you want to do as well. You know, you have that vision to go after the big company, but start on a smaller scale, show that your product works, is successful, people love it, and you're able to build up from there. And it's going to be hard for those big companies to ignore you because you've had a track record of success. The next thing I do to build momentum is try to get some viral marketing going. Especially with cats, I would try to get a YouTube campaign going. So have some cats, you say your cat toy is the best thing ever, and the cats love playing with it, you know, for hours on end. So film cute cats playing with your toy and turn it into a YouTube video. And get people to watch it and look at it, and again, if you can get a lot of views on your videos, then the companies will take notice. And you have these videos with tons of views. And cat videos tend to do well on YouTube, so if you have, especially if you have really cute cats. The production quality doesn't have to be fantastic. You can do it yourself on a camcorder, put some music on there, and just try to build up a little bit of viral marketing as well. And then the last thing in terms of building up momentum is try to get some advisors. So the companies might look at you and say, okay, one-person show, maybe hasn't done anything entrepreneurial before. So that's a risk. But if you can get some advisors who have some business experience, who can be a part of your company, not in a formal way, but just as an advisor, then that adds a little bit more credibility to your company, and again increases the chance that they're gonna want to work with you and say yes. Finally, in terms of what they'll need to, you know, make that deal happen from a structural point of view, I would make sure that you're a corporation. So I don't know what your legal setup is, but I would set up as a corporation and not a sole proprietor. Because, you know, you look like a really amateur company if you're a sole proprietor instead of a corporation. So make sure you get your legal structure right. And then for the manufacturing, if you are planning on doing it yourself, then I'd make sure that you have the ability to scale. That's going to be a question that they'll have, you know, if they're not going to make it themselves, if they're relying on you to manufacture, then they're going to see that you have the capabilities to make not, you know, 100 of these things, but a million of these things. How are you going to go from 100 to a million? So you want to make sure you have some of those really relationships lined up or some ideas at least on how to do it. So hopefully that helped. A lot of questions and a lot of answers there for you. Hopefully there's some nuggets of wisdom in there you can use to grow your business. It's very exciting. Uh, if you guys liked the video, for those watching, please give it a thumbs up below. Makes me want to make more of these videos for you guys. And if you have a question or if you want to leave a comment to share your experiences, please leave it in the comment section below and we'll see you on the next episode.