Launching a Product - 5 questions you should ask yourself before deciding to develop a product

Hello, my name is Ian Peterman and welcome to this episode. I'm gonna be talking about and sharing 5 questions you should ask yourself before deciding to develop a product. Now, before I get into those 5 questions, I want to talk really briefly about just the journey of developing a product and how important it is to make sure that you invest the right time and the right money into an idea and you do things first. So these 5 questions are things that you should absolutely ask yourself before you start developing a product and really investing time and money into You know, there's a lot of people that I've come across that have dived in too quickly and not thought through things and ended up, you know, wasting money on an idea that shouldn't have been spent and not having that money for a later idea. And, you know, it's something I would like to help people avoid and make sure you invest money and time wisely in the best ideas that are really going to help people and give you a return on your investment. I guess that's really one of the things that should happen, is you should put time and effort into developing a product and get a return on that in the form of, you know, you making money and helping people. All right, so the first question that you should ask yourself is, is there a market for this product? Now, that may seem like a hard question that I ask yourself if you haven't done a huge amount of market research before, if you're not a marketer, but it's really pretty easy. Find out if there's other products similar to yours. Look and, you know, just do some Google search. Find any products out there that might be the same, or, you know, not necessarily the same exact same, but similar. Are there products that do similar things, that have similar features? Looking in that way and seeing if there's already existing products that have created a market, that is kind of the first step. And then also wanting to look and see, is it doing well? Are there a bunch of companies doing it? And, you know, getting an idea of pricing. And even if you can do some research yourself and talk to people and ask, you know, have you bought products like this? Do you, do you buy things like this? Is this interesting? To you and getting an idea of is there a market for the product, which is really important. If there isn't one, then your 2 options are don't launch the product at all or make a new market, which we're going to save that for a whole separate video because that is a very different process than trying to enter an existing market. The next question you should ask yourself is number 2. Does this product solve a problem and create value for the user? I know there's kind of 2 questions, but they're really wrapped up together because they're so, so tied and so close. So is your product going— solving a problem? Is it doing something that improves somebody's life? Basically is, is the question that you have to ask. And that's pretty easy. You know, it's asking your friends and family, it's looking at existing products and seeing does it solve— does those features, whether they're, you know, separate features in different products, or whether it's talking to people and saying, hey, do you have this problem? That will tell you does it solve a problem. And of course, this can be something that you, you know, come up with in in your own life. You're like, hey, this is— I have an idea because I have this problem and this product would solve that problem. Great, first part done. Now tied with that, solving a problem is great, but does it create value for the user, right? So maybe the problem that you're looking at is running out of pencil lead in your pencil. Well, would it be worth having a much more expensive pencil that had a lot more lead in it, that was a lot larger in order to work, or, you know, required you to teleport lead instantly into it? Well, probably not. I don't think anybody's going to pay that much more for a pencil, so Is it going to really create value? What is your— what is your problem-solving solution? What does that solution look like, and does it create the value there? Is there a reason for someone to buy it? You know, currently my solution is when I run out of pencil lead, I put more in if it's a mechanical pencil, or I grab another pencil, a new whole pencil, because I used it up. So is there value in trying to invent a new a new pencil that never runs out of lead? Maybe, but the cost probably isn't going to be there. So how does your product add value? And, and start thinking about, is it going to create enough value to be worth someone buying the product? There's lots of really great ideas. I've, I've seen many ideas that solved a problem but they didn't solve a big enough problem that was— and had enough value that caused enough pain to have enough value in fixing to create the value needed for someone to even be looking for or to spend the time and money in purchasing a product to solve that problem. And there's definitely problems out there that I haven't quite hit that point where it's worth it. And some will go away and we'll never, we'll never have products to fix every single little problem because not enough people will agree that that is a problem that is valuable enough to solve and to spend money on a product. Question number 3, who's going to be involved? So you definitely wanna be asking yourself, okay, I have this product idea, who is going to be involved? And you wanna ask that in terms of, you know, just asking yourself, who can I have involved? Who would be, you know, who might be a good resource to be involved? And who do you need to be involved? So first you look at people who can be involved, you know, you're Recruit your friends and family if they're willing participants in helping you, and even if it's for just moral support, that can be hugely beneficial in launching a new product. But, you know, we'll also be looking at who do you need, and this goes for— this goes for companies as well, looking at who's going to be involved, who inside your organization is going to be involved in the project, who needs to be involved, what is the sign-off process. You know, things like that. And if you're starting out looking at who needs to be involved, if you aren't sure or can't figure out, then you probably want to bring in a professional consultant to help assess the product at a level that they can understand and look at your project and say, you're going to need these people and these different expertise involved. In the product to make it successful. And that's, that's something that I've done for, for quite a few people, is, and even companies who aren't quite sure what resources they need to be involved. So asking this question is really important because it will allow you to put together the right team to actually accomplish your product in a successful way and accomplish it and launch it so that you can get a return on your investment. Next question, question number 4: Do I have the resources to make it happen? Now, if you haven't done product development before, if you're completely unfamiliar, then this is going to be a really hard question to answer on your own. You can, you know, do some digging and talk to some people and get some, get some ideas, and you definitely should do that. But it's likely that you will want to talk to, again, a product designer, product consultant, you know, someone like myself. You can talk to me, of course, but anybody that has experience in launching products that would be able to say, this is what it's going to take, this is all the resources you're going to need, and then you being able to ask the question of yourself, okay, well, this is what it's going to take. Do I have it. And you want to make sure that you have the resources or are able to get, you know, somebody else to agree to put in the remainder of the resources, make up the difference between what you have and what you need. And you want to make sure that you know that before you just start jumping in. Of course, there's ways to break out projects, there's ways to, you know, cut costs, save money, and still produce something for Not the full budget. And there's different stages you can break it up into, but being really, really super clear on, do you have the resources to actually pull this project off completely is a really important question that a lot of people don't always ask themselves. They ask the question, oh, do I have some money to start? And that's the wrong question. You want to ask, do I have the resources to make it happen? All the way happen, not partway. You don't want to be one of the many, many people who partway get a project done and then have to stop because they didn't actually put together all the resources they needed to launch the product. Last question, question number 5 that you should ask yourself is, do I have a business? If you don't, you definitely want to have a business. For legal reasons, having some protection is going to be important when launching, especially a product-based company. Product launches, you want to have some buffer between you and the product personally. You also want to have something that can pay for all of the resources they're going to be in, that you can manage it through. And while I've definitely worked with people who don't have businesses, The people that are serious will have a business. So ask yourself, am I serious enough about this to launch a business, to start a business and make this really happen? And if you aren't, then don't, don't put your money into a project that you're not going to be really committed to. Save the money, put it in something else that you will absolutely love. It is important to make sure you only put resources in if you are going to follow through. Otherwise, you will be another person that I'll probably hear some story eventually about how you partially went through and you weren't ready to go through, and then it becomes a really frustrating experience for you because if you're not willing to go all the way through, you're not going to get to the part where you actually get a return on your investment. It's just going to be Oh, I dumped a whole bunch of money into this project and I didn't go anywhere with it. And you don't wanna be there. That's part of why so many products fail is not being in the place where you are willing to actually jump out there and do it and make it happen. And one of those stages is making sure you have a business and making sure you have the right business and that the business side of things are set up to help you grow, to make sure the things are in place to make it easier for you to set everything up to launch product, to launch a new product. You know, if you're moving out of, oh, I make this little thing by hand occasionally, and you wanna launch it as a real product that's produced in larger quantities and really something that's growing, you want to really have growth, you're probably going to want to have a business as a vehicle to help make sure that that is going to be as successful as possible. So I hope that you ask these 5 questions before you start deciding to develop a product. You want to, you want to ask these to make sure that you're in the right place to even begin developing a product. And that you can bring it to a successful launch and enjoy the benefits of having a successful product and not just spend some money and end up with disappointing results. Hey, thanks for watching. We really appreciate our viewers, and if you haven't subscribed yet, please do subscribe to our channel so you can get more great videos like this in your feed. And like the video. If you want to learn more about the Peterman Design Firm, please check us out on our website, petermanfirm.com. You'll find link and information in the description. And of course, we're on all social media as well, so check us out there. All right, thank you. Thank you.