Launching a Product - Can I launch a product as one person?

Hello, my name is Ian Peterman. I'm CEO and founder of Peterman Design Firm, and on today's episode about launching a product, I want to talk about and answer the question, can I launch a product as one person? So I get asked this by a Inventors and people that are really wanting to bootstrap or have to bootstrap in the beginning, at least, you know, they ask, can I actually do this? Is it possible for me to do this as one person? You know, I don't have a business partner. I don't have somebody else to really help. I'm just going to be doing this on my own. And it's something that has come up before. And so I wanted to just talk about a little bit and go over, you know, is it possible? Resources that you'll need, some things to avoid, and is it a good idea? First, is it possible? Can you actually launch a product as one person? The answer is absolutely yes. Uh, it really depends, of course, on your skills, the product that's being made, um, what your market is, how you're gonna sell the product. Because when I think, think about launching a product, I don't think about just, oh, I developed it and I made some and I put up a little website and I'm not selling. I think of it as going all the way through, you're selling product, you've launched it successfully, because that's really what we want. We don't want to just put it out there and have it sit there. So when you're thinking about all the things that go into it, that means you're going to have to cover areas of design, potentially engineering, software and programming depending on your product, as well as marketing. And branding and sales. And so there's a lot of areas to touch on. And if you're one of those people that either has industry experience like myself, I've worked in most of those areas on different products and I've been consulting and I have a team behind me now that we do, we can do all of those things, then yeah, you can, you can definitely, if you've gotten that experience, I could easily step off and launch a product of my own. That would definitely be something I could do. Now, it's going to take me longer. So it is possible. It is going to take me longer to do by myself. It's going to maybe potentially cost more, potentially cost less. Depends on, on kind of what happens and how many mistakes I make on the way. And if you're one of those people that is really self-learning, teach yourself, really go for the DIY type, then And you're willing to learn everything, then absolutely, you can. It is totally possible for you to learn everything you need to, to launch your own product. And if that's what you want to do, do it. If it's not what you want to do, go work at another job, save up money, and pay somebody else to do all those different areas for you, because it's going to be a journey. It's going to take a lot of time as one person doing everything involved with the product launch. It's going to take a lot of time. And, you know, I keep saying that because people think, oh, well, I'll just do it myself and I can cut out all the, all the extra stuff that needs to be done. And in reality, you can cut some things, but if there's a learning curve to anything, it's going to make things take longer. And so you got to make sure that you, you know, and you're okay with that. If you have a time crunch, then, you know, maybe there's parts that you can do and parts that you should hire out. The second thing is resources you need. So the resources that you're going to need, even if you're doing it all yourself, you're still going to need a way to sell it. So an e-commerce platform, something like that, some web presence ideally. You're going to need somebody that can physically make it, or you're gonna need to have the tools to make it yourself. So there's Definitely people hand-make their own products to start with. I told you I worked with Barefoot Sound, and founder Thomas Barefoot built his speaker by hand in the beginning. So you can do it by hand, but he didn't literally just use his hands to shape it. He had to have all the right tools. So you want to make sure that you have the tools to make it, or you have, you know, even if it's just a small little 2-person machine shop or something like that that can produce the parts for you, you are going to need the production portion of it. They're going to need resources in terms of design tools. So you can't just sketch everything with pencil and paper. It'd be great if we could do that more, but reality is you're going to need to create digital assets. You're going to need to create drawings. You're going to need to create documentation. So you're going to need those tools and resources. You'll also, of course, need money. So some products are gonna be really cheap to do. You'll be able to do it for not very much. Others, you're gonna need thousands, tens of thousands, even if you're doing it yourself and you're doing all the human work of a project, you're still going to need to spend a lot of money potentially on prototypes and production and, you know, You're gonna have to host a website somewhere, so hopefully that's not too much of a cost, but there's those expenses that you are just not going to be able to get around spending, so you do need to make sure that you have a budget in order to do it properly. So third thing is things to avoid. Now, if you're doing it all yourself, you want to avoid overwhelming yourself. You need to break it up into very clear stages and steps. Otherwise, you will most likely never complete it. So organization, you need that in order to avoid overwhelm. If you try to do steps 1 through 3 that, you know, I and my team, we can definitely do, but that's because we're a team of people. You need to avoid doing too many things at once, and you need to make sure that you are doing everything step by step. You also should avoid doing things that— as much as you may want to do all your own legal work, be aware of the areas where you do not have enough knowledge to do it right in a way that will ensure your future success. So if there is legal compliance with your product, don't do it yourself. You can But I'm going to recommend here you don't do it. I would avoid doing any legal compliance unless you're a lawyer or you understand the laws around it because you've worked in that field for a long time. So avoid anything where there could be potential downside down the road that you could avoid now, because as much as you may want to do it, the potential cost— and I've seen it happen before— People just developing a product and they, they get into it and they do it, and then regulation— they figure out about regulation and it becomes very painful to adjust a product at that point. So avoid, avoid doing everything if you aren't an expert at everything. So be aware, just be aware of areas where you should not be the one doing the work. Lastly, is it a good idea? Now, it really depends on the person. Like I started out talking about this, if you're someone who wants to learn every part of it, then this can be a great learning experience. If you're someone who's already been involved in most parts of launching a product, absolutely, you can, you can do it if it's something that doesn't require a huge amount of investment and you have have the right budget, then you can do it yourself as well. If you don't have the time to do everything, if you don't have all the expertise or don't want to learn everything, then it becomes not a good idea. So it's really, it really depends on who you are and what you're trying to achieve and what you're going to consider successful. Because that's one of the hardest things is that if you think one thing is successful and you're not able to achieve it by yourself, you're going to be frustrated. So you want to make sure that you know what you're trying to get out of it and that you're going to be able to get that by doing it yourself. So hopefully this gives you a little bit of a picture how you can do it by yourself. It is possible. Resources you need, a couple things to avoid, and Go out there and do it. If this is if you want to launch a product by yourself, be one of those people. Go do it. Reach for the stars and make it happen. And if not, then make sure you have a good budget. Find someone to help you do it so that you can avoid all the portions that you don't want to deal with. 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.