Launching a Product - How to bring a product to market for less than $5,000?

Hello everyone, I'm Ian Peterman, and today on this episode I'm going to answer the question, how to bring a product to market for less than $5,000. Now, before we get into that, obviously there's gonna be some rules restrictions on which products you can do for under $5,000, but it is entirely possible to launch a product to market for less than $5,000. You're probably not gonna launch a new electric car for that, or, you know, a rocket for that much, unless it's a really small rocket, but it's entirely possible and you can absolutely make this happen. So let's dive in. First thing that you want to do is to pick a product that has 2 parts or less. Now, the perfect product in the world in terms of simplicity and ability to go to market quickly is the single-part product. So this is something like, you know, those keycard-sized tools that has, you know, a couple of wrench sizes on it and a bottle opener. And has a 3-inch ruler on one side. That's a single part. It's stamped once, maybe has a couple processes done to polish it up, maybe add some black inking on it, maybe mill in the letters. But in general, that's a very quick, very easy, very cheap to make product that requires no complicated tooling. It doesn't require a a huge amount of manufacturing to make it. It also doesn't require huge molds or an assembly process at all. So when you have one-part product, no assembly, there's no assembly cost whatsoever in it, and that always will help your bottom line. So absolutely, number one, pick a product with 2 parts or less, 2 being maximum. Don't go over 2. It starts to get more complicated from there. Second thing to keep in mind, and you definitely need to follow if you're going to be launching for under $5,000, is minimal packaging. This means off-shelf packaging or none at all. You want something that is really cheap. You want something that's not going to take a lot of space. It's not going to weigh a whole bunch to add weight to your shipping, and you definitely want something that is You know, going to be one piece. So literally cellophane bag or something like that where, you know, wrap it in paper is something that's going to be very cheap, not take very much, zero to very little customization. You know, at most print a sticker, nothing else. You know, a sticker you can get for a penny or less depending on how many you're ordering. So That's an option, but you want to keep it minimal at pretty much any cost. So this also means that you're going to, you know, an example of the pocket tool, you want something durable that you don't need to have a huge amount of packaging around in order to protect it while shipping. Third thing, get your friends and family to sell the product for you. Get people to help you. Take a product to market? Well, part of that is sales and marketing and getting the word out there. And so recruiting your friends, getting people you know to help, you know, share it on social media or tell people about it, or ask if they have any contacts or friends at stores and other places that might be able to pick it up, especially being able to get it into smaller mom-and-pop stores where there isn't a huge process and a lot of paperwork and time and really large minimum order requests and requirements, uh, in order to get into like larger stores. So you definitely probably aren't going to get into Walmart for less than $5,000, but you could absolutely get into a local store that would be able to say yes on the spot, not require a huge amount of product to be put in your store to start selling, and you can start getting that sales out there. So Really trying to find resources that will help get your product in front of the right people for cheap to nothing will help make this budget possible. Next thing is put out valuable content for free. Content marketing, it is a strategy. People are paid every single day to do this. It is very successful and Because of everything that's out there, YouTube is free to put your content out on there. So is Facebook and Twitter and every social media platform. You can be putting content out there for free to your readers, to your viewers, you know, to your listeners. You can put a podcast out for free. Put it out there, get it out there, get content out there that provides value and positions you as an expert. And shows why your product is great. And also, like I said at the very beginning, valuable content to them, whether it's tips and tricks, whether it's just information about how you launched the product and your process and what it was like for you, telling your story, whatever that is, make sure there's valuable content and put it out there and get in front of as many people as you possibly can. Of course, that'll take time, but we didn't say how long this was going to take. We just said that we're getting to market for less than $5,000. 5th option here that we need to take a look at is using a crowdfunding platform. Now, use these properly. Make sure that you have manufacturing ready. Make sure that your product is prototyped and that you can actually produce the product that you say you're going to produce And you can do it in the timeline that you are saying you can. You want to avoid being one of those failed launches where you get a lot of money but you can't deliver and the money goes back. So make sure that you use it properly. Properly used crowdfunding platforms, however, are a huge benefit to you. While you will definitely have to spend as much time as possible telling people to share your Kickstarter, telling people about it, getting information on it, making sure that people see your crowdfunding campaign. It is a great platform because it allows you to do every step up until production. So that means you can save on tooling, you can save on, you know, injection mold tooling. Let's say you're a one-part product, but it is— you do want it to have injection molding as a process because that's going to create a better product. Things like that, you can save those higher costs for actually producing it, for actually making packaging. So you can even kind of take a step back in steps 1 and 2, looking at packaging and actual part count of products. You can do a little bit more complicated product, or you can do a little bit nicer packaging and have those be at different points even of a crowdfunding campaign. You hit a certain benchmark and you'll add that in because you'll have the cash flow and the cash to actually afford to do that. So using those as a really strategic platform and being really smart in how you get the word out and making sure that you can get as many people there as possible can allow crowdfunding to let you launch products very cheaply. Last, number 6, use that $5,000 To get investors or invest that money in something else and wait for it to grow. So obviously the benefit of taking that $5,000 and working with someone to get funding or to use it to build a pitch deck and put everything together to get funding, that will allow you to kind of leapfrog this $5,000 limit and You know, say you take your $5,000 and you're able to use that money to buy and get everything together that you need in order to go get a $50,000 investment. Well, now you're able to work with $50,000 to launch your product. And so there's a lot of platforms out there that'll help you get in front of investors. Angel investors is definitely what you want to be looking at. And there's a whole— this is gonna be a whole conversation at another time that I'll dive into, you know, how how investors work at this level and where, you know, if you really are bootstrapping like this, what are some smart options to investment and what you might want to look for. And, you know, of course you can always just take that money, invest it in something really safe, let it grow for, you know, however many years it takes you to get enough money, and you'll eventually have more than $5,000 and you can launch a product for more than that. But if you're wanting to launch a product for less than $5,000, these are things you got to keep in mind. And if you do all of these, you may find yourself in a place where you can actually launch a product into the market for less than $5,000. 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.