Launching a Product - How to Build a Product by Solving an Existing Problem

Hello, my name is Ian Peterman. I'm CEO and founder of Peterman Design Firm, and today I'm going to talk about how to build a product by solving an existing problem. So this isn't solving a potential problem, it's not solving a really Well, unknown problem. It's solving something that you will have easy and good solid feedback. You can easily validate it. And this is typically what the inventor type of person will do, is solving an existing problem. It's the ideas that people have every day that they go through some action and they experience an issue, they experience a problem. And they're trying to figure out how to solve that. So with this, there's 5 steps that I want to go over: prototyping, sharing your idea, getting feedback on your actual idea, refining it, getting a manufacturer, and then launching. Now, this is a little bit of a brief process, and it is that way because this is how you can quickly solve an existing problem and get a product to market and get your invention to that level where you can then start really growing it or even selling it. So to start with, prototyping your idea. So once you've identified an existing problem, you know it's there, you know, you've experienced it, or enough people have said something about it, you now have this idea to solve it. You want to prototype it. At this point, prototyping should be something that is really quick, nothing really complicated, just a, what we call, proof concept. Make a prototype that can show someone who has this problem what your solution is, how it works, what it does, and if at all possible, make it so that they can actually experience it. So make it a functioning— it doesn't have to look pretty, but make it a functioning prototype. Second step is share your idea for feedback. Now, sometimes you, you want to have NDAs in place. Those can be a really good idea. You may want to take other considerations such as getting provisional patent or starting patenting process. But you absolutely want to get feedback because it's an existing problem and it's one that you hopefully know people or can easily get ahold of people who experience this problem. This is a great place for you to get really quick feedback, prototype it, get some feedback, and you'll end up looping that a few times. But really the key part is get your idea, share your idea, and you don't have to necessarily show them the final product. You can just say, here's, you know, this is the problem. Do you have it? If yes, then, you know, what do you think about this idea? And what do you think about this? And keeping it a little bit more vague. So you can do that at the very early point before you are comfortable sharing the idea. But that's a good way to allow you to get the feedback quickly. And because it's an existing problem, it's going to be a lot easier to find people who have that problem, can answer that question. Even going on places, forums online and things like that, can be a great place to start building feedback. And that's actually a place, in a way, that I've known some very successful companies to come out of. I actually worked with one called Barefoot Sound that He literally— the owner literally started by answering people's questions and refining basically his idea for a studio monitor while interacting with people on online forums about sound booths and recording equipment and things like that. And he launched his product, his first product, by actually selling it on those through getting feedback like this. So this process absolutely works. They're a multimillion-dollar company now. They're really well known. They've launched quite a few products. I've designed a lot of them, and it's very successful. So this is a model that will work really well in this whole getting feedback. Once you start getting that feedback, we're gonna— we start step 3, refine the idea. So now that you're getting feedback, you want to be prototyping, getting feedback, sharing ideas, getting feedback. And you can do that without giving away all the secret sauce, all the actual patentable things. You can not explain how it does what it does, but just show them what it does. And that can help keep you a little bit more protected. You know, you don't have to— if it's an electronic product, you could do a bunch of coding on the back end and not share the code at all with anybody, but just show them, oh, this is what it's gonna look like, this is what it can do. And that's pretty normal. Like, you can't— an idea is just an idea, and until it's a validated solution to a problem, its value is not as big as we all hope that our own ideas are. Next step, step number 4, is find a manufacturer. So once you've refined that idea, you have things, you know, put together, you want to find a manufacturer. You want to find someone that can do a final prototyping and then actual production prototype and then production. And ideally one place that can do all of it, especially if you're an inventor and you don't have the overhead to pay someone to manage all of the different vendors that you might need. Finding a good manufacturing partner is going to help streamline this and make it easier for you to get this product to market. There's a whole lot to do with manufacturers and sourcing the right one and finding the right partner, but basically less vendors are better. Try to find one that can do the product, If there's packaging that needs to be done, find one that can do the packaging, or if they have a partner company that does manufacturing, things like that will really help this work really quickly and really smoothly for you. The last step 5, of course, is launch the product. So this is where marketing and going back to all the people that gave you feedback, you know have the problem, liked your solution, you can, you can work with them to help spread the word, get people to know that your product is launching. They can get, you know, you can even give them the product for free and have them become brand ambassadors for your product in the kind of way that you can only have when you solve somebody's problem with a product and then They're really grateful and they really are happy that they have this problem solved for them. And so then they go tell everybody they know that might have that problem or may not, that this problem has been solved. Whatever your product does, whatever problem it solves, they will be the ones that will shout it from the rooftops, tell everyone they know, this is a problem I have, this is a product I got, it's great. And because they've already given all the feedback, You know that that product is going to work really well for them. And so you can leverage that, and you can also use every other marketing under the sun as well for launching your product. As just a kind of final note, I outlined all this as a, you know, prototyping it, sharing your idea, getting feedback, refining it, finding the manufacturer, and launching. As if you were just doing this by yourself. You can, of course, depending on the expertise required, you may need to hire someone. You may need to bring in a firm. You can work with someone to do the whole process for you. But these are the steps. These are the general high-level steps that you will want to take to solving an existing problem. And if you are tight on budget, I highly recommend But until you start looking for a manufacturer, you can do it by yourself. You can walk through that process. What almost every inventor that I've worked with that has bootstrapped, they've done steps 1 through 3, they've all by themselves, and it's until they get to the manufacturer part that they go, okay, well, now I need a designer to make sure that they capture my idea properly and document it properly so that a manufacturer can make it. And I need a manufacturer that has the machines that can do it all, be able to build the actual products for me. And then marketing, marketing can be its own thing sometimes. And so that is also an area where bringing in outside help becomes pretty typical. Now, of course, you can go the route of manufacturing it yourself, make it by hand. build it. Um, example, Barefoot Sound. He started by hand building his monitors, which sold. They work perfectly. They, they were great, but he built them literally in his garage. So you can do that. You can build it yourself, get raw materials, and just make it happen. And that is completely valid. And then you can, as you grow— like, I, I came into Barefoot Sound much Much later, they were in production. They were wanting to expand their product line, things like that, redesign, update, make manufacturing easier. So these are all steps that you can do if, depending on how dedicated you are and how much time you have. And if you are working on a tight budget, then do as much of it you can yourself.

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