Launching a Product - Is There A Market For My Product?

Hello, my name is Ian Peterman. I'm CEO and founder of the Peterman Design Firm, and today I want to talk about market for products, making sure that there is a market. It's one of the questions that I get from inventors a lot, and, and even companies, they always ask this question. Is there a market for my product? And there's a few steps that we can walk through to determine, is there a market? What can it do? What is possible? And should you move forward with it whether there's a market or not? So first, I want to talk about— I'm going to talk about what is a market, what kind of market research you can do in order to Figure out what the market looks like for your specific product, testing, and then of course going over some risks that you should be aware of when going through this process. So first, what is a market? A market is any segment that can be defined for a product. So, you know, outdoor equipment is a market. Outdoor camping gear is an even more specific market, and you can get down as, as much as you want. And this is where niches— and/or niches, depending on how you want to say it— but that is where a market is. A market is also the people. So you can define it both in where an object is used, where the product is used. So a market would be the United States or North America or Europe or Asia or China or Colombia, whatever that is. So you have a geographical, and these are all the metrics you can, and you add them all together. And so you have location, you have the person, the type of people that use it. And then you also have what it actually does, you know, which vertical, so to speak, that it falls into, whether it's a sports product, whether it's a consumer electronic, and then it all just narrows down from there. So You really want to be able to define as much as possible what the market is that you're going to look at, because if you look really broadly, it's going to be really hard to identify where it's going to fall in. So you want to be able to go down really deep as far as specifically where does the product fit, what is that market. Second, I want to talk about market research. So market research, you want to make sure that you are understanding the market, right? We just talked about what a market is. You want to know exactly where your product is fitting as deeply as you can, down to, you know, really specific things like even city level or neighborhood level of where a product is going to likely be used. Is it going to be something really specific? You know, if it's a camping, camping piece of equipment, for example, does it apply to only people that are tent camping or RV or trailers or tent trailers? You want to get as narrow as possible so that you can really talk to the people that actually know or would use or be impacted by your product and have your the problem that you're specifically solving. So one of the first places you wanna potentially talk to, especially if you're a startup or inventor, but even people at big companies do this as well, is talking to friends, family, coworkers, people in your close-ish vicinity that you can talk to easily and just start getting a feel of, What about this product? What about this idea? Do you have this problem? And start identifying who is going to be really impacted or interested in the product. And you may find that you talk to people that you would— you may think that they wouldn't be interested, but maybe they are. Maybe they have a different use for your product that, you know, you're thinking of it in one way, but they would see that idea and go, oh, well, I could use that over here. And so that can help you figure out and so where it possibly could be used. And the bigger version of that is, of course, if you have the funds and if you have the resources, then doing actual studies, bringing in groups of people, bringing in larger groups, more diverse groups, and then slowly filtering down to identify. And you can do that, but it's always fine to start with just friends and family. That's where a lot of inventors start to validate that there is a market for their invention. Another area is start, start asking people, you know, do they experience the problem it solves? So sometimes it's not even about, you know, hey, I have this product idea, can— does, does this solve something for you, or does this seem interesting? One of the other approaches that is really important is just asking people if they experience a problem that your product solves. So that's just an easy question. Hey, do you have this problem or have you experienced this problem? Because that allows you to approach this question of market research a little bit differently where you're not providing a solution first. You're actually asking a little bit more of an open-ended question where you can get more feedback In some ways, it's not directly about your invention, but it is about the problem that you're trying to solve. And so you want to make sure that you have this approach as well. So both asking, you know, hey, I have this idea, what do you think? Does this solve, you know, does this solve the problem that I'm saying? I say this solves X problem. Do you think it solves X problem? Does that seem like a solution? And approaching it from that way, but also this approach of Okay, do you have this problem? Have you experienced it? You know, how often do you experience it? And then you can ask those kinds of questions. How often is it, you know, a really terrible experience or is it okay? Is it, you know, this problem a work-stopping, life-stopping, extremely frustrating problem or is it more of a nuisance? It's just, ah, it's a little annoying but it's really easy to work around and here's my workaround. And that will give you an idea of, you know, the market demand, so to speak. Okay, well, there's a problem here. This product solves a problem, but nobody's really deeply impacted. Nobody's impacted enough that they are like, oh, I would buy a product to solve it, definitely. That's like, that's an absolute. And they're more of, well, like, I have other easy solutions. So then you might want to figure out a different approach or see how you can improve it even more to the point where it would be worth it, or you might find Wow, everybody has said that, oh, if you could solve this, I would buy a product to solve this problem any day of the week. If I just take my money right now, I want this problem solved. It's terrible. It's frustrating. It's something I want gone. I never want to experience that problem again in my life. And that would give you a very strong indicator that there is a market. People are willing to pay to solve that problem. So, and that's part of what market research is, is identifying Not only where and how and who, but how much of a need there is. Because while you may solve a problem that is, you know, really bad for a couple people, if the percentage is really low and very few people actually want to spend money on it, then you don't really have a market. You have a potential market if you can make something cheap enough, maybe, but that's not a strong enough market to really want to develop your Of course, the other thing that you can do in getting market research is working with an agency, and I mentioned that just because if you are going to talk to one— talk to an agency about doing this kind of market research, you want to be able to point out and make sure that they, when they're talking to you, talk about this dual approach of looking at the problem and looking at the people and the product and approaching it from a complete market analysis. It's not just, oh yeah, there's a problem out there and there's a bunch of people that have that problem, so we're just going to assume that they'll all buy. You want to make sure that when you work with an agency or you hire your own marketer, whatever that looks like, you want to make sure that they're going to do the research in a way that gives you the answers that actually tell you the market, the market size, the market value, and how quickly it's going to pick up. Is it something that's really popular, a really big problem? That people will go, oh yeah, we'll buy it immediately, and you know it'll spool up quickly, or if it's something that you have to show people a little bit more, it's not— it's going to take a little more selling in order to get the product launched. So those are things you want to take care of and make sure that you have in your market research. Next thing, third thing that I want to talk about is testing it. So market research is great. You can even have all the documentation, it all looks good on paper, But when you're trying to make sure that you have a market for your product, sometimes things are just not quite as cut and dry as, yes, there's a market and it's, you know, perfectly fitted, it's going to work great. We know based on all this research that, yeah, it's going to be great and you'll be successful and there's need for it and market will be able to take the price that is required to launch the product. Or not, right? Sometimes that yes or no is great, but there's a lot of gray space. And so one of the things that people do is, all right, I have a product, done the research, it's in that gray space, just test it. So there's a lot of ways to test it. There's going out, great processes, basically running ads and having a landing page and getting people's input and just putting out, you know, putting the idea out there and saying, okay, well, here's a product. Would you be interested in buying it? Would you want to improve it? So you can do campaigns that are a little more inclusive, a little more involved in terms of a really broad range. So I've seen companies spend a ton of money on advertising just to get people's input and thoughts and see if it's something that people are willing to click on. If nobody is searching for it and nobody's clicking on it and it doesn't, nothing moves, then you know there's probably not gonna be anybody actually buying because no one's even clicking on it. No one's checking it out, no one's looking at it on social media, things like that. The other way is to do true presales is something like a crowdfunding campaign where you do get it, you develop it to the point where you are ready for production, but you're not there. And you just put it out there. You put it to the market to see how the market responds without, you know, the other huge investment of actually producing it quite yet. And obviously, if it, if it doesn't do well, then you know, and you don't have to expend that additional money in actually producing it. You just got to the point where it's enough done that you can show the market and The people will either buy it or they won't buy it, and that'll tell you what to do. Now, fourth thing that I want to talk about are risks in doing this. So one of the risks is that market research, while it's good, it doesn't always necessarily tell the whole story. And if you're launching something that doesn't exist in the market, you know, so like the example that people often give is when smartphones started coming out. If anybody had actually done market research on people, they wouldn't have necessarily said they wanted a smartphone. They would have said that they wanted, you know, possibly a phone that was lighter or had longer battery or, you know, different things like that. Not necessarily, I want a touchscreen that gives me access to basically a small computer in my pocket. So it doesn't always line up, and it doesn't always mean that your product isn't gonna do well. And sometimes it's just because if there is no market existing, then no market research can really tell you how the market's gonna respond. The most you can do is get groups of people, run run studies and give them the actual product and be like, hey, what do you think about this? And see how they react. But that can still be a little bit unsure because you, until you really test it and put it out there, you may not know exactly how well the market's going to do. So one of the risks, so that's one of the risks is just market research is great to do. It is highly valuable, but it should never be the end-all be-all for especially new technology that hasn't been in the market before, that is creating products that never could have existed before. And you want to be able to, you know, those kinds of products, you probably want to push them and just test them. You know, do the market research, get an idea if there's any interest, and then test it. There's always a risk too with testing is that you just may not be in front of the right people. It may be a little bit off in marketing time. So there's, there's things to keep in mind that your market research is great, testing it in the market is great. Sometimes you have to just launch it and it may take you 2 years, it may take you 5 years. I've known of companies and worked with companies that have taken 5+ years to really take off. And so you have to be aware of that and that markets change over time. You know, there's demand of one thing goes up, demand of another thing goes down, and that shifting— there's always some shift. So that's why people that have put out a product, sometimes it takes a couple years and then all of a sudden they're really successful and their product is being bought and the market is there and they were just sitting there kind of biding their time basically. So in answering the question, is there a market for my product, we focus a lot on the whole, well, is it ready now? What can we do? What does it look like right now? What does it look like based on the past? And you want to make sure that you're aware that the market will change. Things will shift. And so one of the other questions that is really important with this that you should ask is, right now the right time? Or is it— does it look like a market, that market will be growing, or it will be in a place in 6 months, 18 months, 3 years, whatever that is, possibly be a better point then? And then decide, well, do you want to launch now and just sit around, or do you want to wait? And launch when it's in a different position in the market. So that's something to be aware of and think about while you're doing this exercise of, is there a market for my product? 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 wanna 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.