Possible Business Venture

gamefuck · 2015-10-29T03:14:47+00:00

Industrial Designer here. I will give you the low down of what needs to be done to get your product to market.

1) Design the Product

You need to realise your product, and test it, before you even think of selling it. You need a full form resolution (what it looks like) ergonomics (screen position, hand holds, dimensions etc). It's electronic? Buy a DIY electronics kit like arduino and actually make it work. This process, if you work really hard, will probably take a month.

2) Test the Product

You should have a functioning prototype by now. Now it's time to test it, use it yourself for a week. Find things you don't like about it, things that could be improved. Now give it to a friend and see what they think of it (they probs wont like it, just ignore them and look for the practical advice) Take what you've learnt and adapt the product to meet these new requirments.

3) Enlist an electrical engineer to make your IC

You now need to turn that arduino DIY model into an intergrated chip, this job goes to an electronics engineer. They will compress your large circuit into something quite small. Also you need to find a place to manufacture more of them.

4) Technical Documentation

Decide what material your product is made out of (probably ABS) so it will be injected moulded. This means you need to split your product in 2 (possibly more depending on complexity of shape) and work out how you will mount all the electronics into it, and then finally how the two join together. They then need to be drawn up into a technical drawing, and probably made in CAD (using solidworks).

5) Manufacture

This is the hardest part and probably the number 1 reason products are hard to launch. You have to find someone to actually make this stuff for you. You already have an IC manufacturer and found a supplier for you electronic components. Now you need to find a reputable company to make your moulds (costs between $15 000 - $120 000 depending on size and complexity) They will most likely be in China. Most people who get custom manufacturing done in China usually need to actually visit the factory for quality control. Visa to mainland china is a lengthy process, your manufacturer will have to invite you into the country, and flights are expensive.

Assuming everything goes smoothly (which it probably wont) the company will have made the moulds and you may have arranged assembly as well, they will start shipping them out to you.

6) Distribution

Slightly easier. Online Store, online marketing, Instagram marketing, facebook ads etc. Basically this is where the hussle comes in to sell your product. I wouldn't recommend going through a larger retailer because they will rip you off big time. You can make a lot of markup on a product, especially if it's one of a kind. Easy to flip a $5 product and sell it for $100.

Conclusion

Ideas are cheap as shit, what you have now is essentially useless. If you really believed in your product you would prototype it/do some independent research to see if it would sell. If so you get a loan and hire an industrial design consultancy to make and prototype the product for you, who will then use their own manufacturing connections to get it made for you.

The whole process would cost anywhere between $30k - $250K and take between 9 - 12 months.

Final Word

Even large companies avoid making their own products these days, insteading buying out of factories and slapping their logo on it. In fact you will find many competiting brands are selling the exact same product from the exact same factory. Pre-bought is the way to go. Find a cheap product already being sold and see if you can modify it slightly to make it better. I'm trying to add a single strap to a product which will make it far more useful for marketing purposes, but even that seems very hard to do.

Thesegates · 2015-10-29T03:01:27+00:00

Okay, so I actually am in the process of creating something and I didn't know what to do either. If this is something "groundbreaking" that you're fearful of someone else stealing the first thing to do is look into intellectual property licenses and once you get started patents.

Anyone who is involved in your project must sign a NDA after that also. This way no one will speak about your product.

Spend a shit load of time on google seeing what is out there. It's possible someone else already created it.

exotictantra · 2015-10-29T06:53:07+00:00

The first step is Validate the need.. don't do anything else..

Find out if there is a real problem that you product solves. Pretend you have this product ready.. now go ask your target customer questions.. Make a landing page and buy FB or Google ads and see how many people are interested.

Check out Steve Blank's free tutorials http://steveblank.com/tag/customer-validation/

Title	Possible Business Venture
Author	RPmighty
Upvotes	2
Comments	11
Date	October 29, 2015 1:59 AM UTC (10 years ago)
Subreddit	Posted in /r/askTRP
Original Link	https://old.reddit.com/r/asktrp/comments/3qnc2d/possible_business_venture/
Archive Link	https://theredarchive.com/r/askTRP/possible-business-venture.155783 https://theredarchive.com/post/155783

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