Choosing an industry and creating a product, or Creating an industry and choosing a product

I get new ideas all the time for a product that a consumer can use. Say for example a product like an innovative magnetic levitation bearing. Many industries can use this mechanism in their products they design for consumers. Industries such as wind towers, skateboards, automotive, and many more. As I created it and commercialized my product, I find that it happens to be an inexpensive alternative to the competition. It is more efficient than the competition, it is easy to manufacture, and there are more consumer products than I thought that can use it. This seems simple; let me manufacture as many of these as I possibly can and sell a ton of magnetic levitation bearings.

But is that what is the most innovative thing about my product? The bearing itself?

I dont believe so.

So now we need to take a look at the first few steps of how I commercialized this product. Well... first I designed it on CAD. Then I purchased all the materials I believed would work to make a prototype. I had to keep running back to the store because the first few methods did not work exactly as planned. I felt like I was making bottle openers by the dozens. Then it dawned on me. After some trial and error, I developed a method,.. a tool more like, to create my product. My magnetic levitation bearing was good, but... the tool I created to make the bearing was something out of a rat trap game. It had leavers, pulleys, clamps, presses, heat guns, etc laying on a table. Only I could understand the madness. But it assimilated the pieces just right to build a sell-able product that I was happy with.

After much fiddling with the tool, I had perfected it. I could make my bearing and sell it, and sell it, and sell it.... or.... humm.... I could clean up my rat trap, and sell this tool for a whole lot more money. Maybe I could even license the bearing patent to get royalties off each unit my competition makes after buying my tool. This way instead of multiple competitive companies trying to build a better bearing with their own rat traps, which they would and I'm guessing quickly, I could sell them a tool and sell them the parts and the list of material suppliers they need to be competitive on the market. I might even get a kickback from my material suppliers.

This was just an example, but keep that in mind when you develop a product, maybe you not only created a new product in an existing industry, but maybe you created a whole new industry.

New ideas and the ability to accept "no"

It always cracks me up when someone repeatedly peppers me with a product/service/idea and hits me with the refrain “i won’t take no for an answer” or “would you take no for an answer ?”.  Let me answer that question for you right now.
Hell Yes I take no for an answer. I try to sell good products and services and to have ideas that I hope will be successful. If I am selling any of these to someone and they say no, I will always ask for their objections with something like ” Thank you for taking the time to listen/read. Would you mind sharing with me what you didnt like about the product or why you like the product you chose ? “.  And if I have a good counter to their objection(s), I will let it fly and see what happens.
If they still respond negatively to my efforts. So be it.  At some point, and that point should come quickly, you have to move on.  If you have a good product/service/idea, there will be someone who will understand the value and that will want the product.  If you keep on pushing with someone who obviously does not want the product, for whatever reason you are making multiple mistakes:
1. You are wasting your and the prospects time.  Wasting your time means you are not selling to the next prospect . Always remember what I tell myself :”Every no gets me closer to a yes”.  You have to move on and start communicating with someone you know might buy your product rather than wasting more time with someone you already know won’t buy your product/service/idea
2. The more you push someone who has said no, the more likely you are to appear desperate, and that desperation impacts you brand as a salesperson and the brand of the product.  Just because it worked for Bud Fox doesn’t mean it will work for you. That was a movie.
3. It’s also a sign of fear and laziness. It takes work to find qualified prospects. It also takes courage to overcome the fear of not knowing what will happen next. It is very, very easy to send someone an email every hour or daily.  That is what  a lazy person is going to do.  Spend all of two seconds hitting the resend button. A smart, focused and successful salesperson will gear up and do the homework necessary to find their next customer. That is a sign of confidence . Knowing that you believe so much in what you do, that it is going to be fun and exciting to find your next customer and show off with how amazing your products/service/idea is. If the last person didn’t get it. That is their problem. Not yours.
That is what successful business people do. What do you do ?

Meet Investors, Line up Customers, and Help Others – A Guide to Startup Meetups -- TheStartUpFoundry.com

by Paul Hontz on Jul 29, 2011 • 2:17 pm

I had the privilege of sitting down with my friend Sanjay Parekh (from Startup Riot) to discuss how to get the most of startup events. In this interview we talk about how Sanjay went from being an introvert, to a networking machine. Sanjay discusses how he was able to get his first customer (because of an event for entrepreneurs), how he got press for his startup, and built connections with investors. You can read the highlights below the video.

Guidelines to being a good attendee:

If you see someone at all the events, chances are they don’t have anything of value.
1. Know what people are working on. This lets you figure out how you might be able to help them…

2. Meet new people. It’s not “networking” if you just play on your iPhone the entire time. Be willing to get out of your comfort zone, and meet new people .
3. Be an extrovert. Meetups are designed for extrovert. No one is going to think you’re weird if you go up to someone you don’t know and start talking shop. You’re all part of the club.

How Sanjay used a startup meet up to get his first customer:

1. Show up – Sanjay went to a meet up. You have to get out of the boat so you can walk on water.
2. Have something to talk about when people ask you what you’re working on. Work on your elevator pitch.
3. Get lucky – By luck, Sanjay was seated next to a reporter from Red Herring. This led to an article being written about his startup. There is certainly an element of luck here, but Sanjay was willing to put himself in situations where luck could happen (actually showing up, talking to people, etc…)
4. After a potential customer saw the article, they called Sanjay up and were asking to use their service.

How do you build a relationship with an investor your meet at an event?

Investors don’t invest in people they don’t know. Don’t expect an investor to wip out his checkbook right after you meet them. Instead, try to build a relationship.
1. Talk to them at the event.
2. Send a brief email the day after the event – A couple of sentences reminding them who you are and what you’re working on. Ask for advice
3. Whenever you hit a milestone, let them know. Perhaps you reached a 1,000 signups. Maybe you signed a huge customer. Your goal is to demonstrate progress.
4. If you’re kind, courteous, and working on something they believe could be successful, investors will often try to help you (Even if it’s not a monetary investment). Just remember that they don’t owe you anything.
Sanjay now runs Startup Riot. If you’re in Seattle, Washington on August 24, 2011, Startup Riot is the place to be. I’m planning on attending and would highly recommend you do the same.
For more startup news, follow us on Twitter @startupfoundry, or on Facebook.

Recipe for Success

Using success drivers to make the best decisions

by John Bernero

May 2011

When choosing between product directions, should you choose the simplest, the cheapest, the most reliable, or the one the CEO likes the best? If you picked any of these you might as well have chosen blindfolded.
Let’s face it, meeting requirements is important, but does not ensure market success by itself. What happens when multiple concepts or product architectures all meet the product requirements? How should you choose between them?
The problem with deciding based purely on product requirements is that, while you have the list of ingredients for the product, you’re missing the recipe for how they should be used. It’s like giving a 6-year-old flour, water, cheese and tomatoes and saying “make a pizza”. While it’s possible you’ll get the desired result, it’s pretty unlikely you’ll get something edible unless you provide a bit of additional guidance, otherwise known as “the recipe”.
So why is it that creating a product solution uses a systematic process, yet choosing a product direction is often based on personal bias and guesswork? How can the subjective aspects of our decision making process be minimized? Fortunately, there is a solution to making objective and unbiased product direction decisions. We call it the “success drivers” approach.

Success Drivers to the Rescue

The idea of “success drivers” is to establish a small number (five or so) of high-level principles that determine product success in the chosen market. These principles must account for the needs of both internal and external stakeholders along with technical, regulatory and other constraints. Once you identify the “success drivers”, prioritize them. In the M3 Design Journal article “Throw out your PRD“, Paul Noble-Campbell describes the power of divorcing oneself from the product requirements document. Success drivers do just that.
Establishing success drivers and agreeing on their priority is critical. Furthermore, this must be done before concepts are generated so that the success drivers can inform concept direction. Success drivers also serve as an alignment tool for stakeholders by establishing agreement on what the product will address and embody. Each success driver is paired with a given stakeholder or set of stakeholders to aid in prioritizing what is important to whom, and how that success driver should be taken into consideration.
The definition of each success driver may also differ between stakeholders. Knowing this allows you to align stakeholder needs to ensure the product delights its intended users. Let’s take a success driver of “reliability” as an example. For a stakeholder who is a professional user, reliability may embody a digital SLR. Professionals know what settings they want and need the ability to adjust them all. When they use the product it will perform based upon those adjustments. However for the novice user, reliability may be more like a “point and shoot” camera. When they engage with the product, it automatically adjusts itself with minimal interaction. This user doesn’t want or need fine adjustability and becomes frustrated when messages appear for things they don’t understand or care about. Reliability means it just works.
Once a set of success drivers are in place, all you need to do to is to rate your concepts against each one. It doesn’t get much simpler.

MicroApple

Let’s make up a company. Call it “MicroApple”. MicroApple is trying to decide between two media player concepts, code-named “zPod” and “aPod”. These concepts both meet the product requirements. As you can tell from the table below, the difference between these concepts is not how they play music, battery life, price, or any other functionality. From a requirements perspective, they are essentially identical. In fact, the fundamental difference between these two concepts is that the zPod approach saves some R&D investment by using a supplier’s user interface and sourcing media content from your PC’s USB port. The aPod, on the other hand, proposes an approach that creates an ecosystem which includes MicroApple as the main content provider along with a very customized, optimized, device user interface.

Success Driver Approach

Prior to making their concept decision, MicroApple identified five key success drivers from their user research data. The development teams agree that they embody the high-level product needs and prioritized them as follows:
MicroApple Media Player Prioritized Success Drivers

1. 1. User Experience
2. 2. Ease of Use
3. 3. Performance
4. 4. Compatibility
5. 5. Cost

A meeting was then held with the two concept teams to make a “success-drivers” decision. After a bit of discussion, the following winners for each success-driver emerged and were plotted on a radar chart for review:
MicroApple Media Player Success-Driver Comparison

• User Experience: aPod
  - A much more seamless way to get content to the users
• Ease of Use: aPod
  - The customized user interface was much easier to use
• Performance: zPod
  - Longer battery life, bigger screen, costs less, weighs less
• Compatibility: Tie
  - They both work with just about any service
• Cost: zPod
  - Both use mostly the same components, however aPod has larger software component

So armed with this information, which concept would you choose? Well, it’s pretty obvious from the radar chart that the success driver approach would select the aPod. Success is close to guaranteed, since the decision was made based on what was important to the people who will buy and use the product.

Product Requirements Approach

However without success drivers, choosing between concepts is not as easy. We are forced to choose based upon our past experience and knowledge. Even then, when two concepts look equivalent in function, we will most likely choose the one whose overall project cost will be less, or will be faster to market or some other hot-button factor. With the “Product Requirements” mind-set, the company would have chosen the zPod, but wouldn’t have realized their mistake until the product flopped in the market because MicroApple missed the key user needs.

The Recipe for Success!

“Success drivers” is an objective, data-driven decision-making process. It enables you to systematically identify and select the best product concept from a group of acceptable product concepts based on what’s important to your product stakeholders. Product requirements, while important and necessary, are really no more than a list of features that may or may not be important to your users. Just meeting product requirements will not guarantee success.
For a great product, you need both the best ingredients (the product requirements) and a superb recipe (success drivers). If your goal is to cook dinner for the boss, do you want to wing it with the correct ingredients and hope you produce something edible, or follow a proven recipe that is likely to have him or her asking for more?

METech - meaning behind a brand

By Blake Manson

Branding is an art that many people fail at. And short term branding, although effective, is not a sustainable form of founding a long term business. I think about this a lot with newer internet start-ups.

Examples: Companies with Crafty names without meaning. Like Hulu. Poor name.




 


"There is a moment during every presentation I give when I offer something enormously valuable." Says Ken Carbone, a branding specialist, "I tell clients to write down what is essentially the formula for successful branding employed by the best brands in the world. With their undivided attention and pens in hand, I summarize this formula for them in three words: Unify. Simplify. Amplify."

Ken goes on to say, "This is how the world’s best brands tell their stories effortlessly. Apple. Virgin. Lego. Dyson. Prada. They all apply this formula. But the good news is that this can work for any brand, old and new, large or small-- when designing a new brand identity or refocusing an existing one."

"What makes a good business name?", Monica Campbell from Gobizsuccess answers the question, "Depends on what type of business you are in. Many strategists agree that a business name should either be direct so your customers know exactly what you sell, or be unique so customers remember you. Your business name will depend on the type of culture you want to create and the marketing plan you have behind it."

As I agree with both Ken and Monica, I will have to say that Ken has a better answer towards sustainability. A company name needs to be simple, yet elegant enough to unify your business goals and objectives. Picking a business name is just like picking a logo. You want a character that sticks and will not loose meaning when looking at it as a whole.

Exercise: I am looking for a business name for a new innovation firm. It plans to sell consumer renewable energy products. Affordability is one of the main aspects of the company. Technology is a huge influence. And combining the newest innovative technologies with ease of use, design and user appreciation is how the company will be sustainable.

I registered a company in the past named "Manson Engineering Technologies", and kept calling it "METech" for short. I like the way that rolls off the tongue. After a quick search in the Texas Comptrollers Office website, I found the name is available. After a quick search on GoDaddy.com, I find that METech.com is not available, nor is ME-Tech.com.  I must look into a more creative domain name.

As I search for more insightful information on this name, I find that the logo or the insignia is just as important as the name itself. I must idealize this logo to become a massive product advertisement that can be amplified to the millions. Without being too artistic, I need to be able to see my costumer inside my logo and find that it can be around for many years to come.

I have set a meeting with a graphic designer friend to help me out. I will explain to her my intentions with the company and see if she likes the name. If so, I can make the move with her to help me with a logo that is unified, simplified, and can be amplified like Ken Carbone recommends.


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"Once an idea is planted into your head, it is like a virus. It takes over your thoughts, your future intentions and controls your decisions almost inherently."

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