Business Opportunities Weblog

June 12, 2007 by Rich Whittle | 2 Comments

StartUp Journal:

Dreaming up a useful product idea is pretty easy. The hard part is figuring out whether you can actually sell it at a competitive price, have a viable distribution channel and enough people willing to buy it.

Conducting market research isn’t exactly cheap. If your idea is truly innovative, you’ll want to consult an intellectual-property lawyer and possibly seek a patent or nondisclosure agreement to prevent somebody from stealing it. And you may eventually need a prototype to show potential buyers how it looks or works.

“You might have the world’s neatest device, but you might have no market,” says William Bygrave, an entrepreneurship professor at Babson College in Wellesley, Mass.

Market research often begins by soliciting honest feedback on your idea from friends and family. But you also need to broaden your network and get input from anyone who might understand the industry or your customers — including members of trade groups, executives in the industry and even professional investors who entertain such pitches often. Through the course of these conversations, says Mr. Bygrave, you should refine your idea and define a target market to get a better sense of whether your idea really has wings.

You’ll also want to gather intelligence on competitors, including how they make the products, and projected growth in the industry. Online trade magazines and trade groups can supply such information. What’s more, you should call several manufacturers that make similar items and get a ballpark figure of how much it would cost to produce your item. Sometimes you can’t produce it cheaply enough to sell at a competitive price.

Photo by MSDesigns.

In Ideas, Marketing, Success | 2 Comments