Invent It, Sell It, Bank It!: Make Your Million-Dollar Idea Into a Reality (11 page)

• Finally, you want to know specifically whether people will like your invention and recognize its usefulness and appeal.

For the first two types of investigations, you’re researching information that has already been documented, and it’s the kind of data you can get by scouring the Internet, the news, and well-researched blogs, and by reading trade reports, white papers, and any other previously conducted market research you can find.

To get real insight into that third area of interest, which taps into your potential customers’ wants and needs, you need to go straight to the customers themselves.

THREE KEYS TO GETTING USEFUL FEEDBACK

When you’re doing your market research, keep this in mind: you’re not looking for positive feedback; you’re looking for
accurate
feedback. It will do you absolutely no good to get overwhelming positive response to your invention if you’ve asked the wrong people the wrong questions in the wrong way. In fact, inadvertently soliciting inaccurate feedback could be equally ruinous as placing an order with a manufacturer before you have any orders. So don’t do it.

The only useful feedback is accurate feedback.

Let’s discuss the three keys to obtaining accurate feedback through market research.

1. Anonymity

Family members and friends are often an important source of emotional support for new inventors. However, when you are conducting your market research, you should avoid them entirely. Do not ask the opinion of people who love you, like you, or even know you, because they will either (a) refuse to hurt your feelings and tell you they like your idea, no matter what they
really think; or (b) harbor jealous feelings and tell you they don’t like it, no matter what they really think. You never know. People are either for you or against you; they’re never neutral.

2. The Right Questions

Leave no stone unturned. Create a written questionnaire that asks as many detailed questions as possible, but not so many it overwhelms your respondent. If people have been gracious enough to stop to give you a few minutes of their time, don’t make them regret their decision by handing them a packet the thickness of a dictionary. A quick one-pager will be sufficient, listing maybe eight or ten key questions. You don’t want to take up too much of people’s time. Believe me, that would certainly affect the kind of answers they offered, assuming they even completed your survey.

As most people know, the way in which you ask a question can influence the reply you get and will skew your results. For example, consider the different answers you’d get to these questions:

1.
Unrecycled paper comprises about 40 percent of the amount of solid waste in our landfills. What do you think of this desk-top automatic paper dissolver?

2. Would you use this desk-top paper dissolver?

Your questions should be short and neutral:

• Do you like this product?

• If you don’t like it, why?

• Would you buy it?

• Do you have a need for it?

• Where would you expect to find this?

•
Would you buy this for someone else? If yes, who?

• Would you buy multiples? If yes, why?

• What would you pay for it?

For that last question, you would include multiple-choice answers. For example, if you wanted to sell the product for under $25, you’d ask the most important question: What would you pay for this? You could offer your respondents the options of $14.99, $19.99, $29.99, and $34.99. By going from the extreme low to the extreme high, you’re not steering people toward a tiny range, which allows you to get a good grasp of how people value your product.

3. A Large Cross Section of People

You always want to seek out the opinions of your target audience, of course, but don’t put limits on yourself or your invention. You never know; you may think that your market is women between the ages of 30 and 50, and then discover that in fact it’s women between the ages of 20 and 30, as well as men. My market research informed me that one of my major assumptions was flat-out wrong. I thought every woman would want one of my organizers, because I thought every woman liked jewelry and had a collection of it. It never occurred to me that there were women who didn’t care for jewelry and owned little, if any. That was a good thing to know. Keep your reach broad. And if you find that your market skews in a direction you hadn’t anticipated, go with it. Follow the consumers’ lead, but go with your overall response. Perhaps 20 percent of the women I spoke with said they didn’t own a lot of jewelry, but the majority did.

WHERE TO DO YOUR RESEARCH

Social Media

Not very long ago, unless you were a large business with the funds to pay a market research company to do the work for you, the only way to find out more about the potential market for your invention would be to question your circle of friends and acquaintances (which, as we just discussed, is not informative), or to canvass the population where you live. It just wasn’t feasible for a first-time inventor to test a broader national or even global market. All that changed with the Internet and social media.

Almost every social media outlet has search capabilities that allow you to target potential buyers and listen to the conversations they are having about the problem your invention could solve. If you choose, you can sometimes even engage in dialogue with your market, asking questions to elicit responses that will help you confirm your beliefs about your invention and the market you hope to serve. I often ask my Facebook fans to weigh in on products I’m developing. On Twitter, you can do hashtag searches or follow trends, and get direct, uninhibited, and honest insight into how your potential consumers think and feel about any number of topics, brands, and products—straight from the horses’ mouths.

You can customize those searches to give you results for a specific geographic location, or you can click on “Global” to get worldwide results. If you wanted to get really specific, you could use Twitter’s advanced search option, which could conceivably help you find out how many people sent tweets containing, for example, the words “luggage” or “Christmas trees” from a location near, say, Salem, Oregon. You can conduct less intense research on Pinterest, which is a mecca for anyone passionate
about food, clothing, accessories, crafts, or home décor, among many other visually appealing categories, by searching any of the pin categories or doing a word search. Typing in “wine aerator” shows you an endless scroll of beautiful images of different wine aerator designs. Which ones have been repinned the most? What are the names of the boards on which they’ve been repinned? If you see images of something that relates to your product, is it on boards with titles like, “Things I Can’t Live Without” or “My Favorites”? That should tell you something. On Facebook, you can take advantage of Graph Search and look at who has publicly proclaimed interest in an area relevant to your product. For example, if you asked to see “People who like martial arts,” you’d be privy to a list of over a million people. In addition, you could see the geographic area where they live, and often what they read, what shows they watch, and what brands they like. From that you might be able to extrapolate spending habits and consumer preferences.

Many times you can use these social media search options to gather information about how your audience feels about your competitors, and what your competitor is doing to serve them. From some you can get a general idea of how often your customers shop, how much money they spend, and where and when they spend it. And most of the time you can get this information for free. If you’ve got some money to spend, you can pay to get access to even greater amounts of detail on the people who might buy your product.

Online Survey Companies

These are terrific and inexpensive tools for expanding the scope of the population you’d like to question regarding your product and your market. One of the most popular is SurveyMonkey. There you can send questionnaires to as many members of
their “Audience”—regular survey takers who have been recruited to answer additional surveys like yours—as you like. The cost of conducting the survey is based on your targeting criteria, the size of your audience, and the number of completed surveys. You can tailor questions to find out about your target customers’ reading, buying, and entertainment consumption habits, but you can also be a little more nuanced and find out, for example, what factors influence them most at the point of purchase, or what considerations they make before spending money.

Crowdfunding Campaigns

Some people gain valuable information by doing a mock auction of their item via crowdfunding. These are entrepreneurs willing to take the risk of revealing their products online without the protection of a patent. You’ll see people on fund-raising sites posting photographs of their products while trying to raise money. It works; when people get a glimpse of something cool, they often jump at the chance to be a part of its creation, especially if one of the rewards for donating is the product itself.

These inventors are gambling that once they’ve obtained their funding, they can get their product into retailers and build brand recognition and loyalty before any competitor has time to copy them and eat at their market share. But revealing your product online before you have a patent is something to consider carefully. I personally recommend trying to have some coverage—it’s always safer if you have a patent or one pending. Yet it’s a double-edged sword. On the one hand, revealing the product will allow you to raise dollars to help you get started, and you may even get contacted by a manufacturer, a manufacturer’s rep, or a distributor. They often watch sites like Kickstarter and Indiegogo to find products that might be right for them (we’ll talk more about fund-raising sites like these in
Chapter 5
). On
the other hand, once you put your product online, you are extremely vulnerable to poachers.

Some overseas manufacturers or nefarious types will watch these sites to get ideas for products and then do them without you. Factories surf the Internet all the time looking at popular products, even bestselling items on websites like QVC or Amazon, to find new ideas and products they can knock off. I can’t stomach the idea of seeing someone else steal the product that you’ve put so much work into and that you were hoping would provide a better future for yourself and your loved ones. However, it’s an extremely personal choice, and not every product is patentable. Also, for some inventors the cost of applying for a patent is prohibitive, and everyone’s tolerance for risk differs. For some, the opportunity to get funding or gain brand awareness might outweigh the risk of losing control over their ideas. Make the best, most financially sound choice you can, but be aware of how very hard it is to protect a product once its image gets passed around online. Once it’s out there, the world can see it, for better or for worse.

Despite the risks inherent in exposing your product too soon, Kickstarter, one of the most widely used fund-raising sites, has become a de facto market research resource. If you post your product and your story, and it gains popularity and the donations come pouring in, that’s a good sign that you’re on to something.

Face-to-Face Market Research

Social media provide entrepreneurs with an effective, inexpensive, and sometimes absolutely free way to talk to your target audience and find out how they
feel about the problem you’re trying to solve with your invention. Yet in these days when SurveyMonkey and Twitter can give you access to almost any consumer market from Miami to Anchorage, the best way to gauge how people are going to react to your product, and predict whether they will buy it, is still with a hands-on introduction.