One woman can product one baby in nine months, but nine women can’t produce one baby in one month.
- Anonymous
Q: Did you ever believe your plan was going to fail?
A: Yes; twice.
Once when I was trying to make many sample pieces using a silicone jelly mold (see page 60); the pieces were impossible to use. I thought that might translate into poor quality injected pieces later. It didn’t.
The second time was when I misjudged the cost of injected parts coming from a mold with few cavities (see page 74). It was several times the cost I thought it would be, causing me to reevaluate my entire go-to-market strategy.
Q: How much do you believe I’d have to spend before I have my first real customer?
A: Anything from about $40,000 up. I spent about $100,000. Not counting your own time and effort, you’ll spend a minimum of a few tens of thousands of dollars on the molds alone, then perhaps another $10k for your first production run. If your product is simple, it might be at the low end of those figures, and it can go to any figure imaginable if your product design is complicated. There are countless other costs for everything ranging from prototyping (thousands) to fees, website creation, telephone charges, and so on. Spending more money does not guarantee more profit, but the cheaper and the simpler your product design is, the less likely you will get those big dollars from customers for it. That is not always the case, but I would not plan on getting paid well for a simple product no matter how clever it is. It is not the complexity of the solution a customer will pay for, but rather, the value and difficulty of solving the problem.
Q: What were the hardest tasks?
A: The two most challenging tasks were (1) getting up to speed on CAD and (2) writing a patent without the use of a lawyer. To be fair, there might have been other equally challenging tasks, but these two tasks were not fun, so they seemed a lot harder at the time.
Q: What was the most enjoyable part of the journey?
A: Any of the creative parts, like writing text content or working images, both photographs and screenshots, for the website and marketing documents was fun. The other fun time was watching my CAD-designed models being built in the 3D printer and taking the models I had designed out of the 3D printer.
Q: When did you leave your “day job”?
A: After about a year of evening work. I spent some of the first year just drawing on pieces of paper to straighten the idea out in my head, and then I bought an $800 license to a CAD program. I had a sample part from a 3D printing service in my hand before I ever resigned from my day job.
Q: How many years might it take before I make money on my product?
A: From my experience and from others who have walked a similar path, it might take anywhere between 12 months and 36 months; perhaps a lot more. Wads of cash might help you buy more help along the way, but design and mold creation take time. A good rule-of-thumb is not to expect to extract a dime from your product for at least 24 months. I do not know of anyone who has done it in substantially less time.
Q: How much hard cash would I expect to spend to get my product to market?
A: A very rough estimate would be at least $100,000.
Q: Which is the most critical stage or chapter of this book?
A: Chapter 11 - Make good mold choices.
A person with a new idea is a crank until the idea succeeds.
- Mark Twain
Q: Are there any companies out there that take your product idea, turn it into a product, and sell it, giving you a royalty or a slice of the profit?
A: I did not find any such company. I did find companies that advertised their services as such, but after some investigation, they looked more like a fraud. One company in particular showed products on their website they had allegedly gotten to market for inventors, and perhaps that did happen. However, from observation, the reseller company’s profit model was based on revenue from individual inventors who paid money to research or market test their product idea.
Beware of companies that offer to provide a service to create, market and sell your product for you. The idea is the easy part. Ideas grow on trees. When you have an idea, you can bet a thousand other people have had that idea too. The hard part, the part that adds the value you might get paid for, is ironing out all the kinks in the idea so it becomes a proven salable product. When you have the revenue from satisfied customers in your hands, then you have something a reseller might be interested in.
Q: What would I do differently if I were to do it all over again?
A: Try to keep my day job for a few more months. Although working on a plan fulltime provides the bandwidth to cover a lot of ground quickly, there is nothing like a steady paycheck to keep the pressure off.
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