Smart Product Design - How To
Monika Mundell on July 30th, 2008
Online marketers know the secret ingredient to selling thousands of dollars of products, seemingly effortless. When you see a successful business person you can’t help it but be impressed, despite not knowing exactly what they did to get there. Some of you might have even had the same million dollar idea before but never acted on it.
However, a great idea isn’t necessarily the recipe for success. It might actually be quite the opposite if it isn’t based on rock solid research. This can lead to frustration pretty fast and before you know it, you could be lost in a maze - not really knowing what you did wrong and how you could possibly ever experience success in your online business.
There is nothing wrong with ideas though, as long as they are based on a solid foundation.
But ideas alone aren’t the only way to rake in a decent amount of money. There is another way that can work for you just as well as it does for all the other thousands of people all around the world.
This “secret” ingredient isn’t secret at all, but somehow it often gets overlooked in the process of business or product building.
Identify the need - then get creative
You need to identify a common need and design a solution to suit. Alex has done exactly that with his Expert WordPress product. Alex identified the need from thousands of new and wanna be bloggers to have an all in one solution available that makes it easy to launch you own self hosted blog.
Truly, it doesn’t get easier than this and people like Alex certainly know how to research a market, identify a need and then go about to design a product to cater to this need.
Common product research mistakes
While I previously mentioned that you need to identify a common need before you go and think of a solution, it won’t be enough to simply pick a popular product everybody wants to own right now (like the iPod for example).
Product research goes a lot further than this. People often forget that other, much larger competitors already cater to service this need and therefore it would be very hard to break into a niche that is well established.
However, with some good research, you can do just that.
Lay the foundation
Your foundation definitely needs to be rock solid. After all, it is what your whole product will be based upon and if you took a wrong turn early on, your product or service won’t be as popular as you hoped it would be. To get started on the right foot ask yourself the following questions:
- is there a huge market for what you have to offer??
- Is there currently a service/product in the market that does what you want to supply and if yes, how good is it
- how big is your potential market?
- what price range is realistic for your product?
Think of it like the back to front application of an idea. Now work your way through all these steps and identify each aspect of the market. This includes funding, product development, outsourcing, marketing, design, etc.
The more detailed your research is, the higher are your chances of coming up with a killer product at the other end.
Product design is a long process from inception to realization, but the sooner you understand how important it is to deliver what people really want, the sooner you can make money.
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Some very well thought out ideas here, Alex. I think a lot of people are in such a rush to make it happen all at once that a lot of the research you mentioned gets overlooked. Failure is often the result of poor planning so I think anyone with an idea would be wise to honestly answer the questions you specified before diving in head first.
PMGs last blog post..Property Management Accounting Software
@ PMG: Glad you liked this post. I think the rush job is a common illness amongst wanna be marketers. They smell money and off they go without doing research first. It’s too slow for them.
I rather take my time and see results at the end. Wouldn’t you?
Monika Mundells last blog post..Emotional Connections To Beat Creative Blocks
The more research and product development you do, the more of a chance you have of being successful. That is not to say that you cannot do very well selling an average product, as that is essentially what affiliate marketing is all about, and people do quite well with that all the time. And as your picture shows, if you make a product look quite similar to an already successful brand, that success can rub off on you.
@ Justin: Yes, make it better and you have a recipe for success for sure. Find faults and iron them out, deliver more. Give great value and yadda yadda yadda… you obviously know the deal yourself. Thanks for stopping by to share your views.
Monika Mundells last blog post..Emotional Connections To Beat Creative Blocks
Some good tips here. Product design is something that I’ve always been interested in, and websites like the Dieline help satiate my curiosities, but it was always the back end research that served as a hindrance. Thanks for the insight.
Erikas last blog post..Miami Web Design
@ Erika: You are very welcome. It’s nice to have you here. I never of the Dieline help though. Could you provide a link please?
Cheers
Monika Mundells last blog post..Emotional Connections To Beat Creative Blocks
“See a need, fill a need”, a robot says that, I can remember his name.
However, marketing (brand building, advertising) in my opinion is one of the most important part. How many times have we bought some junks simply because the lady on tv told us to..
What I find interesting, on a similar track is the why does heinz baked beans use a different taste and label for beans in USA? Why are walkers crisps called lays in the USA?
It’s all to do with the better marketing for the country it’s providing to.