Bringing your concept for a unique product to reality is typically one of the most challenging challenges for prospective entrepreneurs. When you hear the origin tales of other outstanding businesses, you will notice that the path to a final product rarely resembles a straight line.
Tina Roth-Eisenberg, for example, saw the scarcity of semi-permanent tattoos after her daughter brought some home, and she rallied her network of fellow designers to establish Tattly. In contrast, David Barnett had to educate himself on using 3D design software to develop PopSockets, the now-popular phone attachment.
These inspiring stories do not give an end-to-end product development plan on their own, but the similarities they share highlight some of the stages founders routinely take to begin a firm and sell a final product.
The Six Step Method for Developing a New Product
Bringing an original product idea to market is known as new product development. Although it varies depending on the business, it may be divided into five stages: creativity, research, planning, prototype, sourcing, and costing.
Here’s how to create your unique product idea and what to think about at each stage.
1. Ideation
Many aspiring entrepreneurs get stuck on ideation, typically because they wait for a stroke of genius to unveil the ideal product to market. While creating something genuinely “new” might be creatively satisfying, many of the best ideas come from iterating on an established product.
By asking questions about existing products, the SCAMPER model can quickly help you come up with new product ideas. Each letter represents a prompt:
- Substitute
- Combine
- Adapt
- Modify
- Put to another use
- Eliminate
- Reverse/Rearrange
By addressing these questions, you might generate fresh ways to modify existing ideas or adapt them to a new target audience or problem.
2. Research
You may be tempted to rush into production with your product idea in mind, but this can be a mistake if you fail to validate your idea first.
Product validation assures that you are developing a product that people will pay for and that you are not wasting time, money, and effort on an idea that will not sell. You can validate your product ideas in a variety of ways, including:
- Discussing your concept with relatives and friends
- Distributing an online survey to gather comments
- Launching a crowdsourcing campaign
- Using platforms such as Reddit to solicit feedback
- Using Google Trends to investigate internet demand
- Creating a “coming soon” page to assess interest through email opt-ins or pre-orders
Whatever method you choose to validate your idea, it is critical to obtain input from a large and unbiased audience on whether they would buy your product. Competitive analysis is an unavoidable component of validation research. If your idea or speciality has the potential to take off, there are already rivals in that space.
3. Planning
Because product development can quickly become complicated, it is critical to plan ahead of time before beginning to build your prototype. When you eventually approach manufacturers or start shopping for materials, it is easy to become confused in the succeeding processes if you do not have a clear vision of what you want your product to look like and how it will operate.
A hand-drawn sketch of your product’s appearance is the most excellent spot to start planning. Before moving on to the sourcing and costing stages, examine your products’ packaging, labelling, and overall quality. These will impact how you sell your product to your target consumer. Thus it is critical to examine these features of your product throughout the planning phase as well.
4. Prototyping
The prototyping phase of product development aims to create a finalised product that can be used as a sample for mass manufacturing.
It is unlikely that you will get to your finalised product in a single attempt. Typically, prototyping entails testing numerous versions of your product, gradually removing alternatives and making adjustments until you are satisfied with a final example. Prototyping also varies greatly depending on the sort of product being developed.
5. Sourcing
When you have a product prototype that you are happy with, it is time to start gathering resources and securing the production partners. This is also known as creating your supply chain: the vendors, activities, and resources required to develop a product and get it into customers’ hands.
While this stage will primarily include searching for manufacturing-related services, you may also consider storage, shipping, and warehousing. There are numerous tools available both online and in-person when looking for suppliers. During the sourcing phase, you will undoubtedly be faced with the issue of whether to manufacture your product locally or overseas.
6. Costing
After you have completed your research, planning, prototyping, and sourcing, you should have a better idea of how much it will cost to manufacture your product. Costing is the process of summing up all of the information obtained thus far to estimate your cost of goods sold (COGS) to determine a retail price and gross margin.
Once you have determined your total COGS, you can choose a retail price for your product and deduct the COGS from that price to decide your possible gross margin, or profit, on each unit sold.
Conclusion
Each road to a final product is unique during product development, and each industry has its own set of oddities involved in producing something new. If you are having trouble figuring it all out, Maction can definitely help you. Remember that every product before yours had to overcome the same obstacles.
If you run a start-up, you know how difficult it is to attract people to try your product. After all, potential clients don’t know if you’ll be around in three months. So it’s far safer for them to lock you out than it is for you to spend time learning how to utilise your stuff.
By following these steps during your product development process, you can divide the daunting task of bringing a new product to market into more manageable stages. No matter what you are doing, you can ensure a successful result by doing all of the essential research, planning, prototyping, sourcing, and costing.
