You can split businesses into a couple of categories, service based businesses, and businesses that sell products. In a service based business, you are offering your skills and expertise to complete a task for a client, whether this is gardening, cooking, or working as a contractor for another company.
This post will be focusing on product-based businesses, and specifically companies that manufacture and sell their products.
In this case, the business idea starts with a product idea and moves on from there. While sales and marketing all come together as important components of these companies, the product design and development phase can’t be ignored as this is where the bedrock of your business is set up.
Your Product Idea
Companies are created through a mix of hard graft sprinkled with a touch of inspiration. You don’t have to be an inventor to come up with a product idea and start a business, you simply have to have the ability to look at a market and see what’s missing.
Products become successful when they fill a niche, but it’s best that a product idea is as simple as possible. From there, you can work on making it viable to design, create, and sell to a market.
When coming up with a product idea, write down as much as possible. Not every idea is going to be gold, but you just need one great idea to make a successful business.
Market Research
Before you invest too much into a product idea, it’s a good idea to do market research. First, you need to see if your product already exists and in what form. You can still develop and create an idea based on an existing product, as long as it is somehow different from it. Do you need to deal with copyright and trademark issues?
Is there an actual need in the market for your product? Sometimes the reason that something doesn’t exist is because nobody wants it. This can be a hard pill to swallow, but it’s important to learn before you spend too much time and money on an idea that will never be viable.
As well as looking at potential competitors and other companies in your industry or that fill similar niches, you should learn as much about your potential customers as possible. What is your customer demographic? What are their needs and wants? How can you integrate that into your design? How much are people willing to pay for your product?
All of this information will turn a vague idea into a viable product design and development.
Prototypes
The design phase might start on pen and paper or you might use CAD (computer aided design) to come up with designs that could work. From here, it’s important to come up with prototypes to improve the design.
Digital prototypes are a more affordable and easier way to test a design before you create physical prototypes. You can put the digital design through a series of tests, while tweaking the materials you use and certain aspects of the design.
Once you have results that you’re happy with, you can move onto physical prototypes.
Make sure that you continue market research throughout this process, as this will further refine your product design and development.
The Right Materials and Supplies
You can’t create something out of nothing, which means that you will need appropriate materials and supplies for your product. Make sure that you find a vendor who can provide you with what you need, reliably and on time.
Local vendors will cut down on transportation costs, and cheaper vendors will obviously allow you to create more products for less money. However, the most important thing to consider is the quality of materials you use. Bad materials can result in a bad product, which will impact your reputation.
Make sure that you find suitable vendors for your products and needs. For example, a flexible wire manufacturer can be useful when designing all kinds of things, including speakers, mobile devices, medical equipment, and even clothing. It’s best to find a few specialist manufacturers for each material that you need.
Further Refining Your Product
So, your product has been designed, manufactured, and now it’s on the market. Is this the end of your product design and development process? Not necessarily. Your company can always work to improve on the initial design or develop similar products in that niche. You might decide to create a more budget, basic project and lower the price, or you might want to move into a more luxury market.
Either way, you can keep on designing.
