Know-How Exchange : Other

The way to get to the big companies is to prove your idea in the marketplace first. Your market, as you estimate it, is $13 billion. Big, giant number! Of course, when you are selling your product idea, you sell it one customer at a time $13 billion times. And there are about $13 billion people who want to get their idea in front of a big company to cash in.

I exaggerate a little. Most big companies don't talk to unsolicited "inventors." This is especially true if you have no intellectual property (patents, copywrites, etc) to show as ownership.

So, take your product to market, build a clientele that is respectable and seems desirable or threatening to the big companies in some way and they will come looking for you.

There are some companies who specialize in introduction of intentions to big companies. They ask for big bucks up front. I don't know how good they are. If you have the big bucks for this, great! Go for it. Explore their offering and see if they can get you to Meca. I don't have experience with them to feel comfortable recommending them to my clients. I recommend going the way I indicated above. But, if you want to explore it and have the big bucks to risk, one place is: www.inventhelp.com. They have a sister company called www.intromark.com that specializes in signing up companies to provide access to inventors. Inventhelp has a nefarious reputation - Google inventhelp scams to read the stories.

The point of bringing this up is that there are no shortage of people who will promise you results with respect to introducing you to "big companies." They will prey on your dreams, collect a bunch of money from you based on aggressive promises, and then not deliver. The "not deliver" will be blamed easily on the fact that your product ideas just isn't as good as you believe. I'm not saying you would be susceptible to any of these charlatans, but since I don't know you and since you asked in your title for someone to help you, it's my obligation to make sure you do have this knowledge.

As I mentioned, building a business that is noticeable to the big companies is the best way to get their attention. It is also the best way to ensure your ultimate personal wealth. If you build a noticeable business, a big company could notice it and buy it - you are wealthy. Or if they don't, you build a business that results in making you wealthy. Either way, you win. Bottom line: Your products are more valuable when they are commercially viable versus just an ideal.

If you need help building your idea into a business, contact me. I do that for a living. If not, I hope this helps you.

Wayde

Heidi,

That's what entrepreneurs have in common with artists - they are starving at some point in their lives. Also, they have passion for a vision and they sacrifice all else to see that vision into form. I work with entrepreneurs all the time and you are exactly where you should be at this point. I see this a lot. And most of the entrepreneurs I've worked with are able to realize their dreams.

Using the artist analogy, the price of Aphrodite marble is $3 per pound. Michelangelo's David is priceless. The marble isn't very special and even the rarest isn't very valuable in itself. The idea for Michelangelo's sculpture, a young King David, isn't worth much in itself either. After all, there are many ideas of young King David - everyone has a vision of this. It was when Michelangelo saw his vision to completion with his bare hands - that's when it became valuable. Oh, and then he died and that's when people recognized the value in the rarity of the pieces.

Fortunately for entrepreneurs, their work is more valuable when they are alive versus when they are dead. But the rest holds true. There are a million ideas out there. Selling an idea for anything substantial is very difficult because of the risk of it actually working commercially. It becomes valuable the more defined it is.

For instance, in your case, you have an idea and a few friends and relatives who have told you it's a great idea. This is not an objective market survey. You can't, with any statistical confidence, tell a company you approach how many of these items can be sold. You have no market projections, no costs of manufacturing, and no idea of profit. So at this point, you can't even say how much this idea is worth to them.

Further, you don't have any intellectual property in the idea. So aside from it is your idea, you don't really have anything you can sell because you don't really own it. Companies don't buy anything unless they are sure the seller has clear deed to the property. And since you don't have intellectual property protection and don't feel you are able to get it, that means that if the idea is great and the company launches it, all other companies can copy it and whatever profits the company would realize are now but a fraction of the original projection. Thus, the idea's value substantially declines.

So this is why trying to sell an idea to a big company has limited success for the starving entrepreneur.

Heidi, don't despair...while this path is discouraging, there is a path you can take to realize the worth of your idea. As I said, develop it yourself into a business. Get out there and build it into a regional success under the radar of "big business." Build a brand that has strength. Build a cult following of customers who are loyal. Expand it to the next region and the next region. Plan on how you will counter the "big business" copies that may come later and be one step ahead of them so that as soon as they come out with one like yours, you have the new and improved model and theirs is worthless. Build a company of your own as if it's Heidi's David. When you do this, you will starve no more and will have title to something that is demonstrably valuable.

How you do this is by putting together the plan and the process and then execute it step by step. Seek help from Small Business Development Centers and other business aid organizations. There's a lot available to you that costs you only time. Seek grants to get you going. Look for partners who might complement your skills and share your vision. Look for money in loans first, but as you get things on paper, you can look for investors. They will want a substantial piece of your business in return for their dollars, but at least you'll have your dream going.

I'm not saying that you can't go to a big company and find people who can work from your vision, see the potential, and benevolently dish out some cash to you for it. Working within big companies and with entrepreneurs for a number of years, I've never seen it happen. But, it could have happened somewhere to someone. I believe it to be rare. What I am saying is that this path will net you less than if you can drive it yourself.

Wayde

Heidi,

If you can teach and earn $100 per hour - that's a no-brainer! You can fund a lot of product development and marketing efforts that way.

Establishing your expertise by writing articles - that helps your cause for developing your brand and adding value to your company. I would augment that with a blog in which you put short 100 word bits about your product - you can develop quite a following that way if you do it well. In addition, link your website and blog with as many complementary businesses as you can. It helps in organic SEO.

You could do an email marketing newsletter. Get people to sign up at your blog and website. This gives you a target list to which to market, sure, but more inportantly, it develops a list of loyal customers.

Don't forget to add in workshops in your marketing strategy. You can give low cost 2 hr workshops - aimed at having the people take something away with them of value - and then a good percentage will want your product and/or lessons. Eventually, if it's possible, you can do a webinar with the same aim.

Those are my thoughts off the top of my head.

Wayde