5 Things You Absolutely Must Do Before Creating Your Product or Service

I’m a big “idea” person. My right-brain is constantly shooting off a million miles per second. And once the creative juices start flowing… I usually end up with a small planet sized mess of mostly average ideas, coupled with some stupid and terrible ones, topped by a few solid home runs now and then.

That being said, I’ve worked with plenty Experts, Entrepreneurs, and simply brilliant business owners who I would consider “BIG IDEA” people.

And one of the things I’ve noticed is that even some of the most brilliant successful and innovative business owners and marketers still make these dumb mistakes that they wind up regretting later.

Not Every Idea is a Good One…
That’s OBVIOUS, RIGHT?

The problem is that many people don’t understand how to fully and properly vet an idea before turning it into a product and throwing it up for sale.

And if you don’t know how to evaluate it properly, you’re shooting blind, my friend. You’re either going to be saying, “Holy shit it worked!” or you’re gonna be super disappointed that you just invested all of this time, money and resources on a failure that you could have prevented…had you considered these 5 things carefully first:

Step 1: Determine Your Market Fit:

What is Market Fit? Your market fit means being in a good market with a product that can satisfy that market and inspire ways for you to create value for your customers.

Step 2: Understand Your Demographic

Your Demographic may NOT be who you think they are. You might be aiming for the wrong target.

Alternatively, you might be aiming for a target that’s way too small.

You may have several different audiences who could identify with or relate to your products or services for different reasons.

Your ability to identify exactly who these people are is directly proportionate to the kind of results you will achieve. So do your due diligence in the research and discovery phase.

Figure out what their unique pain points are, and then identify how each of them will benefit from using your products or services.

A great exercise to help you get clear on who your different audiences are is to first, identify the top 5-7 problems that your product or service offers a solution for, write them down.

Then, hop on the Google machine and type in your answers one by one… see what comes up for each. This should give you some good examples of what your competition is putting out there for your future prospects to find.

Then, look closely at the pages that came up in your search. What types of products and services are coming up? What does their marketing look like? What is their messaging like?

This should tell you a lot about WHO your competitors are marketing to. Then, when you read through the content, the messaging they use will tell you a ton about what your potential customers pain points are.

BTW- If you can’t come up with 5-7 different problems that your product or service is a solution for—either you’re tapping into something amazing and new…or your idea is probably not the best solution.

Step 3: Your Time and MONEY Estimation

To put it simply, there are two MAJOR factors you need to consider before creating your product or service.

They are TIME and MONEY.

Do a little audit of the following to determine if now is the right time for you to move forward.

If you do not have BOTH the time and the money to create your product or service–this doesn’t mean you shouldn’t create it… It means you need to adjust your timeline to reflect a realistic estimate of when your input of time and money resources will match your output of product to marketplace.
Otherwise you’ll be discouraged and disappointed. So manage your expectations by preparing and planning accordingly.

Step 4: Cost to Profit Ratio

This is the biggest underestimation of all…

Think about this for a second:

If you were in the business of flipping houses, there are a couple of questions you’d consider before buying a property:

I’m not a flipper, but as a business transaction, here’s what I would be thinking about…

How much will it cost me to renovate

How long will it take to complete renovations

How long until I can get a return on my investment

If you determine the cost to renovate is a good investment, then you’re probably planning on hiring a ton of contractors to do it for you and get it market ready as quickly as possible.

If cost is a factor, then you might be thinking about what you can hire out, versus what you can tackle yourself to save money.

Though, this comes with a sacrifice of time-cost. And you must consider that factor as well, as it will affect the length of time before you’ll see a return on your investment.

Ultimately you wouldn’t move forward if the cost or time outweighed the potential ROI (Return on Investment) would ya?

This same thing applies to creating a new product or service.

Step 5 Scalability:

Is your product or service scalable? In other words, where can you “grow” from here?

Look at the other competitors in your marketplace, do they have escalation products or services?

Every investment you make, every product you create should be designed to generate customers, but more importantly customers that can buy from you AGAIN and AGAIN, because they know, like and trust you.

Do you have something else to offer them once they buy from you?

If not, I guarantee you, somebody else does.