From Conception to Delivery: How to Convert Your Ideas into Sellable Products
From Conception to Delivery: How to Convert Your Ideas into Sellable Products
Ideas are the foundations of every businesses, but ideas alone don’t make up the business, the ideas need to be processed into products or services, with which the business can achieve its basic objectives, which includes, meeting needs, solving problems, adding value, and making profits.
Most people who are just starting out their entrepreneurship journey often find this transition difficult, and this explains why most never own a business. And ideas are very fragile, if you don’t act on them as fast as you can, you lose them, probably to someone else, who’s ready to take the initiative. If you’re finding it difficult converting your ideas into sellable products, here are 7 tips to guide you through:
- Document Your Ideas
As earlier mentioned, ideas are very fragile, you can lose them in seconds, and never get to remember them again, to not fall a victim of this circumstance, write those ideas down.
Documenting your ideas would not only help preserve them, it also gives you easy access to those ideas anytime you intend to make any improvements. Ideas on paper are easier to work on than those in thin air.
When the ideas are written down, you get the opportunity to check It out yourself, objectively, and see if it’s really viable, and worth pursuing. You don’t want to waste your energy throwing stones in thin air.
- Market Research
The next step is to land your ideas, even before you land the products. Landing your ideas include analyzing your market, which is your environment, to see where the ideas can work. This would help you ascertain if your business would be a service provider, a manufacturing or retail company, etc.
Analyzing the market may require you to ask questions, especially from those whom the ideas you intend to convert into products would be meant for. You could also run a public poll on magazines or journals, and construct the questions or information, in such a way that it doesn’t communicate the purpose behind it, so you don’t put your ideas out there for people, when you haven’t done anything about it yet.
The analysis would not only help you in converting your ideas into products, it would also help you find out how profitable the products would be, when you finally put it out there.
From Conception to Delivery: How to Convert Your Ideas into Sellable Products
- Involve an External Hand
The eagerness to create a business could be deceiving sometimes, that you might oversee some important details that might have very great impact on the success and sustainability of the business. This explains why it’s important you don’t just dabble into the business space without involving another hand outside yourself, who can analyze the idea, including the feasibility study, objectively, without excluding any detail.
The external hand you’re involving, could be a professional in the niche you’re planning to dabble into, a business advisor, a mentor, or a trusted friend. Ensure that you’re not involving a novice with no professional business experience, else there would be no difference and it could even be more dangerous.
Read Also: How to Create a Scalable Business Model
- Create A Business Model
Some enthusiastic entrepreneurs often make the mistake of manufacturing their products, before they decide on how the business would be operated. So, when they are done with the products, there is no structure on ground that will push the product, and they often end up losing their capital, without making any profit.
Before you start manufacturing your first product, create a business model, a structure of how the business would operate, it would also include how it would be financed, where your capital would come from, if you’re bootstrapping, sourcing for investors or taking a loan, all of these have to be clearly stated in your business model.
Aside having an idea, you need to know if you’re up for the sacrifices and responsibilities involved in converting those ideas into sellable products. And this is why your business model is very crucial, to the success of the idea and the business.
- Create A Prototype
You should start with a prototype, to see how the original product would look like when you’re done manufacturing it. The prototype would also enable you see any improvement or corrections that should be made on the product design, to avoid making too much errors on the original product, that might cost your business and the brand.
You can also send the prototype out to your prospective investors, if you are not planning to self-finance the production. It would give you an edge over others who only seek investments with proposals and no prototype that could express the idea they are trying to sell to the investors.
The prototype is also another level of clarity, that would help you see how viable your idea is, and how profitable the original product could be.
From Conception to Delivery: How to Convert Your Ideas into Sellable Products
- Work on Your Product
After creating the prototype, and you still think the business is worth pursuing, then you move ahead to manufacture the product, with the improved product design. If it’s not going to be a product you will manufacture yourself, ensure you get the best hands to do it for you. Because your product quality is part of the determinant of how sellable and profitable the product would be.
You should also monitor or get someone to monitor every phases of the manufacturing process, to ensure that no detail of the product design is left unattended to.
- Promote the Product
You need to put words out there about your products, and get the attention of your prospective customers. There are several ways you could market your product, you can make use of social media platforms, or start with e-mails, for your contacts, you can also get blogs to write more about your products. This would help create awareness about the products.
Promoting your products would not only boost sales, it would also help your brand, especially when your product quality is top-notch. Promoting your products, would promote your brand and help your business in its entirety.
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(B.Agric, MBA)
08105636015, 08076359735
Serial Entrepreneur - International Business Planning Consultant - Speaker - Trainer - Author - Blogger - Network Marketing professional.
- 2018 SME Business Trainer and Coaching Advisor at GIZ for SME Loop.
- 2018 YALI RLC Online Cohort 9
- 2017 Fellow, Inspire Africa Train-the-Trainer Entrepreneurship programme sponsored by US Consulate Lagos and the Dickey Center, U.S.A.
- 2016 Fellow, Tony Elumelu Foundation Entrepreneurship Programme
- 2015 Top 50 Innovative Entrepreneurs, BET5 by Diamond Bank and EDC, PAU.
He is an alumnus of Enterprise Development Centre (EDC) of the Lagos Business School (LBS), Pan-Atlantic University (PAU). Through his training, mentoring, speaking and coaching programmes, he has empowered many young people over the years to start and grow their own business, build wealth, create multiple streams of income and achieve financial independence.
- He is a Certified Trainer in Design Thinking by the U.S Consulate, Lagos and the inspire Africa Entrepreneurship Institute.
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