So this week’s video is super exciting because it’s all about how to get your business off the ground if you’ve got an invention.
If you’ve got a little spark of an idea, I’m going to tell you how to get from a spark of an idea to an actual product and then how to turn that into a business.
And, the reason we’re focusing on this topic today is because it’s a pretty big week for me because my brand new TV show is launching and it’s called – The Big Idea Works.
The idea behind the Big Idea Works is that there are millions of people out there, everyday people who have big ideas for all sorts of products. Things that will change the world, might change your life, might make something easy, but for some, they’re just a little nugget of an idea.
The biggest challenge people have is they don’t know how to go from having an idea to actually making a product.
Now, if I take you back to me when I first started, I had an idea for a product called the Enveloper. I could see an opportunity in the cardmaking market, all these people were into making handmade cards and they didn’t know how to get the right size envelope to fit the card.
Also, all of the envelopes people were using were plain white or manila, whereas actually what people want to do is they want to make beautiful envelopes to match the cards they’ve made, right? Now, my dad is an engineer so I had the vision of what the product needed to be and how it could work.
Because he was an engineer, he helped me to work out how to get from that vision into an actual working prototype. Once you have a prototype, then the world is your oyster if you want to start a business.
In The Big Idea Works, which I have to give a plug for because it will be on BBC One every day at two o’clock for the next few weeks and will also be dropping on iPlayer very soon.
What I love about the show is there are some great business people on there, some who already have businesses, some who want to start businesses, so they need to get their idea ready so they can launch a business with it and that’s what I’m going to help you with today.
But, the other great thing about The Big Idea Works is that there’s also a lot of people on the show who don’t want to start businesses. They’ve just got great ideas and it’s just a waste for them not to have their idea brought to life. They maybe don’t have business inclination so they don’t want to take that product and then bring it to market. Maybe they just want to license it to somebody else and let them do it.
Or I remember one guy from the show has come up with a great idea and he just wants to give it to our NHS so that they can go and do something with the product. So, having an idea doesn’t always have to be about making a business.
For those of you that do have an idea, there are two parts to this.
One part is getting from the idea to the prototype – that’s the inventive step part. Now, I obviously had my dad, and then in subsequent years, I’ve worked with a lot of different engineers over the time who were able to take the concept and bring it to life in a prototype. What you’re looking for in this is a product designer, or a type of engineer.
Once you get the product to the stage where you’ve got a working prototype, the next thing is the most critical step that people often miss out on, which is that you need to make sure that that product is commercially viable.
I’ll give you a brilliant example. On the show, we have an amazing young mum that comes in and she gets really frustrated when she takes her little one out for a walk in a pushchair and then she gets to the steps and the baby wakes up. So, she’s invented a product that you would fit to the buggy and it would just go up the stairs brilliantly.
Our engineers looked at loads of options and they tried to look first of all at inexpensive solutions but when they couldn’t get that to work, the solution they came up with solved the problem for the woman but if they were to commercialize that, that pushchair would be about 6,000 pounds for each unit.
Now, realistically, commercially, nobody is going to pay 6,000 pounds for a pushchair. There might be some people but it’s very niche and not a mass market opportunity.
That is the commercial step that people need to focus on. Look at the product, look at the solution, thoroughly cost it out and make sure that there is a commercial opportunity and that the cost of bringing that product to market is going to work for the consumer.
If I go back to my example, when I invented one of my early products, the Ultimate Crafters Companion,I worked out that it was commercially viable. I knew what it was going to cost me to make. I knew what I could sell it for and that there was plenty of profit in it.
However, to get the first one made, the tooling cost and the setup cost was a hundred thousand pounds. So what I needed to do was look at the commercial viability of how many I would need to sell to make enough profit on each one that it’ll pay back my hundred thousand. And once I’d worked out how many that was, I had to look at whether or not it was feasible for me to do it.
Once you get to that stage, the next part you need to think about is are there any inventive steps? Is this product patentable? Can I register any designs? And if there is, you must look at doing all of your intellectual property protection before you move on to the next step and getting it made.
So, those are all of the steps that you need to do. If you’ve invented a product and you’ve got the idea, from getting that product invented to getting it ready to think about launching the business, you must go through all of these ‘stage gates’.
Work out how commercially feasible it is and then get ready to go to market. I hope that’s been useful, and I hope you get a chance to watch The Big Idea Works, and I can’t wait to hear what you think of it!