Going back to the OP’s original thread, many years’ ago I did a marketing course. From what I remember, the key things to remember when trying to sell a product were the 4 P’s
• Product
• Price
• Promotion
• Packaging
You could have great product at a good price but, if nobody knows about it, you’ve a warehouse full of unsold items.
There are two approaches to selling:
Jacob’s – decide what you want to make, make it, go out and sell it. If your hunch is right then you are on to a winner. Otherwise, you’ve wasted a lot of time and effort not to mention lost income from what you could have spent your time on more profitably. Jacob’s approach works well if you start by making the product in your spare time whilst you are doing a related job (window restorations, furniture making in Jacob’s case?) and have the tools and materials to hand. Alternatively, you are in the position of having the luxury of being able to indulge your ideas since you don’t need the income to buy materials or to live on.
The market research lead approach – find out what people want, at what price and go away and satisfy that need. The problem with this is that most people, when asked, probably don’t know exactly what they want and, if they do, probably don’t have a true for the actual cost. This seems to happen a lot if you read various threads on here about members wanting to give up their boring job in IT or whatever and start making things but are advised by the professionals that there is no money in it as the public at large are geared up to Ikea/Oak Furniture Land prices plus the ability to search the market via the web and see if Amazon stock it cheaper.
The third way, I suppose, is the Richard Branson way. Find out what others have done, let them do the innovation and absorb all the start-up costs then join the market offering a trusted brand with better service etc. without having to recoup all the costs of the research. At least that is what he used to do with airlines/telephones and internet/railways etc.
Two final points. Firstly, Jacob’s approach worked for him. When, what he was selling, how he managed financially whist doing it hasn’t, I think, been fully explained. The world has changed a lot in 20 years, 10 even, what with the internet, computer games, social media, kids having mobile phones glued to their ears virtually from birth. Secondly, I think that the OP mentioned putting together a business plan. In this day and age, if you want to raise capital from a bank to start up a business, it’s essential to have one. And the first thing that the bank will look at is the market research that you have done to justify them giving you the loan.
