Ben Carter wrote:

I know just about every single one of you has invented one, two, or 50 tools, modifications, accessories etc. for this business that if sold would make you (and your kids) independently wealthy. It's one of the great things about people like you, always solving problems that noone anticipated
in cool innovative ways. Everyone I work with his like that, every one I deal withh on a daily basis is the same.
Except only a few take the time and push their ideas into thhe realm of reality so they can start protyping, manufacturing and marketing their products. I've had enough waiting around and have decide to start taking my two dozen or so "million $ ideas" to the next step. We are building our own protypes (as people like us can) and calling around to patent people and feeling out the potential markets for our products. It's going really well so far. So the reason for this post, who else is doing this out there? Anybody else feel like this is the last year they want to work for someone else and begin the process of a better life? Just curious...


Ben



Inventing: .0005% inspiration and 99.9995% marketing.

As far as I can see, it's also a little like Photography...Pros may take
10,000 photos to get one published. Like Edison (maybe a bad example as
he was really a hack), making money on inventions is about volume
inventing where only 1 in 10,000 actually makes you any money, 5 in
10,000 seem to take off but never really go anywhere and the rest are
dogs that you say "what was I thinking?" 10 years later.

It's almost never about whether people actually need or want what you
invented. It's about getting it marketed in a way that makes people
PERCIEVE that they want the item. Hopefully the item is good enough
that perception turns into "can't live without". Those "swiffer" dust
things are not all that good and not really any better than a good
dustrag....perception was generated that they'd not only be a better way
to dust, but they'd make dusting FUN. Deluge marketing made people
percieve that everyone else had/wanted them. The makers probably spent
about 100000 times as much effort and money on marketing to entrench
this perception as they did tooling up to make the product.


Koz