When is the best time to take your product to market?

A question that I get asked a lot, or that I hear being discussed more than any, is “when should I launch my new product? ” Or “when should I take my product to market?”

I had a mentor once his name is Roger Bryan, he is still a long time friend and one of the smartest business minded individuals I have ever had the pleasure of meeting. To be honest, it is because of people like him, who like to help others that I have found it easier than most to come back after failures in my own business. He has opened many doors for me in my ventures and has been a better teacher than any lecturer could ever have been. His outlook and hunger to drive forward and create million dollar businesses time after time, after others have failed, in front of my eyes have driven me on to succeed also.

So your thinking come on when is the best time to sell your product ? According to Roger the best time is now. Right away..Yes, you got that right. Before you even develop your idea, you should be selling. Guess what? He is right and let me explain why.

Over the years, (10 of which I have worked online for myself) I have came up with hundreds of ideas, some of which have made me money, others that have cost me money and a lot that I just didn’t finish hence also losing me money. Like most other people when you have an idea you spend time asking your friends and family what they think, you may do a survey to see the interest and then you start developing. The problem? You spend 3, 6 or even 12 months developing your new idea. 12 months perfecting and making sure the product will be loved by the consumer, 12 months throwing money into a product or an idea that you don’t even know if it will bring you a return. Remember you are building a product that you haven’t even sold yet, so in 12 months you have made $0 profit and your expenses could be in the thousands if not more. (product depending).

In saying that , a company or individual with a similar idea and perhaps a larger cash flow could easily come along and develop the same idea quicker and bring it to market before you. Leaving you in debt and ruining your chances of making profit. Speed of implementation is a must when bringing new idea to life.

So before you develop your product, info-product or other, sell! Take your idea, create a landing page, organise a webinar and just sell. Selling first allows you to see if there is even a market for your product, before you go and waste 12 months of your time and money developing it. Think about it, you make people aware that the product is in development when selling it to them. When they pay upfront then you have cold hard cash to use to develop the idea. A good thing to remember is that this product may have taking you 12 months to develop if you go the route of developing first, however when you have customers to please and that you do not want to let down, you will find your product being developed much quicker than it might otherwise have been.

After you have sold your product it is now time to market it. “Didn’t we just market it”? No, to me marketing is scaling. We need to mass market our product. We need to scale now, we need to see if our idea has scaleability and can in fact be sold to the masses.

Think of it this way..

If your product costs $60,000 to develop and you have 2-3 customers that each paid $2000 that is great. Now we scale, we sell to another 50-100 people. This gives us the money to develop our product rather than spend our own. If during the “Market” stage you fail to sell your product, then you know the product was never going to work. As Roger says “It’s better to make a $2,000 mistake, than a $60,000 mistake”

Refund the money to the people you sold at the beginning, be nice and they will appreciate everything and understand.

If however you do sell your product and its enough sales to satisfy, then start building and delivering to your customers. Now that we have some early customers we can start developing the product based on user feedback, also allowing us to build a truly perfect product that the customers and future customers will love.

There you have it, most people believe they must develop the best product right from the get go, without any understanding of the market or if in act there even is a market in the first place. By selling first we have the opportunity to judge how successful our future product is going to be, before we throw all our money into development.

Remember Rogers key points:

Selling
Marketing
Development
Delivery

These 4 key words when launching a product online, are not in the order you would usually expect!

Craig Murray – Entrepreneur –
CEO Mouse Click Marketing, Toronto Canada.