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The journey of bringing our first (innovative) product to market

A detailed account of a Fastlane process...

UrbanLegend

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Hi everyone,

it's been a while since I've been active on this forum. As many before me, I tried the whole "selling on Amazon" thing.
Well it didn't quite work out and I didn't want to invest more time and money into it. As we all know it violates many of the CENTS.
If anyone is interested in what I did in that business you can read that here.

After my first failure the everyday life got the best of me. I was still reading books and learning new things but I wasn't actively pursuing anything. I should tell you that when I first started this journey and started reading books like "The millionaire fastlane ", I introduced my dad to all of this.
It also changed his whole mindest and outlook on life. My dad had always had many business or product ideas. But he never really acted on any of them. It wasn't until a couple of months ago that he came up with a new idea. He talked to several family members about it including me. And everyone was very excited about it from the get go (my grandfather even built the very first prototype :D). At that point I already told him that this could be a big thing and that he should pursue this. Some more time passed and my dad refined the idea of his product more and more. At some point my dad asked me if we should do pursue this together. I immediately agreed. I should add that the relationship I have with my parents is very good. I know a lot of people will say you shouldn't do buisness with family. But we complement each other with our different skill sets. He is responsible for the product development itself and I will be the one in charge of selling it.

As of now I don't want to get into specifics as to what the product actually is. It potentially solves a big problem of our current society. My dad was able to build first prototypes on his own with materials from the hardware store. But now we need a prototype made of the actual material. We have a manufacturer not far from where we live. And a couple of weeks ago we had an appointment with them to talk through the process of creating the first prototype to mass production. As I am wiriting this we already ordered the first prototype to do more testing. The plan is to bootstrap the whole business and not use any outside capital.

Right now I am working on how we can eventually sell the product. My plan was to create a small online shop (maybe shopify). I thought of creating a landing page with a video that explains the problem and how our product can solve it. The landing page will link to the shop. To drive traffic to our landing page I thought of using facebook ads. This is still very rudimental and maybe anyone has some suggestions as to how you would go about it. Keep in mind the product doesn't exist in this form yet and is something completely new.

The plan is to keep this thread up to date with any future progress that we make. I hope I can get some feedback along the way and maybe this thread might be valuble to someone someday.

Hope to be posting an update soon!

Marco
 
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Monkeycom

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Facebook ads isn't a marketing plan.
You first need to sort:

- Who are my customers ?
- How can I reach them ?
- How can I enter them in a direct contact database ?

Then, come up with the solutions, and keep market to your database.
 

UrbanLegend

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Jan 22, 2017
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Munich, Germany
Facebook ads isn't a marketing plan.
You first need to sort:

- Who are my customers ?
- How can I reach them ?
- How can I enter them in a direct contact database ?

Then, come up with the solutions, and keep market to your database.

Thanks for your input! Really appreciate it. Especially coming from someone who has walked the walk.
 

UrbanLegend

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Jan 22, 2017
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So this weekend we received our prototype and we are very happy. The major question right now is how can we validate our product idea before investing in the mold to produce it?

Our product is comparable to a foam roller. It is made of the same EPP material. The biggest brand here in europe is Blackroll. I am not sure how big they are in the US.
The shape is different from a roll, and so is the use. While a foam roller is for dynamic use. Our product would be for a static use. We already have numerous strechtes that can be performed with our product as a tool. You can also stretch the muscle chains which are very often causing back pain. This actually treats the root cause of the pain and doesn't just ease the pain for the moment.

We want to make sure there is an actual demand for this before proceeding with the production. Any advice is much appreciated. :)
 
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SeanLewis

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Just a quick look at the keyword "back pain" in google trends show a pretty drastic curve upwards.
 

UrbanLegend

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Jan 22, 2017
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Just a quick look at the keyword "back pain" in google trends show a pretty drastic curve upwards.

Yeah when my dad came to me with the idea I looked at the same keyword on google trends. Back pain is a huge issue. Mostly because we mainly sit all day.
 

UrbanLegend

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Jan 22, 2017
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Hi everyone,

just wanted to write a quick update. The last couple of months we have slowly worked towards the goal of going live with our online store, selling our self developed product.

I am pretty much done building out the store. We went with the shopify platform for this. Now we just have to put some processes in place as we will ship the product ourselves to start off. Later we will move to a fullfillment service when we approach a certain volume of orders.

We will begin selling only in our home country of germany, as international shipping complicates the whole tax and legal stuff. We will slowly add other countries eventually.

As of right now the plan is to go live within the next two weeks.

We are very excited as this is a big step to finally put our product out there.

Let's see where this takes us.
 
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UrbanLegend

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Jan 22, 2017
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Hello fellow fastlaners,

it's been a while since I last posted an update so here we go. First off merry christmas to everyone. I hope everyone is healthy and safe during this crazy year we had.

I want to start off by revealing our product and store. For now we only operate in germany, so everything is in german. You can visit our store here: EVOBOD

With our product we call the "EVOBOD" you can perform various exercises to stretch the muscles of the body that shorten during extended hours of sitting every day. The muscles get stretched and the balance in the body gets restored. This way the problem of back pain gets treated at the root. Not just the symptoms. Thats a very brief explanation of what our product does. The USP ist that you can use it passively while watching TV for example.

We first launched our store in April this year. For getting traffic we used Facebook advertising. We didn't get any sales. The product is new, unlike anything that existed before, we are a new company / brand with zero trust. It was very hard getting our first sales. During that time doubt started to creep in. Our first working site went live in September.

By now we have sold 250+ units and also got first feedback from customers that love the product. Return rate is around 5%. Sadly we are not profitable yet. We barely hit break even with our current sales. The only driver of traffic we tried until now is Facebook ads. We are currently generating content for Instagram and Youtube and hope to get more exposure this way.

Our marketing budget is very limited so the main goal right now is to get the most exposure for the least amount of money.

If you have any questions don't hesitate to ask away. :)

We would also be very happy to get suggestions / recommendations by you guys in any regard.

Thanks for reading!

Marco
 

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