I'm a UXD/general designer at a european "startup" (hate that word honestly) company of a friend of mines. We're a small team of 6 and we're working on a product/service for a very specific niche (please bare with my cryptic descriptions, I'm just not authorized to disclose the specifics).
OK, about the niche...it involves a transportation product (retail price doesn't mean anything to our product/service) that is manufactured exclusively by less then dozen multinationals around the world. There's really no reason to expect any new competitors in the area, the current players have all the market share for decades.
Our product/service will vastly, significantly, improve rentability/economics of the product for business owners who use it. We have virtually no competitors, those who are in the competition are lagging behind us a lot.
Our product is working, tested, in the final stages of cleaning up minor software bugs...basically the only thing we're waiting for right now is the first batch of it to be ready for shipment. We have been in the R&D phase for last 2 years and this year we're expecting to sell our first "big" batch of our product.
My questions are...
- should a company like ours even consider outside help from investors or is the "sell as much as you can" route better? We got inquiries for our product before we even finished our website.
- how to determine the right product price? Our current price is based of our competition. But their product literally sucks. Our is worth way more to the end user. Also, our primary goal right now are business users. With our product, they will get better economics, expenditure control and safety improvements.
- since we're dealing with somewhat narrow market, how is patenting important and should we try to get VC just to ensure nobody steals our concept? I don't even know how much $ would a worldwide patent effort cost.
- downsides (as I, the UXD / design guy see it) are scaling. We're dealing with a market that sells some 80,000 units of the product a year, globally. I couldn't get the exact figures, but I would say 20% (at best) of those sells are business related. So those 20% are our primary targets. But our product/service improves this product both in economics and safety, I imagine it should be sold to all end users. The problem is, you can't possibly expect to go door 2 door and pitch it to people. It has to be done on a manufacturer level. And, to be honest, we got some inquires from one of the global manufacturers offices about our product. They were interested in how we managed to design the product the way that we did. I firmly believe we have a hero...but I'm anxious to see it in the market place and not squashed by patent infringements or dealing with big corporations.
The email we got from one of the manufacturers was basically "could you guys send the product so we can test it"...which in my eyes, and I may be a paranoid inexperienced designer, is laughable.
Advice of any kind very appreciated!
OK, about the niche...it involves a transportation product (retail price doesn't mean anything to our product/service) that is manufactured exclusively by less then dozen multinationals around the world. There's really no reason to expect any new competitors in the area, the current players have all the market share for decades.
Our product/service will vastly, significantly, improve rentability/economics of the product for business owners who use it. We have virtually no competitors, those who are in the competition are lagging behind us a lot.
Our product is working, tested, in the final stages of cleaning up minor software bugs...basically the only thing we're waiting for right now is the first batch of it to be ready for shipment. We have been in the R&D phase for last 2 years and this year we're expecting to sell our first "big" batch of our product.
My questions are...
- should a company like ours even consider outside help from investors or is the "sell as much as you can" route better? We got inquiries for our product before we even finished our website.
- how to determine the right product price? Our current price is based of our competition. But their product literally sucks. Our is worth way more to the end user. Also, our primary goal right now are business users. With our product, they will get better economics, expenditure control and safety improvements.
- since we're dealing with somewhat narrow market, how is patenting important and should we try to get VC just to ensure nobody steals our concept? I don't even know how much $ would a worldwide patent effort cost.
- downsides (as I, the UXD / design guy see it) are scaling. We're dealing with a market that sells some 80,000 units of the product a year, globally. I couldn't get the exact figures, but I would say 20% (at best) of those sells are business related. So those 20% are our primary targets. But our product/service improves this product both in economics and safety, I imagine it should be sold to all end users. The problem is, you can't possibly expect to go door 2 door and pitch it to people. It has to be done on a manufacturer level. And, to be honest, we got some inquires from one of the global manufacturers offices about our product. They were interested in how we managed to design the product the way that we did. I firmly believe we have a hero...but I'm anxious to see it in the market place and not squashed by patent infringements or dealing with big corporations.
The email we got from one of the manufacturers was basically "could you guys send the product so we can test it"...which in my eyes, and I may be a paranoid inexperienced designer, is laughable.
Advice of any kind very appreciated!
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