How do you know if your product idea is a good one?

Haha! It kills me but that happens to articles and rants I write here all the time! For the most part they hit, but the occasional one will slip through (like the one I wrote yesterday).

As far as articles I think it has to hit critical mass quickly otherwise it'll fall down the ranking.

As for products. I research the **** out of the market before I even consider making a product. I also MAKE SURE that my markup is VERY high to account for problems I KNOW I'll have down the road.

Too many people just blindly create products without ever doing research to see who is buying. I have a friend who spent thousands of a product only to find out it was getting 82 searches a month. Poor guy.

Cheers
-Adam

Good question. I certainly have created products that did not do as well as I thought they would. And I have also released products that did much better than I thought they would do. So the answer lies in understanding your market and their needs properly before you get into the development process.

Will

Hello,
when I create a product I say to myself would I buy that if I saw it for sale some place else.
If the answer is yes I make it.

There's several things to consider before creating a successful product. First, don't start with the product, start with the pain of your market. There would never be instant coffee if there wasn't already coffee lovers who were in a hurry.

If you find a pain that many people face, then you're chances improve dramatically. Remember, people will buy more to solve a pain than to acquire pleasure. Said another way, people will be more motivated to buy a fix, repair, or solution to a problem rather than prevention to avoid the problem.

The great thing of knowing this is because it also affects your pricing strategy.

Using the coffee example, you can buy a package of coffee at a grocery store for about $4 which will make you at least 20-30 cups (sorry, don't know the exact content of coffee), but many people run out of the house in the morning forgetting to make coffee so they go to starbucks or dunkin donuts and pay $3-$4 for a single cup.

They pay more for an instant solution rather than paying nothing and taking 5 minutes and doing it themselves.

The point is that problems already exist, even with information, and finding that out first is the ideal way to start.

Yup...

This happens all the time.

The more stuff you are putting out there, the greater chance you have for flops, but also for successes, too.

I've had full on products fall right in my face.

Even good, solid market research cannot guarantee that a product will blow as much as you want/expect it to.

I suppose it's one of those things that we will never know until we put it out there.