Hey guys, my 2 friends and I have come up with an idea for a product we want to take to market because it's got a significant demand.
The three of us are 19, so we haven't got a huge amount of capital to start with though we can get a grant from their school or our government, and/or fund the project with kick-starter to really prove there is a demand for this product. I won't mention what the product is, but there was a concept posted all over the net a while ago and there are loads of people asking where they can buy one.
Now here's the issue. I'm really fortunate to have a Dad who is a salesperson for a really big engineering firm that has its own in-house manufacturing, plus he's started and failed 3 of his own projects that involved manufacturing of a product. I spoke to him on the phone and he basically told me to stick with publishing or a service for my first swing at a start-up because of the huge amount of pitfalls that managing even a single SKU business can have.
We don't have a lot of money, and we have 0 experience with manufacturing products.
We'd be able to source some parts of the product from China and Indonesia, but because it has electronics there are a lot of complications that my Dad brought to my attention that I had no idea about.
Not to mention that there are several things that can go wrong with an offline product based business like dealing with the supply chain, rejects, cancelled orders, returns, and shipping.
He also told me that he thinks kick-starter is a great platform, but that he's seen with his very own eyes projects that have come from kick-starter to the engineering firm he works for fail really badly because of inexperience.
I have to agree with him, if we got upwards of 5,000 orders, hell, even less, I have no idea how we'd execute delivering the product to our backers, because it's not just a simple injection moulded paint roller cover, or a simple counter-weight camera stabilizer, our product has electronics in it, plus it needs batteries, sensors, a display and other stuff.
Any advice would be great, and it'd be even better if someone with a business that sells their own manufactured product provided some input. Thanks for reading this, and thanks for any feedback in advance.
The three of us are 19, so we haven't got a huge amount of capital to start with though we can get a grant from their school or our government, and/or fund the project with kick-starter to really prove there is a demand for this product. I won't mention what the product is, but there was a concept posted all over the net a while ago and there are loads of people asking where they can buy one.
Now here's the issue. I'm really fortunate to have a Dad who is a salesperson for a really big engineering firm that has its own in-house manufacturing, plus he's started and failed 3 of his own projects that involved manufacturing of a product. I spoke to him on the phone and he basically told me to stick with publishing or a service for my first swing at a start-up because of the huge amount of pitfalls that managing even a single SKU business can have.
We don't have a lot of money, and we have 0 experience with manufacturing products.
We'd be able to source some parts of the product from China and Indonesia, but because it has electronics there are a lot of complications that my Dad brought to my attention that I had no idea about.
Not to mention that there are several things that can go wrong with an offline product based business like dealing with the supply chain, rejects, cancelled orders, returns, and shipping.
He also told me that he thinks kick-starter is a great platform, but that he's seen with his very own eyes projects that have come from kick-starter to the engineering firm he works for fail really badly because of inexperience.
I have to agree with him, if we got upwards of 5,000 orders, hell, even less, I have no idea how we'd execute delivering the product to our backers, because it's not just a simple injection moulded paint roller cover, or a simple counter-weight camera stabilizer, our product has electronics in it, plus it needs batteries, sensors, a display and other stuff.
Any advice would be great, and it'd be even better if someone with a business that sells their own manufactured product provided some input. Thanks for reading this, and thanks for any feedback in advance.
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