Pushing Your Own Product

Need to sell your own product or invention? Maybe you are looking for the right investor?

Product presentation shows your product or service solving a problem. That’s what your potential customers or investors meed to know. Does this thing solve a real problem, or not? Maybe you need to spin it a bit differently if you are approaching investors rather than the market, but the message is similar. Show them why they need this thing. Show it in context. Take the covers off while it is in operation. Fly a camera into it’s guts and point out the key features. Communicate. Do it quickly and cleanly.

That takes more than a Power Point bullet list. Video can be good in some cases, but a talking head can’t really show the product doing its thing. We need both the human connection and a free wheeling camera that can take the viewer on a ride into the machine. And a well modulated human voice-over, combined with a few appropriate background sounds nails it down as a real experience while educating the viewer on every important pont. They don’t call it eye candy for nothing.

A multi-media production house can use 3D animation, professional voice over, sound effects, special visual effects and combine it all into a powerful communication vehicle suitable for a board room, youTube or your website.

John

The Immediate Future

Instead of writing about what might be 20 years from now, let’s tackle the next five years. Looks like an economic downturn that might be a bear. What life preservers exist? Jobs could get scarce. Job security could vanish. But the Internet will still be there and will be the power line for any recovery to come. Even if people tighten up and don’t have as much available cash, some things have to be spent. Like food and clothing. And maybe information on starting a business. Think about it, if you lose a good job, and jobs are scarce, what can you do? Sure, look for another job, but consider selling something in addition.

It’s not easy but there are ways to make a living working for yourself. It all depends on what you have to sell. If people need it, you can sell it. Even in a recession. The idea is to identify what you have that people need and want. If you don’t have it, then find it. Remember that old saying, you have to sell something, either your time or a product. Your time is limited, but a product – even someone else’s product – can be sold time and time again. So, let’s talk about how to sell things people need or want.

Most people who start their own businesses do so when they see something they like and they assume a lot of other people will also like the same thing. Very poor decision. And most businesses go broke in the first five years. Mainly, I suspect, because they tried to sell something not many people wanted. Or not enough people, anyway.

The internet is something new. It’s very cheap to start a business – cheaper than any other method. Even a website is easy – see how to do it yourself here. The idea is to find a product or service and sell it. But you start by asking what people need rather than what do you have to sell. Maybe they are the same, maybe not.

How do you decide? Using the internet you can look for information on how many people are searching for a particular term. Google provides a free keyword tool you can use to get a feel for the popularity of a keyword. And how many other people are trying to supply information or a service to those same people. It takes some familiarity with the tool to see it’s value but it and other tools like it can help you see who is searching for a particular term. If not many people search, then not many people want or need it. Try several keywords. Say you are interested in shoes. Try “men’s shoes” or “quality shoes” and look at the results in Google. All those people are supplying information or a product that relates to those keywords.

Assuming you see something people want or need, you have to decide if too many people are already selling a solution. If the field is too crowded, that makes it hard for you to compete. So the goal is to find a subject that gets 3000 to 5000 searches a month on Google and only has a handful of other websites that sell a product that would compete. Those websites can give you a lot of ideas on what products exist to meet that need.

John

Tech as Saviour?

The world could be a better place. Does it depend on any one thing?

Personally, I’ve spent a lot of time working on and hoping for better technical tools to solve the problems. If only we could get to the nanofactory in the next 15 years (see Dr Drexler’s website ) we could produce most of our needs without raping the Earth in the process. And reuse everything without creating pollution. But at the same time, there would be terrorists ( the other guy’s freedom fighter ) trying to use it to make ebola’s airborne step-son. Sometimes it seems like the struggle is just to get the sum game to come out even instead of lopsided on the side of evil. It is so much easier to destroy than it is to build something up.

I’m coming to the conclusion that we have to have both good tech and good people. Neither one alone is sufficient to keep intelligent life going on the surface of this planet. We are fundamentally animals and our emotions drive us to fight for resources ( oil wars, ethnic struggles for land and over religion) while our brains focus on better weapons. A few try to rise above it and see a better way, but if we don’t move the majority of us in a good direction, we really have not changed anything. And in the mean time we are reproducing like rabbits and this old ball of mud can’t support unlimited consumers for many more decades. Either we find a solution or the world will find it for us and that will not be pretty. Probably a lot of the planet will look a lot like the ethnic conflict of east Africa if we don’t grow up and figure out how to live together and keep our house clean.

Why do we need tech? Because with such a large population, we need tools that can supply food and energy and contraception a lot better than we can today. If we had a small solar powered device that could take in leaves, small sticks, grass and any other organic refuse and extrude perfect rice kernels at the other end we might have a chance. Sounds like a ordinary rice plant, the kind they plant by the billions by hand or tractor. But the difference is the rate of production, the reduction in human or machine work required and the ability to reproduce itself. It is very high tech and only available years after we reach mature nanotechnology. But it takes us out of the cycle of consumption that is overrunning the Earth. Or at least reduces our impact. At the moment, each human requires a tremendous amount of resources to live as we do. Especially those of us in the (over)developed countries.

Now, not to make things too much worse, for a smörgåsbord of delectable consumer delights go here