If you build it, they WON’T come.
Build a better mousetrap and ….[fill in the blank]
If you answered the world will beat a path to your door, you’ve been infected with the Myth of the Mousetrap. I say infected because myths are stories we believe about how the world works that turn out not to be true. The good feeling we get from believing the story outweighs the pain of the reality check. So the myth persists. Perhaps it’s related to the desire for a CERTAIN button
The Myth of the Mousetrap is perhaps the most damaging myth about business. It gives the impression that building a product (no, make that building a good product, or even just a better product than the other guy) is the majority of what it takes to build a business. That’s just not true. Yet the comfort of believing it forces countless business owners to endure the pain of failure despite having a good, or great, or superior product.
It seems that this problem plagued the inventors of the television, the shopping cart, and the more recently the shootAndstar Rebounder. [**Disclaimer – free advice is worth what you pay for it, and in the case of the rebounder inventor, it’s unsolicited to boot. Not that that has stopped me before.]
Click here and scroll down to the section called HE SHOOTS – HE SCORES! You can see from his comment he’s focused on the product. Unlike his web site which seems to be focused on large colored letters. There is only one picture of the device, and I can’t tell how it works without some study. There’s some mention of a video, but it doesn’t link to anything – not in my browser (Firefox).
These mistakes are typical of people who build a product and hope to turn it into a business. Think how different if this were invented by folks at Spaulding or Nike – people who built a business that they hoped to improve with a new product. I suspect they’d be thinking price point, marketing costs and distribution channels way before the prototype was built. There’d probably be licensing deals with hoop manufacturers and almost certainly a patent application. Not that this would guarantee success, they’d obviously have a larger cost structure to satisfy – but they’d start knowing it takes more than a great idea.
And yet, the rebounder inventor is doing better than many I’ve known about. Sales in 30 states and other countries in about a year? Not bad. New technology makes it easier and cheaper for a solo practitioner to do some of the good things a big company would do. If he does that, while still keeping his cost low (and don’t quit the day job) he could have the best of both, and end up with a real successful business.