What to do with the ideas you have.
One Simple Idea: Eliminate Your Competition By Partnering With Them
When you come up with ideas that are incremental improvements, they have the benefit of being validated already. If people buy red umbrellas, chances are they’ll buy green ones too. However, it also means that there will already be plenty of others trying to sell different colored umbrellas.
Take on a “if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em” mentality and explore opportunities to work together with competitors.
Using Referrals
Renting out your ideas means that, in the end, you’ll stand behind the product’s quality with your name, so make sure you live up to it.
Whoever manufactures your product had better be good. But the best suppliers already have a lot of business, so how can you get a class A producer as a newbie? By getting a referral.
If you can get one of your major player allies to introduce you to their manufacturer, you’ll have a foot in the door and can negotiate a deal with someone who’ll deliver top-notch quality.
Tips For Licencing: Protect Your Idea
Contrary to negative belief, most companies do not want to steal your idea. The traditional way to protect your idea was to submit it for patents. This is a very expensive endeavor.
PPA: This is a provisional patent application and costs $110 to submit. This gives you “patent pending” status, which is all you need for 1 year to prove your idea and get it to market. This one concept can pay for this book 5,000 times.
Appeal To The Sub-Audience
Chances are you won’t stop at renting out one idea, because if you can get it to work once, you’ll want more of it. But there’s one pitfall you have to avoid when coming up with more products that are similar to your previous one: changing the target audience.
People who buy map sets want to go somewhere outdoors and hike, music freaks who want their lights to match the bass probably want to stay inside the car as long as possible.
It might seem like they are tangentially related, but not really. Instead, build something that either servers the same customer segment, or a sub-set.
Pitching Your Idea
If you decide to bring your idea to market, then you need to be schooled in business. This means you need money, management, accounting, production, sales, and marketing. Then, after you have all this, you need customers. All of this is hard.
Pitching your idea to the big guys is the way to go. They have the name brand, infrastructure and distribution channel to hit millions of people NOW. Everybody hates to cold call, but this is required for you to pitch your idea. This is much easier than it seems because companies want new ideas and that is the hook for you to get in.
Tips For Licencing: Look For Ideas
You do not have to be Einstein to have a breakthrough idea. If you have ever been shopping, then you can come up with ideas. The key here is to focus on things that really annoy you. If they annoy you, then maybe they annoy others, too. This is a starting point for a new idea. Think about problems and come up with solutions. This also gives you a reason to go shopping.
Tips For Licencing: Prove Your Idea
The traditional licensing model works like this. Find an idea, build an expensive prototype, spend a small fortune on patent protection, and hope it sells. This is why most people don’t think of licensing as a viable career because the barriers appear too big to bridge. Proving your idea before you spend any money is now easy to do. Google has built-in traffic. It is a ready-made platform for idea creation and proof. One simple way to do this is to create a video of your idea and ask for feedback. You can do this for a few hundred dollars.
