5 Ways to Boot Strap, Prototype, Market Test, Focus Group, and Product Feature Your Way to Success, or Utter Failure

Who says you don’t have enough money to start a business?  Inventors and entrepreneurs:  How much does it cost to start your business?  Develop your product?  Test your product?  Launch your product?  Do you have enough?  Can you do it for less?

One of the number one reasons businesses fail is because they don’t manage their cash flow and costs well.  I am willing to bet that another top reason that people never start the business they always dreamed of, or launch the product  they’ve been fiddling around with for 5 years, is they don’t believe they have enough cash. 

Guy Kawasaki, a blogger/investor/entrepreneur/ tech evangelist, is smashing the belief that launching an internet business requires millions of dollars in venture capital investment.  Check out his latest post, through which we are seeing a live experiment in the launch of the Truemors.com site.  A business/website which he started for $12,107.09.  His monthly breakeven number?  $150.00. 

His point…well, he has many.  One of his points, is to show that without so many of the things we use to believe one needed to launch this kind of business, we can now go for it cheaply and see whether our idea will work in the real world.  It doesn’t matter if his website succeeds or fails.  He’ll either do well, or move onto the next thing quickly without much loss in time and money, and with the confidence that he knows for certain his idea wouldn’t work.

I’m waiting to see the version of this in terms of a consumer product.  The ballgame is a bit different, but could it be done in relative fashion?  Barbara Carey seems to have developed a very strong product development strategy to keep her costs down before she feels good she has a winner.  For those new to the game, here are 5 quick strategies to getting your product as far along as possible without burning a ton of cash:

• Provisional Patent:  It costs roughly $100.  It gives your intellectual property a degree of protection for up to one year.  That’s a lot of time to develop and test your product to feel good about it before spending a lot of time and money on a full patent. 
• Build Your Own Prototype:  This might not work in every case.  But, chances are you can start to prototype parts of your product or rough, works-like prototypes of your product with off the shelf parts, a little ingenuity, and elbow grease.  This might be enough to get it front of a test group to start getting input.
• Test Your Product:  You can put your product, packaging, concept, drawings, anything in front of friends, family, focus groups, shoppers walking out of stores, your barber, and the monkeys at the zoo, to get as much input as possible for free, before you spend more to move your product down the development path.
• Wait on the Formalities:  In my first business, I learned a ton.  I learned that I didn’t need to go out and spend wads of money on gold-plated business cards, an expensive website (it should look good though), a $5000 logo, my own six figure salary, and any other thing that didn’t directly help me do the most important things of all: develop customers for my product and develop a product for my customers.
• Don’t Stop Testing:  Did the record skip?  Nope.  Testing again.  Don’t stop.  Ever.  Each testing point is a gate to see if your product passes through and warrants spending more time and money.  It’s a chance to continue innovating and developing a better product for a better market.  Have a question about your product or anything related to it?  Get others’ input by putting it before them.

The monkeys at the zoo are waiting…