In my last blog post, The Wonderful World of Product Creation, I gave an introduction on how to develop and create your own products and about the kinds of products you can create.
But, how do you create a product?
Whether you want to develop a physical, intellectual, or digital product, you need to start somewhere.
In this blog post, we’ll get you started on finding a product you will want to create.
The first question is usually “Where do I start?”
Do you?
- Have business cards printed.
- Have a telephone installed.
- Grab a pencil and paper, sit down at the table and start inventing.
Absolutely not!
So what do you do? The first thing you must do is…
Find Problems
What do successful product inventors do?
They find a problem and then find a solution to that problem.
So your first job is to find a problem but where do you start?
Start in your own life, look around to the things that you do.
Are there times when you wish you had something to make your life easier?
Are there things you wish could help you do something faster or better?
Is there information that you wish you had before you made a decision?
These are all places to start when you’re developing products – whether physical or digital.
The secret is to start with what you know and try to see if there’s a problem that you can fix.
Problem Brainstorming
How do you find problems?
As you go through the discovery process, don’t worry too much about the solution (we’ll get to that later) but use these steps to simply start listing problems in your life.
As you get ideas… be sure to jot them down… but when don’t just stop and start to work on that idea, keep going with the problems list; so get a pen and paper and make a list of…
- The times you’ve hurt yourself and how it happened. It can be anything, maybe you slipped and fell or maybe you hurt yourself in the kitchen or while fixing your car.
- The times when you were embarrassed about something. Maybe you didn’t know something or you should have or felt uncomfortable in a social situation.
- The times you’ve been frustrated because you didn’t know how to do something. Like maybe, your toilet overflowed or your call stalled or you didn’t know how to change the diaper of your little nephew.
- The times when something physical impaired you. For example, you were too tired or too heavy or too weak or …
- Or other things that was a problem or irritation to you, no matter how minor.
After you make the list you should have a list of at least 25 (on up to 50) issues and problems.
This list becomes your idea journal, something you should carry around with you at all times so that when you see something, when something “bothers” you or you get a great idea you have it all in one place (and you know where that place is 
From this list, you should be able to come up with a product that solves the problem; and what’s really great is you have a list for future products or to replace products that don’t sell well.
Now is the time, when you’re just starting to do things right.
So you should create a product creation workbook.
Get a binder with tabs. Each tab will be one product and you will put in the product description, the solution description, alternate or additional ideas, research results and Web sites, all everything else related to the product.
As you create products you will add tabs for that product; alternatively you could get smaller binders and have one binder for each product.
I know this sounds very manual and like work but, while you can and should keep digital copies of everything you can, the sheer act of putting in the binder actually helps solidify things in your mind and make it more successful.
Plus you can access you product information anywhere and anytime without needing a computer. After all, brainstorming in front of a computer isn’t always the best place.
Okay, back to the finding the problems.
If you don’t yet have a list or 25 or more problems, or are having a hard time coming up with many then try finishing the below sentences to get you going:
- Wouldn’t it be nice if…
- I sure wish I had more…
- I sure wish I had less…
- I really hate it when…
- What do I do when _____ happens?
- It takes so long to do…
- I get annoyed when…
- I was so embarrassed when…
- Just the other day I recently forgot…
- I wish I know how to…
- I really don’t enjoy…
- I would like _____ so much more if…
- A bad event in my life was when…
These questions should elicit responses to problems and issues.
Use Magazines
Another way you can find problems is to look at magazines.
Go to a library or bookstore and look at popular magazines; particularly those very specific topic magazines — don’t look at the news magazines because they won’t often have what you’re looking for.
Remember, you want to find specific problems that have solutions you can provide.
Article titles are particularly good for quickly finding problems; for example, an article title “7 Ways to Cut Home Heating Costs” tells you that this is a topic important enough to a large group of people that a magazine wrote an article about it.
This cost of heating might just be the problem you are looking for!
Looking at magazines make it easy to develop products because they have been carefully researched to be topics that would be of great interest to their subscribers and readers.
And they frequently do exactly what you are looking to do, that is, find solutions to problems in the lives of their audience.
So leverage on the time and money they’ve spent by getting ideas and creating products from their work.
Use the Internet
The Internet can be a great place to find ideas.
Go to both popular forums or popular groups (like in Yahoo!, Facebook, etc.) and find out what people are talking about.
If a lot of people have problems with a particular thing this may be just what you were looking for; write all those you find in your idea journal.
Yahoo Answers! And other sites like it are also another good place to look because it is where people come specifically to get answer to problems.
This can be an idea gold mine.
Other sites like Google, ClickBank, Commission Junction, etc. can also be places that can give you information on what people are looking for and problems needing solving.
Conclusion
Creating successful products isn’t just sitting down starting a company.
The world of sales and marketing doesn’t follow the “If you build it they will come” philosophy.
They solve a need or problem that exists in enough people that they are willing to purchase a solution.
So you need to start by identifying a problem.
Create an idea journal to list ideas, issues and problems as you think of or experience them.
To get started sit down and find things that troubled you or things you hope and wish for.
One way of doing that is finishing these sentences:
- Wouldn’t it be nice if…
- I sure wish I had more…
- I sure wish I had less…
- I really hate it when…
- What do I do when _____ happens?
- It takes so long to do…
- I get annoyed when…
- I was so embarrassed when…
- Just the other day I recently forgot…
- I wish I know how to…
- I really don’t enjoy…
- I would like _____ so much more if…
- A bad event in my life was when…
You can also use magazines and the Internet to really target specific problems people are having.
Once you’ve found a problem you can create a solution and that exactly what we’ll look at next time.
How do you find products to create?
Do you have any struggles?
Please leave a comment below and let me know.
Talk soon,
The Shameless (Ethical) Marketer
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