Welcome to the intro video where I talk about my 3 step process for product research.
The reason why i came up with this 3 step process is because when i first started, I had a lot of misconceptions and the whole big picture wasn’t clear to me.
Once I have been through all the stages and actually into profit, then I tend to understand that Product Research is a 3 step process, it’s not 1 step. Which most teachers, trainers, entrepreneurs try to teach.
I think if we clear the expectations from the very beginning, it becomes very easy for the student or for the new entrepreneur who is launching their first product on amazon using the private labelling process.
It’s very convenient to have a big picture clear so that they can plan and take action accordingly. And they dont have any misinformation.
With that being said, the first step of the product research method is to Identify a Good Quality Product. By good quality product, there are many factors, there is a specific criteria, you get run your product through that criteria and you get to decide if its a highly profitable product for you to launch as your first product. So that is number 1, to identify a good profitable product.
We talk about the product itself in detail in step 1.
The second step is to identify a good quality source, because if you have identified a good enough product which is going to be profitable and you have done all the profit estimation, but if you don’t have a good quality source, which is the supplier or the manufacturer who is going to produce the product on your behalf, based on your specifications, based on your instructions, if you fail to identify a good supplier or the source, then basically the foundations for your business are weak.
These are the two main foundations, the product itself and the supplier. You can’t just launch a good quality product without having a good, reliable, trustworthy supplier at the backend who is going to produce the product for you.
So supplier selection, identifying the source for your products is number 2 step of the process. Once you have identified the supplier who is going to produce, then what do you do?
So you have the product and you have the supplier.
Then the most critical the most critical step of the whole product research process is to place a test order and if you have this from the very beginning at the back of your head, if you have this mindset, that this whole first product is a big test, then it saves you from the frustration that you might have, if this particular product does not become successful in the marketplace.
Because even though you have done the best product research that you can, even though you have identified the best supplier that you can. Your product is not in the market yet, the real people, the real buyers, they haven’t bought your product yet.
So unless and until you put your products in the hands of your consumers, your customers and then they provide feedback based on the different ways that they perceive, because each person perceives product, information and the world around them in different ways, so each customer that you are going to get is going to provide you feedback on different categories, on different ways that they would like the product to be better.
For example, someone might say that the weight is too much or the weight is too low. Someone might say the built quality isn’t good enough and someone might say the built quality is absolutely fantastic. Someone might say that the product itself is good but i would really like if they had this feature in this product or if they improved the packaging of this product.
So may be you get 20 feedbacks by the launch of your test order. So then you have 20 feedbacks related to different aspects of your product, how people are perceiving it and how they want the product to be, and then you can take this information and decide whether you want to proceed with this product or you want to scrap the idea of this product and go find another product.
So if you do decide to continue with this product and the product is profitable, the built quality is really great because even if the supplier sent you the sample and you manually evaluated the sample, you never know exactly what they are going to deliver when it comes to the finish products.
So its very important to place a test order first and not consider this product research or this discovery of yours to be the grand finale, rather just consider this as a beta test and once you get the feedback you decide if its profitable and based on the feedback that you want to address those issue and then launch the product with those improvements, that’s going to be your actual product launch.
So i hope this whole concept clears much of the frustration and it gives you a mindset of taking this whole thing as a big test so you can save yourself from the frustration and you know that this whole thing is going to be a big test, unless i get feedback from the market.