GoKawiilOpinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
Listen to this post
Key Takeaways A great product needs someone behind it who is willing to put in the money, time, and effort to make it work.
It doesn’t really matter how clever a product is if you can’t show people how it saves money, makes money, reduces risk or improves something they care about.
A good story makes a product believable.
I run a company built entirely on farmer-invented products, tools that farmers engineered to fix a real problem in their own operation. I get pitched dozens of them a year, and my job is to find the ones worth betting on, then do the hard part: build the market and sell them to farmers all over the world. Here’s what surprised me after doing it over and over.
The product’s brilliance has almost nothing to do with whether it sells. Every product I get pitched is brilliant. That’s never what separates the ones that take off from the ones that go nowhere.
I know that because I didn’t come up through farming. I came up through sales. For twenty years, I sold houses, then windows, then internet service, and in every one of those industries, I was an outsider who had to figure out how to make people care. That part never changes, no matter what you’re selling. So here’s what actually decides whether a product sells.
An inventor who’s all in
The biggest predictor of whether a product sells isn’t the product. It’s whether the inventor truly believes in it, and believing means putting your own money and time behind it. Every product I take on is already great. The ones that make it are the ones where the inventor is all in.
... continue reading