Cheat Sheet
About This Episode
Most Project Creators, and Product Creators specifically, have crowdfunding backwards.
They think, “Money first, product second.” (M-F-P-S)
It makes sense.
If you are looking at a low bank account, and don’t have experiencing raising angel or VC money or don’t want to sell ownership of your idea, then Crowdfunding sounds like a Pot of Gold at the end of a rainbow.
And while M-F-P-S CAN work, the failure rate is SUPER high.
That’s because there are two major ways a campaign can fail:
1- Project Creators don’t truly understand the problem they are solving and haven’t actually hit “Product Market Fit”, so the campaign fails at launch. Note: building a pre-launch audience (my favorite topic as regular listeners will note) is easy once you have hit Product Market fit, and nearly impossible if you don’t.
2- Project Creators have achieved Product Market fit, but their “Product” is in reality only an “Idea”. They don’t understand the manufacturing process and they haven’t fleshed out their true manufacturing costs. Once they raise a ton of money, they quickly find out that they are LOSING money on each order.
So you have to get as much of the manufacturing and marketing legwork out of the way BEFORE your launch as you possibly can.
So how do you do that?
Enter Filip Valica.
Filip Valica is a mechanical engineer and experienced product developer. He has worked for mom and pop shops as well as large companies like IBM.
He has brought a number of products to market and worked on all parts of the value chain, all with experienced companies.
What Filip noticed was that the systems and processes experienced companies use to minimize risk in a traditional product launch were nearly identical between companies.
After reviewing his DIY Product Development Flow Chart (see link below!) I knew his processes, when executed in parallel to my Product Launch Checklist, can drastically increase your chances of success!
In this episode, we take a deep dive into the interplay between marketing, design, and manufacturing.
I learned a bunch in this interview and I know you will too.
Resources Mentioned