What to Sell

There is an old saying “if you build a better mousetrap, the world will beat a path to your door”.

It’s very popular and is a mantra I hear often.

It also happens to be completely – and dangerously – wrong.

One mistake I see over and over again with business owners is they’re inventing and creating products and services, and then looking for a market to sell it to.

Even at the small end of the scale, you get budding information marketers spending a lot of time creating information products before they know if there’s anyone out there willing to buy them. At the other end, you have Sir Clive Sinclair and the disastrous C5.

And while this can work and it does work (after all, every commonplace product was a new invention once), it’s fraught with difficulty and peril. And even if you succeed, you don’t get extra points for making things hard on yourself, for being a trail-blazer. Every pound you deposit in the bank is worth exactly a pound whether you worked hard for it, or whether you made it easy on yourself and earned it without too much effort.

If you want to maximise your chances of success, you must do your research… and sell what people want.

Most people balk at this because it’s both hard work and potentially disappointing and you might discover there is no market for your favourite new idea.

It’s human nature to avoid this kind of disappointment, but it’s vital you realise you’re going to experience it anyway, and it’s better to get it over with early before you’ve invested substantial time and money into a dead duck.

The good news is market research is easier than it looks. It doesn’t need focus groups (which are notoriously fickle, anyway), questionnaires or complicated research.

No, it’s as simple as looking around and seeing what people are already buying. What’s selling well in the marketplace? Where is the money being made right NOW?

If you can see what people are buying, your job suddenly became much easier, because all you have to do now is do it better and market it more effectively.

You don’t have to copy, and you don’t even have to compete. Nothing on Earth is being done as well as it can be done, and there is always a new and different way to make, present and market a new way of doing an old thing. Do what you do best, do it as best you can and do it better than anyone else, and you can’t go far wrong.

It really is that simple.