Three Score.
Not to sound critical, but that seems like a fairly limited opportunity.
Quote: " and then try selling it for a few months...and if it doesn't sell, then make it free.."
Unless you're clearly identified who the potential customers are and how you're going to drive them into your sales funnel. You're pretty much guaranteeing the latter here. Creating awareness, let alone educating potential customers of the benefits of a product can take some serious time.
My 2 cents - Research is your friend, it's what protects us from become another 'I tried and failed' bleeding heart online.
The number one issue that comes to mind would be - Don't assume there's a market just because the topic interests you. I'm not saying pick something you're not interested in, but for every idea there are various off shoot ideas also. Jump on google and invest a some time hunting them down. You might find your self a several niche(s) ideas that you can directly plug into.
What you're looking for really is a way of identifying the risk/effort against the possible return. It's typical to write a business plan. Which is just a bloated document that analyzes the potential of an idea. There's no guarantee, it still might all go south, but at least were trying to make a more informed decision than any assumption.
There's loads of this stuff online. Everybody is trying to get rich fast, ironically selling 'how to get rich fast products"
.. It's not easy, but it's not rocket science either.
Hopefully the following tidbits will help you formulate some answer when evaluating product ideas.. Those being Research (what to make and for whom), Marketing (How are you going to find and bring buyers to you), Production (building the product), distribution. Form here you can estimate of the products return over time.
Quote: "
1) Research
-> Product
* Who are your competitors ? (Free, Commerical)
* Compare your product design against the competition. (Find Strengths and weaknesses)
* What is different about your product (How does you solution differ from the competitions in terms of the customer!)
-> Customers
Who is the product targeted at ? (male/female, age, interest groups, education, businesses, home users, language )
What % of the target audience actually has the
ability to buy ?
Assuming a %0.5 to %1 conversion rate (people who view the demo and then buy), is the audience big enough to warrant servicing ?
Why would they buy your solution, rather than a competitors ?
* Surveys
What do the customers actually want from this product ?
What are their most important concerns (platform, functionality, price, support, etc) ?
Note: Interestingly tidbit is that there's a correlation between people who fill out surveys & interested (potential) buyers.
* Price
What's this product worth to them ?
* Resellers& Licensing
Are there opportunities for the product to be licensed by businesses/corporations.
* RISK
What risks are associated with this product ? (Competition, Life span, Intellectually properties, Trademarks even ..).
2) Marketing
* How do people find these type of products ? (print, word and mouth, search engines, forums, news letters, magazines, banner ads, etc etc)
* Are there established interest groups that you can plug into ? How large are these groups, who is already servicing these interest groups ?
* How do you intend to attract customers to your solution, over somebody else's solution ?
* What costs are associated with marketing the product ?
3) Production
> Requirements
* What is required to build the product ?
(Artwork, Sound, Code, Manual, Web )
-> Time
* How long will it take to create ?
-> Costs
* What costs are associated with creating the product. (tools, 3rd parties)
4) Distribution
-> Resellers ?
Will 3rd parties be able to sell the product for your
-> Costs
* What costs are associated with the distribution of the product.
Bandwidth, customer support,
5) Sales
- Dump all the info into spread sheet. So you can see all your costs factored against the projected exposure of your product. So if even the most conservative estimations produce something you're happy with, then off you go..
"
Objectivity is needed here. Imagine your trying to write a sound document (doesn't have to be 100 pages or anything) that weighs all the arguments together. Then have some
trusted 3rd parties pick over the document. Perhaps they can see a different angle on some issues. What you're left with hopefully, is a reasoned plan of action.
