When you turn on the television, you see all these business gurus talking about how you should take control of your life and become your own boss and invent a wonderful product to start marketing like sliced bread. Well, if you examine which businesses these gurus started, it becomes blatantly obvious that they really don’t know anything about how to build a business based on a physical product.
The vast majority of the time, these gurus are investors who make money by giving you seed money and then taking 50% of your profits for a few years. They do nothing more than give you some startup capital, sit back, and wait for you to go broke (in which case they have contracts that guarantee your payment) or benefit from your hard work. It’s these same people who say, “It’s great to be your own boss, get out of there and fail, that’s how you learn.” Well, they make money on your learning curve. The other type of person who swears that starting their own physical product business is great is the marketing consultant. Marketing consultants, like most consultants, make money if you fail or succeed. They really have no real vested interest in your success.
These marketers love physical products because they can sell you many services to help you promote them: banner ads, branding, buzz building, viral marketing, supplier relationship management. All of these “services” do not guarantee sales. The more lazy a consultant gets, the more they deceive you. Stay away from the invention of physical products. It’s a dying business model for small entrepreneurs, 90% failing while consultants make money.