Comments on: Can you profit by serving early adaptors?

By: Josef Hoffman

Josef Hoffman — Sat, 29 Dec 2018 07:07:03 +0000

It seems to be a common occurrence that if the technical developers of a new product think it is just great, they assume that the intended customers will, too. And that becomes the main (or the only) criteria that is used to decide to fully develop and market the new product. Another approach to developing new products is to first do market research. Ask potential customers “If you had a magic wand, what product would you conjure up to solve some of your business problems?” Or, if a new product concept had already been fleshed out, ask potential customers if they would buy it if it existed?

By: Kent Deines

Kent Deines — Tue, 04 Sep 2018 21:04:56 +0000

A friend of mine, Joel, had a similar experience at about the same time. He had an automated visual inspection system he was selling. He was able to get a number of sales into factories, but for only one unit each. He would get the most positive feedback he could ask for and be told about the other opportunities they had including parallel production lines. The problem was that the sales model required multiple sales to a customer and in spite of the rave reviews they never got a second order. One of manufacturing engineers Joel worked with won a award from his company for his efforts to bring the vision system into the company and was flown to a meeting where the Chairman of the Board gave him the award, but the company never bought one.
Trying to understand why, we dreamed up a bunch of explanations:
In court it sounds better to say “Our product is 100% visually inspected.” Even though we all know that the inspectors fatigued a few minutes into their shift and couldn’t see a defect on a bet.
The rejection rate increased, decreasing yield and increasing waste. The penalty for shipping defective parts was small while depressing yield is expensive.
And then there is simply change.
Kent

By: Barry Yarkoni

Barry Yarkoni — Tue, 04 Sep 2018 20:57:07 +0000

Hi Dave,
In 1975, Intel hired 7 of us to be the evangelists to get “early adopters” to design Intel microprocessors into their products. That program was highly successful. We all did a mix of training, helping, selling, and supporting, and whatever else it took to get the design wins.
Warmly,
Barry

By: Michael O'Daniel

Michael O'Daniel — Tue, 04 Sep 2018 19:08:58 +0000

Particularly if they make an agreement with you re: the testing and then don’t bother to live up to it.