I'm working on a potential business idea which I want to sell to Amazon. How can I approach them?

These are some great questions. As an entrepreneur, growing and scaling my business has been both a challenging and rewarding task. I'll answer both your questions separately: 1. How should you decide which business idea to pursue? Your decision should take into account both personal factors and should have regard to your environment, your market and your resources. From a personal perspective, choose an industry which (1) you are passionate about and (2) you have knowledge/experience in. This will considerably reduce your risk of failure. As a startup founder, you will find your job to be extremely challenging and the only way to succeed is through resilience. If you are not passionate, you will easily give up. Having the knowledge and expertise of your industry will not only give you more gravitas but also save you lots of time in research and understanding the wants and needs of your customer. From a larger perspective - ensure your business solves a problem that is large enough to build a profitable business out of. Here is a non-exhaustive list of questions to help you get there: 1. What is your intended customer base? It is harder to target a broad and general audience - try to establish a niche customer base which needs your products and/or services. 2. What problem does your service/product solve? Identifying a problem and providing a solution is the heart of every innovative idea. 3. How can you add value to the product and customer experience? Your customers need to gain benefit from purchasing your goods/services. 4. What are the most unusual characteristics of your business which will give you competitive advantage on the market? Establishing yourself in the market means you need some advantage over your competitors to attract their customers or new ones. 5. Have you researched your competition? In what ways do you feel you can do better than the competition? You need to know who are you facing to understand your market share, and how can you provide better solutions. 6. Do you have access to all the resources you need to launch the business? This includes funding, manpower, premises, equipment etc. 7. What is the size of the market? Do your research! 8. What would it take to create a minimum viable product and test it on the market? You don’t need a finished product to launch, start small and test your ideas. 9. What will it take to make profit? You need to have at least some estimated financial projections as to what you need to spend and what you need to earn in order to break even and then make a profit. 10. Is the problem you are trying to solve on the top priority list of the potential customers? Important consideration to see whether your products will sell. 11. What is your business model? How do you plan on charging your customers, how do your competitors do it, can you create additional revenue streams? 12. Is there a potential for growth? Think in the long term, can you scale the business further? 13. What are the possible roadblocks you are likely to face? You should attempt to find a solution for each problem you can think of. 14. Have you chosen a business name? Make sure that your name is descriptive of the branding and targets your customers. Ask people their input - choosing a name is an important matter as it will affect the rest of your branding. 15. Have you looked for your business name online? Ensure that no other business can be confused with yours. Ensure that the domain name and all social media accounts for your business name are available. I hope this answers your first question. 2. How do I decide which direction to invest my energy in and how can I develop my idea further? This will come to you much more clearly once you have found the answers to your first question. Ensure that you are spending your time in a way that produces results. Your first goal is to bring your MVP, to test it amongst customers, to learn from feedback and then to improve your product. Repeat this formula until you reach product market fit. I hope this helps - please don't hesitate to get on a call with me if you'd like to drill this down further.

I wrote an answer to a similar question today which you can find here: https://clarity.fm/a/2877 The one flaw to your current process is this premise: "Whereas, if I focused on a good idea the whole process of driving success would be easier." This - from my experience - is simply not the case. I'm working on what I believe to be the best idea I've ever had and it has been absolutely the most challenging time I've ever had in a career full of product challenges. So a "good idea" does not make the process any easier. As I privately advised the person who asked the other similar question: I'd encourage you to define all your own pain points in your life and filter by most pain and also least addressed by existing solutions. Building what you know and what you're excited about building is the best that any of us can hope for. There's no path to greatness that isn't full of challenges ahead. Happy to do a call to discuss further.

The way I see things, a pay-per-minute phone consultation ought to involve no sales pitch whatsoever. Nobody wants to pay for that, and nobody should. Consulting and sales are utterly different roles. Mutually exclusive, in fact. Is your value proposition external to the call or internal? A consulting call ought to be self-contained. By the time a client hangs up, they ought to be in a better position than where they started – with no further obligation to pay us. So ask yourself what the purpose of the phone call is. If your goal is to sell a product or service – a useful WordPress plugin in this case – then the call is a sales presentation not a consultation, and it ought to be free. The hard truth of sales is that a large percentage of prospects (the majority, usually) won't buy, even after a 30-minute presentation about the virtues of your offering. Time spent talking to dead ends must be factored in to your price and recouped by successful sales. Adding that cost as a fee for the sales pitch itself won't work out well. This is sometimes a tough distinction to make. In my own case, I offer a number of services (e.g. brand name creation) that go beyond the scope of a 15-minute phone call. When someone is paying me $5 per minute, I don't want to squander their time and money by explaining some other paid service! So the rule I've set myself is to stick to problems I can solve on the phone. When it's appropriate to explain the broader services that I offer, I try to do so in a non-paying context. Mainly through email. There's nothing wrong with using a free Clarity.fm call for a sales pitch. But it does sound like you're using phone calls in order to pitch a purchase; so charging for such calls would probably backfire.

First of all, what you have is a provisional patent **application**. For now, the provisional patent application is not publicly available. This can be a big advantage to you. You can use this time to improve your invention and file additional provisional applications. If you don't plan on making/practicing the invention yourself, you should make sure to try to think of everything possible regarding how that invention can be improved. This would (hopefully) come naturally to a practicing inventor. When you file your non-provisional application, your disclosure will be made public ("published") 18 months from the filing of the non-provisional. While your applications are not publicly available, I suggest waiting until you file your non-provisional application(s) to talk to others. Quite often, provisional applications do not have the detail or the scope that the non-provisional will have -- due to the time spent on getting drawings accurate and making sure everything is included in your non-provisional applications. It is best to have a complete application before talking to practicing companies. Sophisticated companies will take advantage of information not disclosed in your provisional application to file their own patent applications. If your applications are not publicly available (or even they are published), you should sign confidentiality agreements (non-disclosure agreements) with anyone you talk to about licensing or buying your invention. Keeping track of who you talked to with confidentiality agreements can be the basis for "notice" of the invention by an infringer -- when they eventually steal your invention. You can sell your idea anytime, but a provisional application is worth a lot less than a non-provisional application which is worth less than an allowed application or issued patent. Provisional applications are generally not as complete as they could be -- and require additional time and finesse to complete the non-provisional application. In terms of appearances, if you are not willing to put in the money to file the non-provisional application, the invention is likely not worth that much money. Companies as well as non-practicing entities may look at provisional applications, but not for long, and will not give you the kind of money that you may get from selling a fully examined patent. Of course, it depends on how good your invention is.

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