developing new products

Review Your 2024 Goals

2024 is more than
50% over.

You had goals for this year.

Review them.

Are they still applicable?
Do you still want
to achieve them?

If the answer is yes,
take one small step
toward achieving one
today.

If you plan to start
a business,
perhaps decide
on a logo color
or an industry
you wish to play in
or the type of customer
you wish to attract.

If your goal is
to launch a new product,
select a font
for the packaging
or craft a list
of possibly raw material
suppliers
or devise three possible
taglines for the new product.

Take a small step
toward achieving
your 2024 goals.

Expanding Your Business

The book graphics tool company
I’ve been using
has now ‘expanded’
their offerings
to author services.

They haven’t updated
their available graphics
for three months.

They’re ignoring
their core business
to focus on the other offerings
and that is reducing
value for their existing customers.

I likely won’t renew
my subscription with them.

I’ll move
to a dedicated graphics company
or buy software and stock images
and do it all myself.

If you want to retain
your customer base,
don’t focus
100% of your energy
on new products/services.

Allocate some resources
to your original products/services.

Sentinel Intelligence

One of the activities
I find extremely interesting
is
looking at trends
in different industries
and places
and demographics
and figuring out
how they might converge.

Many of us
call this
‘connecting the dots’
and it helps us
avoid dangers
(like food supply collapses)
and
recognize opportunities
(like awesome new products
to develop).

Jessica Wildfire
has a more professional term
for this.

She
calls this
sentinel intelligence.

She
shares

“If you have sentinel intelligence,
then your brain can aggregate and sift
through extraordinary amounts
of information
in a very short period of time,
especially when it comes to
seeing latent or hidden dangers.”

(This entire post is gold.
She talks about conspiracy theorists
and also why many people
don’t heed warnings.)

If you’re developing
new products or services,
you NEED someone
with sentinel intelligence
on your team.

You need someone
who can connect the dots.

Thinning The Possibilities

I recently had to thin
my tomato plant seedlings.

It was painful.

I had to kill
several potential plants.

But doing that
will give the remaining plants
more nutrients, water, space,
other resources.
It gives those plants
better odds of surviving
and bearing tomatoes.

Many of us have
too many projects on the go.
By pausing or killing some,
we can give the remaining projects
more resources
and a better chance of success.

Sometimes we have to kill projects
to succeed.
Do it.

If They Don’t Use The Products…

A loved one was asked
to bring vodka to a party.
He doesn’t drink alcohol.
The asker knew that
yet still assigned him this important task.

There are hundreds of types of vodka.
They are all different,
will taste different in mixed drinks.
The loved one picked one bottle at random.

Is it a good brand/type?
He doesn’t know.

The asker won’t know that either
until the loved one
arrives at the party.

You might be shaking your head
right now,
thinking how the asker
should have clearly asked someone else
to buy the vodka.

Yet we do this ALL the time.

We talk about our business ideas
to people
who would never use those products/services
and then we VALUE
their completely random feedback.

Don’t ask someone who doesn’t drink alcohol
to bring alcohol to a party.

And don’t ask someone
who would never use your products/services
their opinions
on those products/services.