I was obsessed with getting my product to market as fast as possible.
I had a clear vision and wanted it launched yesterday, so I pushed hard. But I was just moving faster, and not exactly in the right direction.
When I wasn't working on my prototype design, the rest of my energy went into securing a patent. I had fallen into the 3 P's trap, and I focused almost entirely on my prototype, patent, and pitch deck.
But by chasing what seemed like the obvious priorities, I missed some vital steps that led me down the wrong path.
I made two big mistakes, and at the time, neither one felt like a mistake. Both felt like progress.
The first was on the market side.
I hadn't done any real user testing. To me, the product was intuitive to use. But once it hit shelves, I realized people struggled to use it without me there to demonstrate it.
I was also skipping real product-market validation.
Countless people told me they loved the product: people at tradeshows, retail store owners, manufacturers, even sales reps. So I thought I had properly validated the product.
I also did a sales test at one Ace Hardware store where six units sold in a week. Naturally, I did the math: 6 units per store, times 4,000 stores, times 52 weeks.
That's over a million units a year!
I was basically a week away from yacht shopping.
Spoiler: those sales didn't repeat beyond the first store.
But at the time, I was convinced I had a winner.
The second mistake was on the technical side, and it was just as expensive.
I built my prototype until it looked and worked like a finished product, and I was proud of it. But the moment I partnered with a manufacturer, they took one look and told me it couldn't be mass-produced. It relied on glue and was a nightmare to assemble at volume.
So I had to go back and do a major redesign, rethinking how the whole thing went together just to make it simple enough to actually build profitably.
The design was technically fine. It just couldn't be manufactured, and I had no one experienced to tell me that until it was already built. That redesign cost me months, a bunch of new prototype iterations, and a lot of money.
And once it could finally be built, I went ahead and placed my big production order for 10k units.
My wife was getting tired of it consuming our life, our finances, and all our conversations. And I had no one around me who'd been through it before.
Looking back, both mistakes came from the same place. On the market side, I designed the product FOR users instead of WITH them. On the technical side, I designed it with no one experienced reviewing it.
Either way, I was too close to see what I was missing.
If I'd had some outside perspective to help me see those blind spots earlier, on both the market and the technical side, I could have had a much more successful product.
So take a moment to ask yourself: are there blind spots you're missing?
Don't want to repeat the same expensive mistakes I made? Here's the smarter way.