Wade Armstrong

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American Inventor: Episode 3 Recap

Posted Saturday April 1, 2006 in Entrepreneurship

If there was one lesson to this week’s American Inventor entries, it was “do your research.” Most of the products that were kicked out either obviously failed to meet the actual (rather than surface) needs of the market, while many of the rest require going head-to-head against a Fortune 500 company or bucking industry operating norms. Both are good ways to get into trouble.

Know Your Market

There were people this week who knew their market — for instance, the Toner Belt, an upper-body resistance workout tool that could be worn around the belt. “You can use it sitting down in front of the TV!” said the inventor, proving that he understands the American people. Like any good businessperson — not just inventor of an idea, but seller of the product or service in that idea — the Toner Belt’s inventor had done his market research and had a product that met real needs.

Less successful was the Perfect Pet Petter, an automated hand that could pet your pet while you were away (the Petter came complete with recorded master’s voice). Putting aside for the moment the likelihood that any moving mechanical hand would scare off the pet in question, you still have the problem that you’re selling a product for a pet, but getting the person to pay for it. This is obviously not insuperable, as the massive pet products market shows, but it does create a set of challenges. What is it that the end user wants? What is it that the purchaser believes the end user wants? Why and when does the purchaser want to make the end user happy? These are some of the questions anybody selling such a product needs to answer, and it’s not clear that the Perfect Pet Petter’s inventor had considered the value proposition to anybody but the pet (and maybe not even there).

Continuing with the pet theme we saw the Shapoopie, a product with several substantial problems. First of all, it was described as “a universal product for the whole world,” which is always a bad sign, because when was the last time you knew six billion people who all had the same desires as you? Except for oxygen and Wal-Mart. Worse, the product itself is a “pre-emptive pooper scooper” — a container on a long wand that you hold behind your dog for him or her to do his or her business into. The question here is: do dog owners really want to catch poo? Now that would be some fascinating customer research. I suggest a demo and then focus groups.

The judges passed on the Temptress Bra, a bra especially designed for women with breast implants. Now, I’m inclined to give the four judges the benefit of the doubt, based on their career success, but this product seems to me to be a slam-dunk. You have a small market, sure, but one that’s just spent thousands of dollars to enhance their breasts. Wouldn’t it make sense that this market would be highly-motivated to spend hundreds of dollars to continue to enhance their breasts? I would imagine that you could get high loyalty, high repeat purchase, and high margins on such a product. Big mistake, judges! This inventor had a solid understanding of the market here and a well-targeted product.

Know Your Industry

Just as important as knowing the customer is knowing the context in which you will operate and, particularly, the people who will be trying to either make or kill your product. Will you have a lot of competition? More-skilled competition? Do your research and find out, or end up like the Rescue Disc. This idea, basically a Frisbee on a line that can be thrown out to a drowning person and with which said drowning person can be pulled back, comes into a market that one of our judges, probably with some authority and reason, described as saturated with similar products. How would the Rescue Disc stand out? What had been put into it that wasn’t already in all of the competitors? The inventor wasn’t even aware of the competition, a problem that could have been fixed with a simple google search.

Another contestant who could easily fall victim to competitors was the disposable bedding, an invention which, somehow, actually advanced to the next round. I’m not unconvinced that disposable paper bedding, made from the same stuff as diaper liners, could be successful in a nursing home or hospital setting; I am unconvinced that any small operator could make the stuff cheaply enough. After all, enormous companies like Procter & Gamble and Kimberly-Clark already make hundreds of millions of diapers a year; they have the complete procurement and production system set up to make the paper product, how difficult would it be for them to just package some of that liner product a little differently? Meanwhile, the disposable bedding inventor must invest millions, if not billions, to make her own factory; and she must also set up the sales network, a network that diaper makers already have (after all, P&G’s Pampers supplies most of the diapers to American hospitals, a key market for disposable bedding). If a little competitive research reveals that enormous companies can make the same product cheaper than you, and sell it cheaper than you, to exactly your current customers, then you may be in trouble.

The BevPlate, a cleverly-perforated paper plate that includes a cupholder, also advanced, but may run into trouble in the next round. It’s a good concept, with a well-articulated market of people at stand-up events who previously couldn’t hold both food and a drink at the same time, and it comes into a market in which people have shown substantial willingness to pay for premium disposable dinnerware. However, one of the judges pointed out the difficulty and cost of fabricating the plate (probably a complex die cut, and, if die cuts on plates are anything like die cuts on the printed materials I’m used to working with, an expensive die cut that costs several times the total cost of manufacturing the product). Part of understanding an industry is understanding how the operations within that industry work, in general, and a bit of thorough research would probably have revealed the problems with die-cut paper plate designs and other current manufacturing limitations.


With all of this, some good products got to advance to the next round, including a flosser and a moving alarm clock. We apparently have one last cattle call show, then I’m looking forward to getting into the meat of things. The series appears to be getting better, especially now that it doesn’t have to fill a two-hour time slot as it did with its premiere. A little luck and a lot of face time from the judges should bring us a good number of useful take-aways in the later rounds.