169: Critical Testing Stages in New Product Development

Ryan Margolin is the CEO of Professional Hair Labs, a cosmetic company with dozens of products with tens of millions of dollars in sales all over the world. He has spent 25 years in the consumer product sales and marketing industry, and is also a TEDx speaker. Today Ryan is going to share some valuable knowledge for inventors, startups, and small manufacturers on what the foundation of smart consumer product testing is, what the different types of product testing are and at which stages in the development process, and how to leverage a pilot manufacturing run to ensure a strong brand alignment with your customers.

Today you will hear us talk about:

Marketing Brief is the scope of the product.

Most products aren’t going to speak to everybody on the market, so figure out exactly what your solution is and to what specific types of people.

What types of testing are required for your product.

Compliance tests. These are tests the ensure your product meets the regulatory requirements.

Compliance testing is generally a base line

Reliability of those tests

You never get a second chance to make a first impression

Reliability is what the client will expect, which will be compared to best in class, which is a lot higher quality than compliant or regulatory testing.

Global sales is easier than ever to achieve, so if you put yourself to a high global calibre, you can sell worldwide.

The global marketplace is more accessible now than it has ever been.

Pilot production, which is customer testing

Get the product to be as reliable as can be, then do a pilot production run to test the customers.

This is a critical phase of ensuring that a few potential customers are tested.

Get paying customers to pay for the product if you can, even just a few, so that you can learn as much as possible.

This is the key separator between the companies that go big and the companies that constantly struggle is those that put the effort up front to test and validate their products as opposed to going to big production runs out of the gate.

The more testing you do earlier, the exponentially less expenses and headaches you have down the road.

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The Product Startup Podcast Links:

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Partner: PTC’s best-in-class software solutions Onshape: The only cloud-native product development platform that delivers full-featured computer-aided design (CAD), integrated product data management (PDM) and enterprise analytics in a single system, and Creo: 3D CAD solution that provides designers with the most innovative tools to build better products faster, such as generative design, additive manufacturing, real-time simulation, IIoT, and augmented reality.

Producer: MAKO Design + Invent is the original firm providing world-class consumer product development services tailored to startups, small manufacturers, and inventors. Simply put, we are the leading one-stop-shop for developing your physical product from idea to store shelves, all in a high-quality, cost-effective, and timely manner. We operate as one powerhouse 30-person product design team spread across 4 offices to serve you (Austin, Miami, San Francisco, & Toronto). We have full-stack in-house industrial design, mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, patent referral, prototyping, and manufacturing services. To assist our startup and inventor clients, in addition to above, we help with business strategy, product strategy, marketing, and sales/distribution for all consumer product categories.