What are the odds that my new product will be successful?
There are all kinds of figures out and, and I'll give you the worst. The worst one was that there was a study done some years ago by the Boston Consulting Group on all kinds of products, and they found something like 1 of 1,400 products that people thought up actually came out and actually were a successful commercial product. You can narrow that down quite a bit as they were looking at all kinds of products; big kinds of products and everything else. You may have heard of 8 or 9 or 10 products succeeding; I think whether a product succeeds or fails really tends to do with businesses rather than products themselves rather than the marketplace. Regarding the product; it really depends on what you with the product. I am again referring to my master in this: Joe Cossman. I've really learned a lot from him. Joe had a lot of success; he also had some failures. He said that really the basic thing is what you do with the products that's different. He took not only the Ant Farm, but also a potato 'Spud Gun' which sounds like a strange name. It was a toy; potatoes are mostly water and you took this little gun, put the potato in there and fired, and it fired a little piece of potato. That product had failed miserably in the market place; awful. One way Joe used to find products was that he used to call plastic factories around in his city (which happened to be Los Angeles by the way), and he would ask them if they had any old tooling. He found out this one company had tooling and also about ten thousand of these little potato spud guns, and they had lost all kinds of money about ten years previously. He bought the tooling and the 10,000 spud guns for $500. He sold 850,000 Spud Guns, but it was a twist that he made to it and the way that he marketed it that made it different than what this person did before. Any product can be successful. I wouldn't look at the success rate. Just remember that the caution note is that any product can fail but any product can also be a success if you do it right.
