 The ultimate 15-step checklist for successful product research. Okay, so you've picked a product, but will it work? If you just move forward from this point forward, your chances are kind of random if you're going to be successful or not. And that's not good. That's why I put together this checklist. I want you to take your product, put it up against this checklist, and you'll know if the product's going to work or not. Don't forget to ring the bell. Turn on all bell notifications so you're notified each and every time I go live or if I upload a video. And give me a thumbs up if you don't mind. Okay, also make use of the comments down there. Some of you may have questions on this and I get it. Put those questions in the comments and I'll come back and I'll answer them. So I want to go through this list, put your product up against this list, and it can make you a whole lot more successful. And before we go through the list, I mean, what the heck is product research? Well, product research is basically figuring out in advance if you're going to be successful. That's pretty cool stuff. So you're going to look at the market. You're going to look at competitors. You're going to look at the audiences out there. And we're going to put all this stuff together and determine whether you've selected a good product. Okay, so let's go through, before we do the actual product research, let's look at how you can do product research. Okay, the first one is market-based criteria. So what is the potential market size? Really important to ask, what does the competitive landscape look like? Is it a trim or a fad or a flat or a growing market? What's going on with it? Is your product available locally and who are your target customers? So that is going to be your market-based criteria. Now let's look at your product-based criteria. What's your markup? What is your potential selling price? What is your product size and weight? How durable is your product? Does your product seasonal? Does your product serve a passion, relieve a pain or solve a problem? How often will you need to turn over inventory? This is really important in our products because we sell survival food and it has a shelf life, everything does. Is your product consumable or disposable? Is your product perishable? Are there any restrictions or regulations on your product? Is your product scalable? Okay, let me give you an example of one product. This is a company called Daneson and they sell high-end luxury toothpicks. Let's check it out. Okay, you can imagine that it takes a pretty discerning and dapper person to purchase exquisite toothpicks, right? So these are Daneson, the finest toothpicks right here. A product like this likely has a very narrow market size. The narrow market size limits the revenue potential for the business. However, depending on the exact market, a narrow market size potentially can be easier to market to allowing company like Daneson to penetrate its market and capture it more effectively. Now, once you've determined the market size, it's usually impossible for most businesses but there are a few ways to understand market size in more general way. Google Trends is a good starting point. So let's pull this up toothpicks on Google Trends. Check this out. From there, you can look for your particular product area being sold elsewhere and look at the number and quality of customer reviews. Are there no reviews, just a few or hundreds? This can give you an idea of how many people are searching for your keyword. And we also wanna look at competitive analysis. Who's selling out there? How long have they been selling? How much are they selling it for? And are they successful? Next thing I'm gonna tell you is determine your product outlook. When I started selling survival food online 12 years ago, a lot of people said, well, you don't have much future in that because once people buy it, then of course, you know, they don't need it anymore. But of course, that wasn't true because it doesn't last forever and people's attitude towards survival food changes. When I first started selling survival food online, there were a very few niche people that would buy it. But after we went through the world illness, almost everybody will buy my product now, okay? It's a very marketable product. So when you think it's a fad, sometimes it's not a fad and sometimes that fad will change. So you need to look at that. Now here's a chart on a fad right here. A fad is something that grows in popularity for a very short period of time, dies out just as quickly. Now a trend can be lucrative if your entry into the market or exit are timed perfectly. I think mine was with survival food. But this can be difficult to predict and usually a recipe for disaster if you don't know what you're doing. Now here's a good example here. A Geiger counter is a personal electronic device about the size of a cell phone that measures the level of radiation around you. Shortly after Japan suffered the earthquake in 2011, well, Geiger counters were just flying off the shelf. However, you can see from this Google Trends graph right here, interest died right after that. Nobody was interested anymore. So you wanna see if it's a trend, okay? Is it a trend? Is it something that's gonna die out later on? Now, maybe you're looking at a stable product. Maybe it's a product that consistently sells and it's been selling for a long, long time and it's probably gonna continue to do so. That's one of the best products to sell but it's also one of the toughest to break into the market of. Is the market growing or is it shrinking? In our case with survival food, the market grew exponentially because of the world illness. People started realizing there were food shortages and prices were going up and they wanted to have food in their home so that they were buying our products in masses. You also, since you're selling online, when you ask yourself, is your product sold locally? You know, if you were selling number two pencils, you could go down to any store and grab a pencil. That's not a problem. So the odds of somebody buying that online are far less because they could just buy it locally. So if you have a locally sourced product that anybody can buy anywhere, you gotta watch out. Next thing you gotta do is determine your target customer. I think that's very, very important. I alluded in the beginning of this that everybody needed our product now and they probably do need our product every person but not every person's gonna buy our product. So we have target customers. We figured out the age groups. We figured out the income level. We figured out regions of the country so we know who our target customer is and you gotta do the same thing with your product. Next part is you gotta determine the markup. How much are you gonna charge for your product? What percent of profit do you need to make? And that varies. Now, I've seen products that sell for, you know, $10. It only costs the person $2. That's a pretty good markup. Our market owner survival food is nowhere near that because we can't market up that much. However, I'm not selling a $10 product. I'm selling a $500 or a $1,000 product. So our percent of markup may not be as much but our total profit is far greater. Okay, so let's look at an example on the screen and I'm gonna talk about a 1,200% markup, which sounds like a lot, but let's check it out. Okay, so the cost per unit's $2. Product packaging is $0.10. Import shipping cost per unit is $0.30. Customs and duties is $0.40. Shopping cart fees is $0.25. Credit card processing fee, which is 2.75% of selling price is $0.69. Shipping fulfillment fee is $3.30. Shipping cost is $5. Advertising cost per unit is $5. So our total cost per unit is $17.04. Potential selling price, $24.99. So the shipping revenue is about $5. Total revenue per unit is $29.99. Now the margin dollars is $12.95. Margin is 43.8% and the markup is 46.65%. So as you can see, there's a lot of things to go into selling a product. And when you say, well, I can buy it for X number of dollars and sell it for X number of dollars, there's a lot of stuff in between. Then you get to determine your product's weight and size. We sell canned meats and those canned meats are heavy. They're very heavy and it costs us a lot to ship it. In addition to that, we have a lot of packing supplies we have to buy. We have to pack that product with styrofoam all around it so those cans don't get dented. If we have dented cans, people are unhappy and we have to replace products. So you've got to figure this out, what does it weigh? What is going to cost you to ship? How are you going to package it so it doesn't get damaged? Those are all factors you need to look at. Also ask yourself this, is your product seasonal? Now you would think we sell survival food canned meats and that wouldn't be seasonal, but it is. The majority of our sales are from September to March and that's been historically for the past 10, 12 years way it's gone, except when the world illness started and then people started buying year round because it was a year round problem then. Prior to that it was just people who were preppers and they were on vacation in the summertime and they didn't really worry about doing any of that stuff but when winter came of course they thought of stocking up. Now our cycle has changed. So your cycle may change on your product too but you've got to ask yourself, is it seasonal? Now the next three I think are really important that's pain, passion or problem. If people are super passionate about your product that's a good thing, are they passionate? Look at your audience, look at your product, are they passionate? Does it solve a pain point for them? Is some type of pain that they're going through right now that they don't have your product? Or does it solve a problem for them? Are they having some problem right now that your product could solve the problem? So if you could hit on all three of these your product has a much better chance of selling. Next up, what is the product turnover? How quickly are you gonna turn this over? Now our canned meats we have to make every two weeks but lately we've been making them every single week and the reason we've been doing that is because the demand is so great. So what is gonna be your turnover for your product? Another thing you gotta ask yourself will you have the inventory? Also ask yourself is your product consumable or is it disposable? Our product is consumable, not as often as we would want but it is consumable. But let's say makeup products or dish detergents or soaps those things are disposable and consumable. Now the last thing I wanna discuss is are there restrictions and regulations on your product? Now we produce food so we have to produce our food under USDA standards and we have to adhere to that. Does your product need some of those same standards because that's another additional cost that you've got a factor in. And of course the most important factor is your product scalable. Can you scale it up and make a lot of money? If it's always gonna be a small audience and small sales and you can't scale it you may wanna look at other products. Now I hope this helped you out. I've walked you through a lot of steps to check out your product and I hope I didn't hurt your feelings if your product didn't match up very well on this list. But it's better that you know that now than to spend a lot of time, effort, money and find out that you're not gonna make any money on your product. I hope you enjoyed this. I've been doing product research for many years or many different kinds of products so if you have any questions about that feel free to put any comments in the comment section below ask me questions or just say hello if you want. Thanks so much for watching this video. Don't forget to subscribe, hit the subscribe button. If you do it right now I'll show you a picture of a really cute puppy. See there, wasn't that nice? Go ahead and subscribe. Don't forget to ring the bell. Turn on all bell notifications so you're notified each and every time I go live or if I upload a video. Thanks for watching and I'll see you in the next video. Hey, thanks for watching my video. Don't forget to subscribe to my channel and click that little bell right there so you can be notified every time I do a new video. Also, click on one of those videos there. Thanks for watching on my channel.