Develop a plan for dissemination of your final project.
Who is the Target User / Buyer?
This product will be targeted at families who want to give
their children a back yard toy / game that helps them with
one (or many of their favorite) sports. In talking to
a few parents who have athletic children, they seem to
believe this product might make sense. Everyone seems
to agree that combining a moving/changing target for
children to aim with some feedback on the force would be
quite viable given most back yard athletic toys don't do
either of these things. |
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How will I distribute the project?I am unsure of how I might distribute this product. The main reason I am not sure is because I don't know how much "invention" will be involved. I don't think the idea itself is patentable, but the final product might have some element of invention that will be parentable. For example, I need to figure out how I'm going to accurately determine the force of the shot. As I learned in this project, Velostat did not do a great job of this. Perhaps there are things I can do to improve the accuracy with velostat, but even Neil suggested in the final presentation that I might want to consider do capacitive sensing with foam. So, once I get the issue of accurate sensing nailed down, I will look at whether this idea is worth patenting. Fortunately, I have a brother-in-law that is a patent attorney who has offered to help me. As he pointed out to me, there are multiple reasons to consider doing a patent:
Having said that, I totally recognize the cost (and
implications) of having to have a patent you need to
protect. |
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What else needs to be done?There are three big issue I need to resolve before I can seriously think of distributing this: 1) As mentioned above, I need more accurate sensors for the force. 2) The cost. Right now all the parts are too expensive. I need to find a way to manufacture something with fewer/cheaper parts. The price would need to be below $100, which means the parts and manufacturing would likely need to cost less than $25 or $50. 3) I need to look at the physical design of this to...1) make it more resiliant and 2) to make it look a little better. |
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How would I distribute this?I think there are four channels I would pursue to get this product on the market: 1) Talk to sporting goods stores. Having a deal with someone like Dick's Sporting Goods would put a product like this on the map, but a deal like that would be hard to close without some market success. 2) Talk to a sporting goods manufacturer. There are many companies that make sporting equipment who want to break into sports like lacrosse. If you could get a Nike, Warrior or other sporting good manufacturer to buy in you could leverage their distribution channels. 3) Schools. Schools buy sporting equipment. They buy the bouncebacks that I have referenced throughout my web pages. Why wouldn't they buy something like this? I know the kids at our middle school would love something like this. 4) Online stores. An Amazon like storefront could be a great way to get started with little cost. |
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Initial FundingI've been wondering about this one. My current thinking is that I won't even try for funding until I resolve some of the big questions listed above. Having said that, there are three potential sources I might consider (in the order in which I'd go after them): 1) Friends and family: I know of many people who are crazy about their children's athletic successes. So I might attempt to locally "crowd source" the funding to get this off the ground. 2) Kickstarter (or some other platform): I have seen many successful (and some not so successful) kickstarter projects. Having said that, if I can't get local friends to contribute, I would likely go to a crowd sourcing platform. 3) A local institution: I know of a few schools and some leaders of athletic club teams. I wonder whether they'd be interested in seed funding an idea like this. |
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