Nowhereman wrote:

>
> Hi
>
> Just supposing I had invented a product that solved a major problem that
> people have been trying to crack for generations and that I can easily
> prove and demonstrate its value.
>
> Say I have either worked out how to make unlimited energy from sea water !
> or
> I have worked out how to accurately predict the beginning and even the
> angle of the next stock market trend ! or I can manufacture diamonds with
> some carbon and a few chemicals !
> All sound equally unlikely and perhaps even ridiculous I know (and this
> is
> the problem) but anyway....
>
> 1) If I show potential customers how to use my product (which would be
> very cheap and simple to reproduce), I have given away the secret and they
> won't need me anymore (and won't feel like paying me).
>
> 2) It just sounds too good to be true ! (The few prospects I have
> approached just laugh and give me a superior, all knowing smile assuming
> that I am trying to insult their intelligence or worse).
>
> Seriously how would you market a product such as this when most people
> think you are nuts and won't even return your phone calls / letters ?
>
> Most ordinary people would believe that such a product would make you an
> instant millionaire but prospects are just too cynical to even listen and
> might even laugh !

It sounds like you're going after this from the wrong direction. If the
idea is so simple that anybody who sees it demonstrated can replicate it so
easily that they'd rather do that than buy it pre-made (and it would have
to be down in the paper airplane range of complexity for that to be the
case), then perhaps instead of selling a product based on your idea you
should sell the idea. Write a book describing it, make videos, give
seminars, etc and make your money off of those.

If your product is as you say, even if you do manage to market it without
giving anybody enough information to reproduce it, you're only going to
make money off it until it's popular enough that everybody has seen one--at
that point everybody who didn't buy one will make his own and the market
for it will self-destruct.

You could patent it, however if something is so simple that tens of millions
of people would make it themselves rather than buy it then the cost of
defending the patent would be more than the income to be derived from the
sales.


> Who do I call ?
> Any ideas ?? Thanks a million.
>
> BG

--
--John
to email, dial "usenet" and validate
(was jclarke at eye bee em dot net)