{Don Debelak’s new book, Turning Your Invention into Cash is now available on Amazon for $3.49. Go to Amazon.com and enter inventions Don Debelak to purchase. From the author of Entrepreneur Magazine’s Bringing Your Product to Market.}
Inventors Create Repeat Sales
Inventor Story: Brian Turkalo
How do you profit from your invention? Brian Turkalo found his opportunity for profit in creating a product with a consumable aspect — part of the product that gets used and needs to be replaced. This repeat business can be a gold mine, but how does it work?
Turkalo created a supplemental product to the popular LitterMaid. The LitterMaid automatically rakes a cat’s litter box after each use, but you still need to empty it several times a week. Turkalo decided that wasn’t automatic enough and created his own LitterWorks. The LitterMaid rakes the refuse into Turkalo’s LitterWorks which stores the litter in a custom made garbage bag. When you have both products, you only need to empty them once every two months, and it won’t even smell.
Turkalo sells the most basic unit of LitterWorks on his website for $99 and you can buy LitterWorks and the LitterMaid together. Although sales have gone well, the real money is not in selling the LitterWorks themselves, but in the replacement bags. A pack of three replacement bags for the LitterWorks cost $34.99, not a bad deal since they should last six months, costing under $6 a month for the customer. What that means for Turkalo is that for every 1,000 LitterWorks being used per year, he earns $70,000 just on the replacement bags. Considering that 38 million homes in the US have at least one cat, Turkalo is sitting on a potential gold mine. If only a tiny fraction of the households who have cats have LitterWorks, he will make a fortune selling the replacement bags.
When developing your product, see if a disposable aspect is appropriate. Turkalo could have created an easy to remove, empty and clean box to collect the refuse instead of bags, but then his product would have a very difficult time making much money. His disposable aspect is more convenient and much more pleasant, while only slightly less environmentally friendly (you regardless throw the litter away and probably most people would empty it into a bag anyway, thus creating equal waste) plus is the main source of income for his company.
Sometimes it takes awhile to build up a big enough customer base for your repeat sales to create a solid income, but once that base is built, you will have a steady source of income flowing in. Many companies who depend on repeat sales sell their initial unit as cost or even at a loss just to build up their customer base quickly. As Turkalo says, “If I could afford to give away 40,000 units, I would.”
See if selling consumable aspects of your product works for you — you may find your fortune not by selling the product itself, but by selling the consumable parts.
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