How to Obtain the Best Patent

By Don Debelak

{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.}

1/18.2016

What exactly is your best patent? From my point it is a patent on a product that is right for the market and it is patent on a product people will buy. Inventors really need to research their product ideas with potential end users before they finalize their patent if they want to end up with the best patent possible.

Before starting your research you can put your product into a patent pending process by obtaining a low cost provisional patent. https://onestopinventionshop.net/services/patents/ , A provisional patent is not a final patent, you have one year to apply for a final patent, but it has several advantages. First it is relatively low cost, patent fees can range from $100 if you do it yourself, to $1000 including attorney fees, But the big advantage is that provisional patents don’t require you to put in just one design, or as the patent office calls them embodiments, in the patent, You can put in as many variations of the product as you can think of, That allows you then to go out and do some low cost market research to determine just what product will be the right one to patent,

Market Research Steps

Black took three inexpensive research steps before he decided to launch his product:

Learned all you can about potential competitors
Give potential consumers a choice
Verified that customers were willing to buy his product.

See https://onestopinventionshop.net/?s=Bob+Black for a story about how th inventor of the Clean Shower used these techniques before introducing his product..

Know the Competition

Just because you can’t find competitive products on the shelves doesn’t mean they don’t exist. You may need to scan trade magazines, attend trade shows, talk to potential distributors, or acquire industry buyers’ directories from trade magazines to find potential competitors.

Once you learn the names of potential competitors, check out each product. After all, your product is innovative only if it’s different and significantly better than existing products. If they’re too expensive for you to buy, attend trade shows where they’ll be displayed.

To find the competition for your product, check trade magazines that target manufacturers in your market. These magazines are listed in the Gale Directory of Publications and Broadcast Media (Gale Research), which is available at larger libraries. Trade magazines will have product directories once a year that list all the types of products that are available to the market. Use that list to see who the competition consists of. Also do a patent search on your product idea to see if any of the patents have been assigned to a manufacturer or marketer. https://onestopinventionshop.net/?s=patent+search

Give People a Choice

Consumers have many choices when they buy a product, including buying a competitive product, buying another type of product or buying nothing at all. You need to be confident people will select your product from all these possibilities before you decide your product is a winner.

One product I evaluated this way was the Dish-Net, a net that could be used in dishwashers to keep plastic cups, bottles and caps from overturning or falling into the dishwasher’s heater core. I called a local women’s group and invited them to participate in a market research group for the new product. The group was happy to participate at their next meeting, which was attended by about 40 women.

Because the product had only one indirect competitor, a dishwasher basket for small items, I displayed them both, along with four household products that were about the same price: a milk-bottle spout, a microwave bacon tray, a set of plastic storage containers and a lint-removing brush.

I asked the people to rank the products by how likely they were to buy them. I’d consider marketing the product if 20 percent of the participants ranked the product as a first or second choice. That may seem like a low percentage, but 20 percent of the people ranking a product first or second is a very strong showing if all the products are already on the market. In the case of the Dish-Net, 30 percent rated it as the first or second product they’d most likely buy.

Will They Buy It?

The ultimate test of whether or not a product is worth launching is to find out whether people will buy it. Some ways you can check if people will buy the product are::

Use a prototype to obtain orders. A prototype is a model that’s very similar to your finished product. You can make a sales flier about the prototype and approach catalogs, retailers, manufacturers’ representatives and distributors seeking orders. You can also show a prototype at a trade show–or even a flea market–and take orders for future delivery.
Run ads, deliver product fliers door-to-door or send out a direct mailing and see how many orders you receive. You don’t need to have inventory to advertise a product for sale; all you need to do is offer customers an option to cancel the order if you can’t deliver within 30 days.
Produce and sell a small quantity of products made with low-volume production techniques. For example, instead of buying a mold for a plastic part, you might make the part by bending and machining a flat piece of plastic. Don’t worry about losing a small amount of money during market research. Consider it an investment that will tell you if your product will really sell.
Reward based crowd funding sites like Kickstarter will let you raise money by asking people to give you so much money in return for a product once its available. Again that helps you show the product will sell

Patents are expensive and most patents don’t produce a profit for the inventor. Take the time to be sure you are patenting a product that will sell, those after all are the best patents.

Do you need web content? Don Debelak, who has written 15 books published by major publishers such as McGraw Hill and Entrepreneur Press is currently writing web content. Check out more information at:

https://onestopinventionshop.net/web-content-writing-services

Don Debelak offers affordable patent work. Check out http://patentsbydondebelak.com/