One Simple Idea

One Simple Idea shows you how to turn your ideas into licensed products and build copmanies around those that use outsourced manufacturers to produce, market, sell, ship and distribute those products.

When you come up with ideas that are incremental improvements, they have the benefit of being validated already. If people buy red umbrellas, chances are they’ll buy green ones too. However, it also means that there will already be plenty of others trying to sell differently colored umbrellas.

Stephen suggests taking on a “if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em” mentality and to always explore opportunities to work together with competitors.

For example, his company Hot Picks creates fun guitar picks, covered with pictures of celebrities or shaped in the form of certain symbols or even Disney characters. Instead of starting a war with their competitor Dunlop, they simply hired them as a contractor to produce their guitar picks, turning a fight over market share into a win-win situation.

Whether these collaborations are about marketing, service or production doesn’t matter, but trying to turn enemies into allies will save you a lot of time and stress.

One of the most crucial points of licensing out your idea for custom-designed popcorn buckets is finding someone who makes really good popcorn buckets. We’ve all bought a cheap knock-off with a wrongly spelled, fake designer brand name at least once in our lives (at least I know I have), or gotten a product that fell apart the minute we looked at it.

Renting out your ideas means that in the end, you’ll stand for the product’s quality with your name, so make sure you live up to it.

As Warren Buffett likes to say: “It takes 20 years to build a reputation and 5 minutes to ruin it.” Whoever manufactures your product better be good. But the best suppliers already have a lot of business, so how can you get a class A producer as a newbie?

By getting a referral. Remember the collaborations mentioned above? If you can get one of your major player allies to introduce you to their manufacturer, you’ll have a foot in the door and can negotiate a deal with someone who’ll deliver top notch quality.

You can’t just call Nike and say “I have this great idea for a running shoe, will you make it and put my name on it?” But getting John the local sports store owner to introduce you to his contact at Nike? That’s doable.

Lastly, chances are you won’t stop at renting out one idea, because if you can get it to work once, you’ll want more of it. But there’s one pitfall you have to avoid when coming up with…