Often, one of the challenging things many creatives face is not finding product ideas but bringing them to life. How do you get things done, planned, and brought to reality? In this episode, Tracy Hazzard is with none other than the creator of Make My Idea Real, Lisa McCarthy. Lisa breaks down the steps in creating a product development plan, which includes zoning in on your target market and goals because there is no one-size-fits-all. She shares some guide questions and tools to help you understand the process not only for today but also for the future. As the saying goes, “hope is not a plan.” Let us take the reins of our ideas and start making them real! Create your plan today!
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Turning Your Product Idea Into A Product Development Plan With Lisa McCarthy Of Make My Idea Real
It has been a while since we had an episode. I met somebody and I had to bring her to you because there’s so much going on. I’m hearing the theme is, “How to get things done, how to get things moving, how to get things planned, and how to make my idea a reality.” It’s what I keep hearing and what’s being asked of me again and again.
I have been thinking about that. I ran across someone who I haven’t seen in a while but I have known her for quite a few years. She’s a great product inventor and has a great mind. She got this ability to take a look at the big picture and look at those finite details, too. I thought I had a chat with Lisa McCarthy and bring her on here. Her company is Make My Idea Real. Doesn’t that sound great? We are going to talk all about that.
Lisa empowers and educates people to recognize and embrace their natural-born guests to realize their ultimate potential as they inspire, motivate, and create an impact in the world. She’s a respected leader who collaborates globally at all levels while mentoring cross-functional teams, and consistently develops and delivers optimal product solutions to ensure market success.
Her clients say she turns their mental mess into a workable visual masterpiece. Doesn’t that sound like something you might need? Maybe a plan is in place. As you know here on this show, we both say again and again, “Hope is not a plan.” A plan is a plan. Let’s talk with Lisa McCarthy about how to make your idea real and how to get a plan.
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Lisa, we are talking ideas. I get to riff with someone who cares about the big picture and the finite detail at the same time. That is complete fun for me. I know we are going to have a great session and we’re going to have so much fun telling all the audience about all these details. There is nothing that I see as more important than figuring out how to make your ideas real. The thing that I get asked to speak about again and again is the thing that people want to understand, “How do you get this idea off the napkin and out somewhere?” They don’t see how to do it. How often do you come to somebody who sees that path?
I would say not very often because when I first started inventing, even though I had all these skills in my back pocket without realizing it, they could not give you a clear path. It was like, “It depends, you could do this, and you could do that. You can go over there.” You go to the SBA and you would go all over town trying to get the help you need. Every mentor wants to sell you the highest program to make you the bestest ever kind of thing and none of it got the product done. It’s eye-opening how much help is and isn’t there.
The hard part about being a mentor here in this space is when I see someone, it’s not a one size fits all path, no matter what happens. I know you know this because you mind map everybody’s path. It is different for every person, their budget, the type of product, and the way the market is. Now, if you’ve got a product that you need to spend a lot of dollars on advertising to make it work, first off, I would say probably don’t do it now. Wait a little bit longer for the ad market to get over. It’s a cord of craziness that’s happening at the beginning of 2022. If you do, find alternative ways. You might need multiple path choices for you.
Everybody looks at, “I need funding.” I’m like, “There are about seventeen different ways to get funding, which one works for you? Unless you know they are available, how would you know it fits you?”
Not just which one fits you but which one do you qualify for and which one works for you and your product? I have been introduced to people and after I’ve given my whole pitch, they would be like, “We only invest in products and companies that have recurring revenues, that are at this growth pace with this number of already established users.” They have already got a formula and no one tells you.
Investors want a big piece. If you’ve gone to a Shark Tank or ever looked at what they do when you are doing a licensing deal, you are giving away your cashflow before you have any to get going on that kind of a show, if you will.
You can't smoke the hopium. That's a hopium plan. You got to really do the real work. Click To TweetLet’s talk about Shark Tank because you have a little background there. The affirmation mirror was presented to Shark Tank and you did an audition. Tell us about what happened, how the process worked, and then what your thoughts are about Shark Tank as a process for other idea makers.
It’s a long process. There are usually 500 people in line at their open calls and you tend to stay there all night long because they only take the first 500. You are like, “I’m going to be here.” We camped out and did all the crazy stuff to be in that line. A friend of mine went with me. We dressed up like Snow White and the Evil Queen. We have the apple and the mirror. We tried to fit that into the performance. They take a little snippet of your business on an executive summary level and they give you about a minute and a half and they are like, “Thanks, we will call you. That is your audition.”
The Sharks when you go there, that’s for sure is a long process. I’ve spoken to people who have been on the show and there are 5 to 20 different times behind the scenes that you will have to meet with producers to get ready. Half the time, those fall out. They have quite a turnover before they ever make it to the show even if you have been chosen from that list. The last time I went, I realized it was a couple of years ago and they said they were eight months backed up to even look at anybody who was pitching that day. If you figure three years later, they are probably about 16, 32, and 2 to 3 years behind.
My products would be out on the market sold on the declining lifestyle at that point, declining in trend. That’s why it never seemed like a viable option to me. It did to me already at the beginning. I had quite a few clients who were Shark anchors originally in a couple of the early seasons and I always thought it seemed too slow.
They can make a deal on the camera and it could go away as soon as the cameras are off because of something that somebody somewhere along the way didn’t do. It’s a tough process but you do learn. That’s one of the things. As you learn it no matter which direction you take, Shark Tank, Dragons’ Den, fighting the good battle, meeting every investor, asking every friend you ever met, and crowdfunding, whatever you do, you learn.
To start down in one of those paths of funding, seeking funding or a Shark Tank, that kind of Angel investment, and you are looking for that, you’ve got to have a plan together. Most inventors and product people I know, the idea people don’t have a plan. How do you focus on it and what do you do? Why don’t you describe for us with the affirmation mirror how you developed it into a plan?
It’s looking at the market that I wanted to serve. I looked at how much the product was going to cost to produce, how much we needed to spend on marketing, and the different areas identified in the process of flushing it out. Who would we need for the team and what their roles would be? We went through every aspect of it to create a plan, the executive summary, and the whole business plan and to be able to start pitching the people.
Unless you can convey that plan completely dollar per dollar, estimating what everything is going to cost if you haven’t started. If you are lucky and you are in business now and you have real numbers, you just have to plan every aspect. Good, bad, and mitigations for what might go wrong such as you are buying your product from China and now we are having sanctions, what are you going to do? There are always these little what-if types of questions that need to be asked along the way to create a cohesive plan.
Most people have no idea what that is. That’s what they are out there seeking and asking those questions quite in that way. They are like, “I need to get a prototype made,” and then reality what they need is to get the pricing done but then without the prototype. They are down this path and they keep going and they are like, “What’s the next thing I don’t know? Let me go get that.” They are piecing it together in this way that’s making it take extra long.
Also, extra expensive because you are spinning your wheels and spending your money on things that may not create what you are looking to do. There are so many pieces to that. It always starts with the plan. Who are you serving? Who is it for? Who is your market? How much are they willing to pay? How are you going to get this done? What is it you are doing? Why does somebody want it? Who, what, when, where, why, and how are the biggest questions but you dive in so deep that you have every answer.
Product Development Plan: Always start with the plan.
This is why I am having Lisa on because I told you she fits our model of hope is not a plan and we need to have an actual plan. Tell me how you get to a plan. How do you know what you don’t know to develop that?
Questions. If you are starting out, I would like to make this headset right here but what size is it going to be? What color is it going to be? What’s the technology inside? What package are you going to put it in? What prong is going to be at the end of it? Every question about everything that’s going to go into what you want to create needs to be satisfied. You start from who, what, when, where, and why. Every question starts from those five basics.
Those things we learned about, we learned about them in writing a good essay back in 5th or 6th grade, something like that was when we wrote our first essay, somewhere in there.
That’s what a business plan is. It’s an essay about what you want to make happen in your business, plan, invention, and dreams. You can’t smoke the hopium. That’s a hopium plan. You’ve got to do the real work.
That’s an awesome phrase. I have to share that with Tom and he will get a big kick out of it. Making your idea real changes all the time, too. What works now wasn’t necessarily the same thing I did many years ago when I was starting in my business area. It’s not the same. How do you keep up on that? How does the person with the idea go to the right people and figure that out?
You have to bet people because you can get taken down the wrong path and pay the wrong people to do the wrong things or you think they are the right things but they don’t happen that way. You have to do your homework every step of the way. Who are you working with? How is their reputation? You guys have a great reputation for not only what you have done on the product side but now on the podcast side.
Playing with the right people, creating the right plan that works for you, and adjusting it when needed because the boat may need to turn and there’s a big iceberg. Don’t be the Titanic like, “We better turn ahead of time. Let’s not wait until the end.” There’s a new movie that says, “The asteroids are coming. Don’t look up.”
It’s true though that their motives matter. We are not here, we have no business, and we are not selling anything but I am giving advice because I’m giving advice from a place of experience. At some point, my advice is going to be outdated if I’m not continually launching products. That’s what I see too often that happens. You’ve got someone who’s like, “I did this and it’s great.” I won’t drop the names here but there have been some big people who have been in the home shopping world or all of these things. It’s great that it worked one day, it worked way back when but in nowadays world, that model doesn’t still fit. That advice doesn’t necessarily still fit.
That’s where continually seeking education, not only for them but for myself, and doing crazy things, getting out of your comfort zone, putting out TikTok videos of all things. Doing things that are different because you have to create a different result when there’s a different market out there. As you say, don’t do the same things over and over if they don’t work. That’s insanity.
This is what happened to me. I was talking to a bunch of Kickstarter marketing companies and they are like, “We’ve done X number of over million-dollar campaigns.” I said, “How many did you do in the last three months of 2022?” They are like, “None.” I’m like, “I know because Facebook advertising is not working for you. You cannot ride on your laurels from before. You can’t even trust those kinds of statistics. You have to know what they are able to do today and what they did in the last month because it’s different.”
It takes a lot of passion to keep going. Click To TweetIt will always be that way. Always adjust the sales.
That’s the hard part for me about a business plan itself. You spend a lot of time developing it, writing it all down, getting it all out there, and then I feel like it’s outdated as soon as I finish it and I have more input. That’s maybe just me. I don’t know about other people. How do you feel about that? Is there a way to make it more dynamic?
There is a way but it’s because it’s part of the check box of when you get your college degree, you have to do if you want investment. To have an idea of which direction you are going to go, you have to have some sort of plan. I believe in mind mapping plans because they are bullet-point driven. They are not that long like you are writing your dissertation for your graduation. You are just bullet-pointing everything. Everybody can see it visually. Everybody can buy in. That’s how I feel. Put it wherever you can see it and you can change it when you need to. You keep looking, growing, and adjusting it.
Why don’t you tell everybody a little bit more about mind mapping? I’m not sure everybody is familiar with that.
I use software that lets you look at your business in a spoke and wheel kind of situation. There’s the center point of the wheel where all the spokes connect, and that’s your business. Each of the spokes that go off is another component of your business. You’ve got your marketing, team, and actual product or service that you are offering. Within each of those are other little spokes that go out that explain those in further detail. You get to expand it as wide as you want to go and know everything about each of the things that you are putting into your business plan. You can shrink them all down so that it’s easily digestible for somebody, and then you pop it back out as they are looking through it and they can see everything as well.
That’s interesting because as you find something new that you didn’t know you have, you are not readjusting the center. You are making a new spin-off wheeler.
It’s according to your existing spin-offs. You can keep expanding. When something doesn’t work, you can get it out of there easily. You are not going through the whole process of a giant 75-page business plan of like, “We better find, search, and replace. It doesn’t make sense now.” It always makes sense.
It is a little bit easier, at least for me, when you are writing a plan for a business or a product that doesn’t exist yet, it’s a whole lot harder for me to do it when you have an existing business that is constantly earning revenues. You are adjusting the existing numbers which then are changing your forecasts. All of that is changing your timeline and that’s a cascade of problems. When you have something like your idea and you are figuring that out, you can keep it on an open timeline.
That’s what I like to do. I do month 1, month 2, and month 3 rather than say, January, February, and March. That way, you know that once I get the funding, then month one kicks in. It keeps it flexible to the timeline that you are in. I love that you keep the financial side of that flexibility and you are keeping the map of what’s happening, what needs to be done, and who needs to be involved in that dynamic way. You are going to have a lot more flexibility to present it to anyone at any point because that’s another thing that I hear from a lot of inventors and product people. They are like, “You are willing to have a meeting with me? I’m not ready yet.”
That’s tough. When you are trying and ask the inventor because I’ve done it, then you feel like you’ve grown and then you are like, “I’m kicking my own butt.” You want to be a queen.
Product Development Plan: A business plan is an essay about what you want to happen in your business, in your invention, in your dreams.
I watched WeCrashed, which is all about the start of WeWork. The guy stayed up all night and said, “We are going to have a meeting with these investors.” His partner stayed up all night and developed a pitch deck and plan. That’s the pitch deck that their first few million on it. I’m like, “That also is not a great plan. That’s not a great way to go about it either.” Having something that you can pull out that you are working on but isn’t maybe a working document seems like a more viable way.
You can copy and paste these things into a project plan. You can copy and paste them into something else that you need like an Excel sheet to do homework, whatever the market research. You can continue to use it in different ways, so it’s never a wasted effort.
I love that flexibility. You were talking about on your website, and I love the way you say this, that you go from a mental mess to a masterpiece. That’s the way a lot of creative’s brains work. Our brains are all over. Our visionaries have their brains going all over. How do we bring that together into the masterpiece? A plan is only as good as taking action. Do you have methods and processes for yourself that you use that you recommend to others that you coach for how to then now take these pieces and put them into action?
Typically, I help with the planning and introduce them to people who are project managers or real coaches for that side of it. I let them do their action but we identify everything with them so that they know what to do next.
They jump at whatever looks fun or their next logical step, which may not be the best step for them to take.
It’s important to have the team in place that lets you execute the things in the order that makes the most sense because if you are running around and building the product before you actually know if there’s a market, you are going to be chasing your tail the entire time.
My longtime readers here know that we have our 7 Ps, Prove it, Plan it, and Price it are the first three Ps in the process. We say prove it because you’ve got to make sure you have an idea that somebody wants to pay for and is worth it. Prove it 1st but plan it is 2nd. Planning it before pricing it because you have to think of some things before you understand where it needs to be priced.
How you are going to reach your clients or customers, what you might have to spend there, and who’s your competitors. There’s a bunch of stuff in that planning process that’s going to come to light and that’s going to change the outcome of the pricing. Planning it 1st and plan it 2nd in this case. Planning it before pricing is essential.
You won’t know what that money to ask for. For investment, you won’t know where your money went because now you have spent everything. You are like, “I plan for $100,000 and I need $400,000. What happened here?” It is about that. Every component within whatever you are buying or building in a product is important. Everything from the case pack as you know, all the way down to, “Is it going to be on a crate? Is it going to be individually boxed? Is it going to be a multipack? Is it a clamshell?” There are so many pieces and that creates cost for every single one of them. Identifying all of that allows you to know what to do.
Here’s the thing, you don’t have to know all of that initially, you have to know it’s there. It’s off that spoke as you put it. It’s there. I’m going to need to define it but I can use a rough estimate here now that I think is good and then when I get closer to it, I will define that area in detail because I know it needs to be defined. Sometimes we can’t do container loads until we get to our final size of the product and everything was done in a prototype. It’s not going to happen in that early stage but we can make some good assumptions and help ourselves.
Nothing ever gets done alone. Click To TweetYou’ve made a mistake because you know that there’s eventually going to be those things. We are going to have case packs, we are going to have twelve, you make it up but at least you plan for it.
The thing is that sometimes the creative mind works well in that mess. Sometimes it’s those raw odd connections that you are making where innovation happens. As the inventor, the creator, you need to be able to have that mental mess. You also then need somebody to support you in turning that into a masterpiece, organizing that, filling in all the pieces and parts, and putting that plan together with you. When you don’t get that support, you don’t realize how hard it is to go out there and pitch and continually go out there in excitement. That’s what most of them do. Passion is not going to get it all the way there.
It takes a lot of passion to keep going and that’s one of the things that we pull out of the person, “Why is that you want to do this? Why are you going to keep going?” It gets hard because it will eventually, it’s not going to be all daisies and butterflies. What is your motivation to keep going even when you get smacked down and told you can’t have what you want or in the ocean again? What are you going to do now? What keeps you moving?
Now, you’ve got to tell everybody what happened with the affirmation mirror.
We licensed it out and we are waiting for them to do their job at this point but we had endorsements from people like Bob Proctor, Les Brown, Marcia Wieder, Mary Morrissey, Michael Beckwith, and Jack Canfield, and all those people who touch lives. I was there. I was running around. I say we because I feel nothing ever gets done alone. For me, it’s always about the team and anybody that you are having that conversation with.
I’ve got a great mentor who came to me through SBA of all places. This guy was like, “You don’t need to be here. You need to talk to this guy.” He running Allison Maslan’s group. His name is Stewart Borie and he was incredible at opening my eyes. He’s like, “Lisa, here’s the problem. You are a zebra and you are in the horse pen. You are the only one who doesn’t know that you’re a zebra,” and I’m like, “Now it all makes sense.”
“I’m in the wrong place.” That’s a great way. That’s a great analogy. The visual is good.
It’s true for most entrepreneurs. We tried to fit it in the box but there’s no box. We can’t go that way.
Here’s what I can say from having met you because I met you early on in the affirmation mirror model of what you were working on. There are a few people who I ask questions like, “Have you thought about this? Have you thought about that?” They have that ability, they are still in the big picture. You have that great ability to look at the big picture and the finite detail. I thought that was impressive when I first met you. It’s not common.
I used to work in technology. I could bridge the gap between the programmers and the normal people that we are not all normal. It was the techie speak and then what that means in English but I feel like I can do that here. It’s like I’m a translator, so somebody can come with all the wildness and I’m able to put it in the right category, and then it becomes a sense of calm in the storm of creation.
Product Development Plan: For any entrepreneurial venture, are you willing to step up and do what it takes every day, even when it’s not fun?
From how far along in an idea should they be before they come to someone like you?
They can come at napkin level. It takes a little bit longer. They’ve got like, “Here, I want to make a box.” “Let’s talk about the paper. Let’s talk about the size. Let’s talk about where you are going to go with it.”
You probably have to talk about the market because you are starting back at the napkin level.
There are so many other pieces to that. I have worked with a lot of people in voting industries, automotive, Reiki universities to psychic mediums, speakers, authors, and books, so many things in between that there’s nothing that I haven’t touched out of 38 markets so far at some level. They can come at any level that they need to but they need to be open and willing to do the work. That’s always the case for any entrepreneurial venture. Are you willing to step up and do what it takes every day even when it’s not fun?
To expect you to have all the answers for 38 different verticals is not realistic. How much do you happen to know about the automotive industry or boating industry? You are going to get a lot out of it having done it now once but you didn’t know it the first time. We’ve done every product category. We have designed products except for food and straight fashion. We’ve done fashion accessories. We refuse to do app development but we have now done a web app for ourselves.
We probably don’t touch those three areas because of the extra layers of complexity to them or the time pressures or the outside influences like the FDA process. That’s why we don’t do food, medical products, and things like that. When we look at that, that’s why we chose not to touch them because there were so many layers of complexity. I bet that you find that in these industries. There are regulatory industries and there are none.
Even within some of the regulatory ones, there are standard things that go into it that we know. You need a UPC. You need to have compliance with any of the FDA regulations if you are eating or putting it on your skin. I have worked in beauty and food. I’ve had people who are bakers that go to commercial kitchens because that way, you don’t have all that compliance to commit.
The kitchen has it right. There are ways to grow those things and not have the same compliance level by taking a different door. I worked in development and I’ve done a lot in technology. From Kinko’s to Amgen and lots of places in between. At some level, I’m capable of helping them pull most of the information but there’s always homework.
You’ve got to figure some of that stuff out. You’ve got to find out for your own business yourself. Do you know what I think would be useful for a lot of existing businesses? You mentioned that and it’s true that often they can’t pivot properly or they get mired down because they are trying to move into a new area that they don’t know enough about. They haven’t asked all the questions. They go into it and then they hit roadblocks along the way.
Another area though is Kickstarters. I see this often. It’s not just that they don’t have an understanding of what it’s going to take for their product to go all the way. They didn’t plan enough in their rewards and requests. They didn’t think all of that through. Often, the marketing companies that work with them are like, “You are going to have over a million dollars because that’s what everybody has. Your ad spend is going to be this.” They plunk that down without any understanding of what those details, where the spend needs to be. You may end up with a successful campaign but you don’t know how to spend it properly. You don’t know what to do with it.
Follow your dreams, but make a plan. Click To TweetThe one that comes to mind was the Coolest Cooler which was a fantastic one. We covered it in our early episodes or at least we mentioned it. The Coolest Cooler failed miserably in execution on the other side and they overfunded by $3 million. They should have had plenty of money to do it but they didn’t have a good plan in place for how to implement it.
That is a bummer. You’ve got to pay those people back at some point with prizes or whatever you have promised them. If you are not able to deliver all these things that were products that you promised during that campaign, now you’ve got a whole other issue.
What happens if you don’t achieve your goal? Are you even able to deliver to those people or do you have to cancel your campaign? That’s what some of them don’t do. They don’t cancel, and then they don’t deliver because they had to use all the funds that they received to bail themselves out from the marketing that it took to get to that point. They didn’t achieve the overall goal. You can’t plan on only the successful points. You have to figure out what it is along the way where your break-even is.
You have to make your minimum or you don’t get your money. Some of the other ones like RocketHub and the other kind of Kickstarter-ish companies, a lot of them are what you take whatever you have made. As you say in those cases, you shouldn’t deliver to those people who contributed.
You likely can’t if you didn’t make enough. The other problem that I see is that it’s usually a marketing set. In other words, somebody makes a decision that you’re going to go for $25,000 because then we can say we X the minimum goal when we get more than that. They set the minimum goal too low and it’s not even viable. If that’s all that they achieve, they can’t do anything with it. They can’t deliver on any of those rewards or make the product.
A Kickstarter campaign for a crowdfunding, whether it’s equity or prize-based is a lot of work. It’s a whole business in itself, as a division if you will when you are launching a crowdfunding campaign. It’s every day and has a lot of maintenance.
It has been an entire business in and of itself to do it. It’s running another business on top of my business because my business is actively running. It’s absolutely hard. It’s harder to do that than it is to make the product and run the business. That’s my personal feeling. It’s harder to do it.
It’s a tight deadline too. You have 30, 60, 90 days that you set for that and it’s a full bore for that time, otherwise, the clock is up and it’s over. It’s not like a product where you are like, “I can take another month to get this finished.” You’ve got that time limit. You don’t get to extend it. This is it. This is the show.
What happens are these unknowns. If you don’t have a plan, you don’t know what’s going to slip, how to shift it or what to do with it. For us, what went wrong is that Facebook advertising came to a screeching halt because of the war, and their algorithms shifted because of iOS changes. It’s because Apple changed its privacy concerns, ads aren’t being served and people aren’t being able to be tracked from Facebook to wherever. If they see the ad on Facebook, you can no longer track them so you can’t retarget them. Retargeting is completely not working in the ad spend plan, so advertising did in the single digits from what it did three months earlier.
That makes a huge impact on what you are doing.
Product Development Plan: You need to believe in what you’re doing. So make sure you’ve got your passion behind your dream and take action each day to make it happen.
We had to come up with another way because that’s us, we are flexing. We did a client blitz. We’ve got over 200 investors and 100 of them were our clients. Even though we can say we didn’t do what we expected to do because we didn’t have this advertising piece in and the email marketing didn’t work either. The email went in the single digits as well because of the iOS issue.
You aren’t getting emails delivered to the phones. It’s because of those two things combining to fight us, the only thing we could do was do a client blitz. At least we can come back and say 50% of our investors, our clients, that’s a success story. We had to pull that out. Trying to do that in the middle of it, for us, only an eight-week campaign was hard but we did it. We are getting closed down, closing it up the final week.
It’s a lot of work but the payoff is that your heart feels good about doing what you want to do. You are in the wrong box or the wrong horse pen. You are in your zebra pen.
For us, everything is not critically based on how much funds we make here where other people are. Their product cannot be made if their Kickstarter is not successful and if their plan is not executable. They are going to have to go back and get more funds. Ours isn’t like that. Our business art who runs this is already in revenue. This was to do more. It will take us a little bit longer to do more but it’s still okay.
You will do it in such a way that it’s successful for everybody that you touch.
Our plan is not changing, our timelines just changed.
Also, how did you get your funding but you made it work.
Lisa, I am glad we’ve got some time to chat and talk about how you turn product ideas into realities because people need to understand that planning is such a significant part of that. Is there anything you want to share with the community and any pieces of wisdom and advice?
I would say follow your dreams but make a plan. Make sure that plan comes from your heart because you are the one who has to make it happen. You want to make sure it’s something that you feel is the right way as well as checking the boxes, you need to believe in what you are doing. Make sure you’ve got your passion behind your dream and you take action each day towards making it happen.
Thank you so much, Lisa.
Make sure that a plan comes from your heart because you're the one who has to actually make it happen. Click To TweetI’m excited. Thank you so much for having me.
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I love what Lisa said at the end about the plan, about you, needing to be involved in that process, taking action and moving within it, and getting your passion and excitement into it, too. I love that concept of it because I strongly believe that I can’t hand you a plan. No one can hand you a plan that’s going to work for you.
I say this often, I meet someone, and see their product idea and this path. I can visually see exactly where it needs to go, the steps that I would take but those are the steps that I would take. I don’t have your same world experience. I don’t have your same budget. I don’t have all of those input pieces that you need someone to help draw out a few and put into that plan that it’s workable for you so that you can take those actions and steps.
I can lay out my 7 Ps for you. I can tell you to Prove it, Plan it, and Price it. When you go to make that actual plan for your product and for everything that you want to do to get it to reality for its end goal, it might be licensing like Lisa did where their affirmation mirror. It might be an actual physical product that’s available on Amazon or the shelf at Best Buy, Costco, and Walmart. Who knows where you want to take it?
When you figure all of those things out and that endpoint, what you have is capabilities, what you have as resources, and you put that into place, and you map that out. I love that concept, too. When you mind map that out for yourself in this flexible way, you are going to get yourself a better visual of where you are going. It is going to make it easier for you to go get funding, be clear about the path, and figure out if all the resources fit into your plan or not.
You are not going to be making these spontaneous decisions. We are deciding to do something. We are making a cut and getting rid of things because we are choosing to do something else. We are making a choice in that process. I want to make sure that you are able to make those choices with as much of a visual of your path for you. That’s why working with Lisa McCarthy and someone like her would be useful for you.
As you know, we always have all the information or all the resource partners for Product Launch Hazzards and none of them pay me. I want to be clear about this. Lisa doesn’t have to give me a kickback. There’s none of that. I asked them to do you a favor and cut you guys good prices though because they were from here.
Do make sure to tell her if you decide to go work with her that she came from Product Launch Hazzards. When you go to her, you will be able to find all the information on how to reach her, what she does, where she is, and all those great resources that she has talked about on the show at ProductLaunchHazzards.com. Make sure you go there and check that out.
While you are there, check out some of the other resources we have for you. Make sure to check out the 7 Ps and we have an entire map for that as well. There are lots of other download resources, templates, and things that you might find useful as you are going to do some of this planning that you are talking about with someone like Lisa. Lisa McCarthy, Make My Idea Real. Go out there, make your idea real. Make it something that is a plan in place that you can take action on every single day because when you are turning your product idea into a product development action plan, you are more likely to get this done.
Thank you Product Launch Hazzards. I’m always on the lookout for any kind of topic, area or things that I might be able to bring you. We’ve done over 150 episodes but I’m always looking for something new to bring you. If I find more things out there or if you reach out there and ask me a question, I am happy to bring you some more episodes in the future. Thanks, everyone, for reading. I’m Tracy Hazzard. I hope to see your idea on the shelf somewhere.
Important Links
Coolest Cooler – Past Episode
Facebook – Make My Idea Real
Instagram – Make My Idea Real
YouTube – Make My Idea Real
http://ConsciousMillionaire.com/lisamccarthy/
http://www.GetBoldToday.com/167-lisa-mccarthy-the-power-of-affirmations/
https://JWNajarian.WordPress.com/category/audio-podcast/page/3/
About Lisa McCarthy
Lisa empowers and educates people to recognize and embrace their natural-born gifts to realize their ultimate potential as they inspire, motivate, and create the impact in the world that they are uniquely called to do. Respected leader who collaborates globally at all levels while mentoring cross-functional teams to consistently develop and deliver optimal product solutions to ensure market success. Her clients say she turns their mental mess into a workable visual masterpiece!
