You Built It. Who's Going to Buy It?
Melissa and Doug: A Case Study
I work with a lot of founders who have a solid product and no idea how to sell it. They've spent months - sometimes years - building something real. And then they look up and realize they don't know who their customer actually is, how to reach them, or whether the market is big enough to sustain a business.
This is so common that the Small Business Innovation Research program had to build commercialization planning into its process. They kept funding founders with genuinely good technology who couldn't answer basic questions: Who buys this? How big is that market? What's the path from your prototype to their hands?
A good product is not enough. You need to know where it goes.
Melissa and Doug, the toy company known for sturdy wooden toys, learned this the expensive way. Their first product wasn't toys at all. It was a children's TV show that they wrote, filmed, and produced themselves. Thousands of dollars, months of work. When they finished, they realized they had no plan for getting it to anyone.
Then the manufacturer told them they could only produce tapes in bulk. Suddenly, they weren't selling a few copies to test the waters; they had thousands of units they needed to move.
So they drove around to independent toy stores. And learned that parents don't buy mystery boxes. They want to see what's on the tape before they spend money, especially on something for their kids. The product was fine. The packaging told them nothing. The price was too high for a gamble.
They eventually figured it out, added covers, started advertising, and came to understand their customer. But they could have saved months and thousands of dollars by asking those questions before they made the tapes.
Here's what I tell founders: before you build anything, you should be able to answer three questions.
Who specifically is going to buy this? Not "parents" or "small businesses", that's too vague. Which parents? What do they care about? Where do they already shop?
How do they find out about it? If you don't have a clear path from your product to your customer's attention, you're hoping for luck. Luck is not a strategy.
Is the market big enough to matter? You can have a real product that real people want and still not have a business if there aren't enough of those people, or they won't pay enough, or reaching them costs more than you'll make.
You don't need perfect answers before you start. But if you can't answer them at all, you're not ready to build yet; you're ready to do research.
