Trouble finding a manufacturer (and other problems), any ideas?

[craftsy21]

First of all - great forum you guys have here, I've been reading here ever since I finished the book about a month ago. Like many of you, I'm very excited about trying to create my muse.

I've got a few ideas already that I've started researching, though I haven't started doing any adwords testing yet because both projects that I've started working on are giving me problems figuring out what my capabilities are looking like.

I know a lot of the advice here is to just jump into testing to see if it's even worth figuring out the small details or not - but I don't want to waste my time and money on testing either if I"m not even sure I could get one of these off the ground, nor have a clue what my margins are going to look like in terms of profit - not to mention, I won't be able to offer a realistic price on my test page to offer in order to gauge interest.

My problems for both products are similar - I've located the people I want to work with (for distribution and/or manufacturing), but very few of them are getting back to me and the ones that are have proven to be tough to stay in contact with and/or not completely what I'm looking for.

So I guess my questions are kind of like this, in two parts...

For the one situation, I am having trouble finding somebody to distribute the product to me altogether. I did get a wholesale quote on the price, so I could just estimate it for the site, but the people I was trying to work with told me they are having warehouse problems due to a recent flood and would be out of contact for awhile. The other manufacturers I've found of the product have yet to respond to my contact attempts altogether.

So what's my next step on this one?

The second is a bit more specific.. the thing I'm trying to do needs to be done in smaller batches than I can find a company to do. I don't want to give away my ideas here, so forgive my vagueness, but basically they work in nothing less than 360 units and I'm trying to find somebody to work in the 40-50 unit range, which is proving hard to do. There really is no option as far as working in higher units, as each order will be unique - and there's no way I could afford the necessary machinery myself... So i was wondering if there's anyway to negotiate a deal with these places to pay a higher price per unit in exchange for smaller batches than they generally will accept? Or if guaranteed business (a contract maybe?) would provide incentive for them to work with me?

My only problem with that is - I feel like I'd have to give away part of my business model to them in that way, and if so, they would want a part of the action at that point or just go on to take my idea entirely.

As a side note to that - I'm also concerned about if I'd be okay with charging for a product that isn't truly mine without the expressed permission of somebody else. It wouldn't be truly reselling the product, I'd be acting as sort of the deal-maker for the customers to the manufacturers... but I would attempt to keep both the customers and the manufacturers out of the loop on that detail, as I'm not sure the manufacturers would appreciate me marking up their finished product.

Is this making sense to everyone? :confused:

Sorry for the long-winded post... I'm just extremely excited to try both of these out as I feel they are great ideas, but I'm not sure how they will actually work once I get a price-point to them and run some tests.

If anything isn't clear and you need specification to make a better response, just let me know. And thanks for any insight you can provide. :)

[kamakiri]

Hey Crafty and welcome to the board. I have to start with the old cliché though, and that is: if I had a dime for every person who came to this board and said, "I have an idea but I can't tell you what it is" I would be living the zero hour work week.

Once you take the first steps, you will realize a few things, and a big one is that muses don't last for ever. It is the process of building, failing, succeeding, and doing it again that is far more benefitial than the idea. Another thing is never build a pizza shop in a town with no pizza shops, because you know they don't eat pizza (Always open in the city with 10 shops). If you are having troubles manufacturing your muse, so will anyone who copies you, and to tell the truth, if it is a pain to make, there are thousands of easier things to copy out there, and if yours is worth copying, it will be copied within 5 minutes of going live anyway. This is the internet. It is a fact of life. Being copied is not a bad thing though. Did Ray Crok invent the burger? Did the MacDonald's brothers? Did Myspace's humongous lead in the social media category stop Facebook from walking all over it by being easier/better to use? Of course the answer to all of these is no.

You mentioned the first part of your question was distribution. That is easy. It is you. You have no business with a drop shipper unless you are selling 200 or more units a month. FedEx and UPS will fight for your business, take advantage of that, and do it all your self. Again, I am gonna sound harsh here, but if you talk to those distributors like you are talking in that post, I wouldn't work with you either. You bring nothing to the table. A tire kicker is what it is called in the car industry. If you want to play the game, you need to buy your way in, and having no sales history does not look good. Literally hundreds of thousands of people read Tim's book and skipped all the important sections and just contacted the resources. They can smell a greenhorn a mile away. If you could go to them and say I have a history of shipping X number of products every month, and will be selling more in the future, they would be calling your cell phone, and addressing you as Mr. Crafty!, not ignoring your emails or giving lame excuses of flooding. Would you want to deal with you?

Why only 40-50 units? Can you really make any money there? 360 min order really is not much no matter what the product is. On top of that customizing every order is kind of moving in the wrong direction from automation.

As far as giving up part of your business, think about it this way. Would you rather have 100% of 40-50 sales or 50% of near unlimited sales? Not wanting to give up power is a common flaw in many new entrepreneurs, but it is based on a flawed premise.

Lastly, if you can prove the concept with sales tests, then the details will fall into place. Everybody wants more customers.

[craftsy21]

hey kamakiri - thanks for the response.

I am a little confused by your advice as it feels a little contradictory on certain things, but I think if I clarify my problems based on your advice that will help both of us understand one another better.

Another thing is never build a pizza shop in a town with no pizza shops, because you know they don't eat pizza (Always open in the city with 10 shops).

My products definitely have markets - in fact, they are both products that exist in other markets and do well, that I am trying to bring to other nicely sized markets that I don't believe exist yet there.


If you are having troubles manufacturing your muse, so will anyone who copies you, and to tell the truth, if it is a pain to make, there are thousands of easier things to copy out there, and if yours is worth copying, it will be copied within 5 minutes of going live anyway.


I didn't mean to say that my products were hard to manufacture - just that, of all the manufacturers/distributors of the products I need, none have proven to work for me and my potential business model.

While the products aren't hard to manufacture, they are specific enough that I can't just find any guy off the street to make them - they involve expensive equipment that I nor anybody I personally know has access to.

So my worry is that I will spark an idea for somebody that does have access to this equipment and these products and could easily decide to take the idea themselves and run with it, keeping me from having access, too.

Maybe you're right - they will copy me anyways. But I do believe there's something to the idea of being FIRST into a market, and if I don't have to give my business model/muse away, I shouldn't.


You mentioned the first part of your question was distribution. That
is easy. It is you. You have no business with a drop shipper unless you are selling 200 or more units a month. FedEx and UPS will fight for your business, take advantage of that, and do it all your self.


Apparently on this one, I misspoke. I am having trouble finding somebody to distribute to ME, as I am already planning on being the person to ship out orders to customers to start.


Why only 40-50 units? Can you really make any money there? 360 min order really is not much no matter what the product is. On top of that customizing every order is kind of moving in the wrong direction from automation.


Well as I said, this problem is only relevant to the second idea.. and that's because a typical order would never exceed 40-50 and each order is a "run" of sorts, featuring a customers customized order that they submit themselves.

An order of 360 however, is what most of the companies I'm looking to contract this work out to are listing as their minimum to produce at a time.

My plan is to submit many orders, but each "run" would consist of far lower totals than their policy lists as their minimums, and there's no getting around that as I know for a fact (i am a member of these markets after all ) that nobody is ordering 360 sized orders of my product anytime soon.


Lastly, if you can prove the concept with sales tests, then the details will fall into place. Everybody wants more customers.


Tim suggests having your profit margin in mind so you can provide a realistic pricing point, as far as I understood. And that makes sense to me.

What sort of test would I really be doing if I didn't have some idea of the details figured out, and what point would there be in doing a test if I couldn't actually ever supply the demand for it anyways?

I'd like to sell real moon dust or magic fountain of youth water, too.. and I'm sure there's a market for both, but there's no chance I can provide either - according to you, if I test it, the details will fall into place. But it's not that simple.

Don't I at least need confirmation that I can make these happen on some level, and an idea of a price before I can partake in a realistic test?

Again - that was just my interpretation of Tim's advice. Maybe I read it wrong, and maybe you've had success contrary to my understanding.

Hopefully this has cleared up some of my issues - and again, I do agree that I need to get some testing done before I get much deeper into this all. But right now my biggest issue is I dont' have the information I feel I need to even make a test.. i'm not looking to lay out the entire model or anything, but I need some level of details about how I could make these work at all before I go spending a few hundred bucks on an adsense campaign that may or may not prove a feasible marketplace.

[kamakiri]

Now you are just going around in circles. There is no winning in a chicken and egg discussion. I am saying that it is that simple.

You make decisions, move forward with them, and then revise after testing.

My point about having a market? That if you can only sell 40 of a thing, that is most definitely not a market that is adaptable to the 4HWW. I can't imagine a case where you could if you could sell 40 widgets, you couldn't sell 360 of them. Makes no sense. Every product I have looked at had minimum orders of 5000 units. 40 units offers no economies of scale.

Being first to the market pales in comparison with being in the market. By keeping first to the market as a goal you will sink into analysis paralysis even further.

Lastly, this is not a world of warcraft forum, there is no need to break posts into bits and quote them as the post is easily viewable with a quick scroll on your mouse.

[craftsy21]

First of all - breaking a post into quotes like I did makes it easier for everyone to understand what I'm referring to. I'm not sure where your statement about world of warcraft comes from, but I'm a regular member of about 8 different message boards and have been for 10 years or so now, this is standard procedure on every board I've been to. I apologize if this doesn't suit you, but in my experience it's the best way to organize a response to somebody's post.

I'll try it your way this time, for your sake.


You're still not understanding what I mean when I say a typical order is 40-50 units. I am not saying that I only plan on selling 40-50 units TOTAL, rather that each individual order will be 40-50 pieces of like-designed materials. I can't just buy 360 units because each order will be unique in some way or another.

Think of it like I was selling t-shirts that people would submit design's of themselves. And assume that nobody would ever order more than 50 at a time, but that the printers I was using would only take orders of 360 or more at a time. I would take multiple orders of 50 units, but very few customers would order enough at a time for a run of 360 shirts.

Now I'm not actually doing t-shirts, but it's a similar idea. My manufacturer wants to deal in 360 identical products at a time, and I need somebody to work at lower levels PER order.

See where my problem comes in here?


Lastly - how does it make any sense to jump into an idea without proper information first? it's the same idea as Tim talks about, just buying up a bunch of inventory before finding out if you have a market.

Why would I spend money to test a market before I know if I can even produce a product, should there be demand?

Shouldn't any sort of investment be held off until I can at least guarantee my idea is going to exist? I won't even be able to offer a realistic price, so how can i effectively test market interest?

My biggest hurdles right now are just to deal with these manufacturers somehow - to figure out a way to get them to deal in smaller numbers per order. If i can be sure of that, get some idea of a pricing point, then i can move forward with realistic testing.

So what advice can anybody offer there?

[kamakiri]

I will bow out of this discussion. It appears that you already have all the answers you need. Good luck.

[Sven]

If you like, feel free to email me about manufacturing. I've been in high quality small scale manufacturing for 14 years.

But I do feel that you're making things too complicated. You have to walk before you can run but if you're affraid of falling you will go nowhere.

[kamakiri]

The law of the little shovel
from Seth's Blog by Seth Godin
17 people liked this
If you want to dig a big hole, you need to stay in one place.

If you walk around town with a little shovel, you'll just end up digging thousands of little holes, not one big one.

Call on one person ten times and you might make the sale. Call on ten people once each and you will likely get ten rejections.

The important thing to remember is that separate events are often separate. If you use the same ineffective approach on one thousand people, it's not going to start working better just because you use it more often.

Connected events, on the other hand, often benefit from frequency and trust.

Which leads to two viable strategies:
1. If you can stay still, stay still. Earn the trust, earn the sale by repeatedly demonstrating value and authority.

2. If you can't stay still, get a bigger shovel. Your marketing and your sales pitch has to be so refined and focused that it works the first time, because you don't get a second time.

[Sven]

Very true, but OP may have very valid reasons for wanting smaller quantities.

[craftsy21]

Very true, but OP may have very valid reasons for wanting smaller quantities.


Thank you.

I appreciate whatever advice you're trying to offer kamakiri - but did it ever occur to you that maybe your time-honored cliches don't work in this case?

The thing I enjoyed most about Tim's book was that it was not just a bunch of vague ideas - it had specific, real-life ideas and strategies. It wasn't full of cliches like you're offering, that you assume apply to every "muse".

I am asking very specific questions here and all I've gotten in return is a bunch of basic, overused business advice. That's great, I get all of those rules. I know business, to some degree. If that's all you can offer me, than fine - thank you. But I'm not looking for a business 101 degree here, I'm asking specific help on dealing with precise situations.

I do apologize if I've offended you for not just taking your advice and being on my way, but I don't think you really gave me a legitimate answer by saying things like "the pieces will fall into place". I don't believe that's a productive mindset to have.

Now as I said - i HAVE to work in small quantities per order.. it's the very nature of the type of business I'm talking about trying. Most of the reason my muse doesn't exist already is based on the fact that nobody is working in quantities this small - but I want to setup some sort of deal with a manufacturer to guarantee sole use of their company for my supply, in hopes that they would be willing to work in smaller quantities PER ORDER.

To simplify it even more - imagine you're trying to sell cans of soda. You believe there's a market out there for 4 oz cans of soda, but the minimum anybody makes is a 12 ounce can. I want to find somebody to make me 4 oz cans, with the guarantee that I'll buy the same amount as their 12 ounce customers, just split up into more orders.

You telling me that I should just order 12's doesn't work, because the market for 12's is taken care of, or doesn't work for my product. I'm not dealing in all like orders either, I want people to be able to get whatever size they want, be it 2's, 5's, 7's... I have companies capable of making every size, but they want to make my entire dealings with them all in one size, and I want each order to be a different size.

Hopefully that clears this up once and for all... i'm beginning to think this place is too much of a ghost town to get any input from anybody else though, so maybe I'm wasting my time asking here at this point. :rolleyes:

[Sven]

Thank you.

I am asking very specific questions here and all I've gotten in return is a bunch of basic, overused business advice.

Well, not exactly.... You have left out the most important part. Maybe for solid reasons.

But for the best answers we need the best information. So far the info you have given is incomplete, leading to general answers....

[craftsy21]

Well, not exactly.... You have left out the most important part. Maybe for solid reasons.

But for the best answers we need the best information. So far the info you have given is incomplete, leading to general answers....



I don't disagree entirely - But I do feel like the information I've given at this point is sufficient to get me some more specific advice.

I have gotten a manufacturer to contact me today finally, saying they MIGHT be willing to work with me in the quantities that I want for an upcharge. So I might be getting somewhere, but I still don't know if I should reveal to them that I'm trying to run a business through them.

[CRFBusiness]

Your biggest difficulty is the tooling and set up costs associated with the manufacturing. You are right they should be able to do a small lot price quote which would include surcharges to reflect the set up time. If it takes them an hour to set up the tools and die's, at an affective 80 dollars an hour (all in costs associated with wages and overhead) they need to amortize it over the production run. See how much they are charging for tooling and see if they would let you up front the cost of the tools and then only surcharge the set up. It might be a sunk cost but make it easier for you. Just an idea.

I have used thompson.net but my best luck today was going to the local library and looking at a state manufacturing directory. Surprisingly useful. Sometimes you can find things not necessarily posted on the internet. ;)

[aguyleroux]

I've been having a lot of trouble finding a manufacturer for my muse and I was hoping you guys could be of some assistance.

I've developed a vitamin supplement for a niche market. The problem I'm having is that minimum orders for many of these manufacturers are asking me for a $10,000 investment.
For example: I am producing a monthly supplement. So 30 packets of 6 vitamins. The most recent quote I got was .42-cents per packet. Or $12.60 per box (not including the cost of the box). This isn't ideal, but it's workable. The problem was the company wanted a 25k minimum order which amounts to $10,500. I've contacted about 12 manufactures of all different sizes and this problem keeps coming up over and over. Quote is decent, minimum order is too large.


Do you guys have any advice or ideas?

[djhelliweld]

Hello Guys,

I live in Asia and I might be able to work out the manufacturing if its engineering related it would be quite easy for me.

Regards

DavidIf you like, feel free to email me about manufacturing. I've been in high quality small scale manufacturing for 14 years.

But I do feel that you're making things too complicated. You have to walk before you can run but if you're affraid of falling you will go nowhere.