224: Expanding Your Product Into New Verticals

Danny Angers, one of the pioneering Co-Founders of VOSKER cameras, uncovered something fascinating regarding how users were employing their products and used it to his advantage to expand his brand substantially. In just 5 years, VOSKER has grown to achieve an astounding $150 million in annual sales across 45 countries and boasts the distribution of over 2 million devices worldwide. Today, Danny graciously affords budding inventors, startups, and small-scale manufacturers insight into his experience scaling VOSKER. He will delve into the efficacy of listening to your customers to inform the product iteration phase in order to boost the satisfaction of existing clients and identify verticals that you may not have explored without external insight.

Click this link for This Episode's Full Info Page: https://www.makodesign.com/podcast/224-expanding-your-product-into-new-verticals/

Key Takeaways in This Episode:

• Listen to your existing and prospective customers! Oftentimes, your clients will tell you what they need from your product.

• Innovation starts coming in from the client.

• The way you help your customers help you is by asking them how they are using your product.

• As a new hardware startup, you have the liberty to aggressively reach out to your initial customers.

• When your customer base increases, you can start sampling a portion of it to get a better idea of who the customers are.

• Send customers who send you positive feedback the next version of your product that is designed to help a specific customer persona.

• Around half of your customers will respond to outreach, which is more than enough.

• Ensure that you listen to customers when customizing the product for each new vertical that you have identified as an opportunity.

• You don’t necessarily need to create a product for every vertical.

• Focus on an MVP at every stage, and ensure each level is successful so that you can piggyback off that success.

• Failure is a key part of the process to success as well!

MAKO Design + Invent: www.makodesign.com

Kevin Mako: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kevmako

Producer: MAKO Design + Invent is the original firm providing world-class consumer product development services tailored to startups, small manufacturers, and inventors. Simply put, we are the leading one-stop shop for developing your physical product from idea to store shelves, all in a high-quality, cost-effective, and timely manner. We operate as one powerhouse 30-person product design team spread across 4 offices to serve you (Austin, Miami, San Francisco, & Toronto). We have full-stack in-house industrial design, mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, patent referral, prototyping, and manufacturing services. We also help our clients with business and product strategy, marketing, and sales/distribution for all consumer product categories.