A Guide to Start-up Essentials
Why protect your Intellectual Property? Retained IP within your new venture could prove very valuable in the future. You have established that your start-up idea has the potential to succeed and now want to start sharing the vision with investors, suppliers and potential customers. But as a start-up, you are rightly nervous about who they share their ideas with and when. Click to learn how below.
So that moment of inspiration has arrived and you are certain you have a perfectly formed product idea, what next? The first challenge is how to fund this venture? The good news is, there are many ways of getting hold of funds. The bad news is, it doesn’t necessarily come without certain conditions. To provide a starting point we have pulled together some of the common funding options in the UK.
It is easy to focus on the new product idea that you are deeply passionate about, after all, it is exciting and rewarding. But equally important is the question of how are you going to sell it? The route to market should not be an afterthought. In this article, the key routes to market are outlined including, Crowdfunding, Direct-to-consumer, Wholesale/Distribution, and Online-only retailers.
Design Packages
So you have an innovative new product idea, well at least in your head and you've done your research to establish the idea is unique, there's a market for it and it wouldn't infringe on any existing IP. But how do you communicate this to others? This is often the challenge many face, how do you explain the benefits clearly. In addition to this, is the idea credible and how would it work in reality?
At Phase Two we offer design packages to start-ups at a fixed rate to help to form your product idea. These design packages will generate professional high-quality design content that can be used for user research, to secure investor funding, product marketing, share with potential partners and generate interest. The intention of these design packages are to enable start-ups to communicate their ideas effectively and avoid substantial research and development spends until the product idea is fully formed and on a solid commercial footing. This will give the project every chance of being successful, whilst limiting risk.
Our combined 30 years of commercial design experience, working with clients ranging from start-ups to global organisations gives us the ability to rapidily add value at the early design concept stage to excelerate product ideas, whilst avoiding potential pitfulls. This enables our clients to bring products to market faster.
To define your product idea we will quickly generate a series of design concepts. This is a crucial step to outline how the product will look, function and perform. As part of this package we will conduct a product viability assessment. This will consider...
...various elements of the product idea such as potential market size, technical feasability, manufacturability, sustainablity, NRE costs, production costs, branding, etc. The product idea will be explored in sketch form to uncover and define suitable creative design directions.
The design concepts will be presented in a digital format that would be suitable to share with key stakeholders. Following this piece of work either a design visualisation or visual prototype could be created based on a choosen design direction.
Unleash the full potential of your product idea with a design visualistion. We will create a tangible vision your product idea to gather insights and feedback...
...from potential end users, investors or other interested parties. This package would include a product viability assessment as described in option 1.
The product visualisations will be presented in a digital format that would be suitable to share with key stakeholders and as digital assets for digital promotion and marketing.
Nothing can replicate a physical prototype. For some product ideas it's essential to get the product idea into someone's hand. This can create a memorable impression that delivers the impact needed...
...A visual prototype will look like the design concept but won't have full function. This is very dependant on the produce idea, for example, if the product included electronic hardware this may not be included in an visual prototype as it not have been developed.
The exact specification would be agreed prior to the prototype build and based on the requirement. The prototype would be fully finished to represent the design vision.