As you dive into your research to discover the market, competition and technology around your invention, the materials you have uncovered start to pile up. If you are like me and you like hard copies to take notes on, highlight and organize, then you will start to develop giant piles, binders and folders loosely organized around the different topics. Many inventors, because of their creativity get a little crazy with all this material. However, I’d like to share a few strategic points and tricks (although not unique or ground breaking) that can help.
1. Brainstorm Keywords
2. Google Search, go through quite a few pages
3. Stay disciplined, use a form that tracks citations and summaries of findings
Now the tricks,
Google Search, check out this link that will explain lots of tricks to isolate the important (or unimportant) keywords. They will cut down on the number of irrelevant results.
Research Template: Come up with a research template to keep track of the important products / websites (if you don’t like hard copies). All this data will be very helpful when you do a full scale competitive product analysis. An example template…
Google Keywords Used - You don’t want to keep searching the same ones
Product Name: Price - Find the price (most likely a range from different vendors)
Summary What is it in 1 sentence
Vendors - Know who they are because you might want to sell there someday. Also helps gauge the strength of the competitor (E.G. Amazon or Bob’s Online Warehouse).
Links - You have to keep track of the citations (nothing more frustrating than trying to re-find a hidden product on the web)
More in-depth Summary of Product - What is their product pitch
Technical Specs - How does it work, can you learn anything from how they did it?
Online Reviews - Where is the product struggling, what is it good at? Is yours better in the important areas???
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