A Hypnotherapist Develops a New Product

A fellow took my class with a solution to a problem in mind.  As a hypnotherapist, he saw the blending of technology with practice wold advance the healing process.  But he desired to keep his idea secret for fear of having it stolen.  So he would not be too open:

I would sell them to anyone who wanted to break a habit, like smoking, weight lose or just relax. I'm also a hypnotherapist so I could provide programing for each of these areas.

Or they could create their own script and re-program their own subconscious.

So I asked who he thought his customers would be.

I think stores that sell New Age type books and videos like East West book store,float centers,Brookstone, or any store that sell high tech gadgets for executives. 

I think any store that sell vision light therapy boxes could carry it.

So I told him to go and try to BUY his idea from those customers.

I've been getting really positive feedback on my idea. It took me going in the stores in order to better understand what I was really talking about. 

I was trying to create a Swiss army knife of tools for therapist. But I found out that each one of them are great tools by themselves and they are all using the same video glasses just modified for different uses. 

*Meditation

*Bio Feedback

*Vision Therapy

*Hypnosis

What I found is any store that sells anything related to ways spritual healing or high tech toys was really excited. I even had someone say when I find one bring it back and show them.

So he finds what happens when idea meets customer.  The customer sorts him out as to applicability and so much more.  Plus, not how he is no longer desiring to keep his idea secret.   He gets far more valuable info far earlier by revealing his idea.  Now keep in mind, he approached the stores as a customer, not a supplier, since he is not a supplier as of yet. If the product proved to already exist, he would be a customer.

Question: I trying to find the best place to have it made. It has two components. Video glasses and EEG combined with software. 

I've seen the video glasses before but they would have to be modified significantly to be used for any of the things I've mention. 

Should I focus on the easiest item in the line to create item first? Which would be to modify the video glasses for meditator or anyone having difficulty learning how.

When you are combining two components to make your device do I focus on the place that has the best management? 

Example Video Glasses and EEG Devices?

To which I replied:  “Of the two components, which will will require the most change.  There is your target supplier...”

First off, after reading some of the articles about monopolies and Open Source products which I absolutely love I've expanded my view about what protection means and I would love for you post what I'm doing on your blog. 

The shift!  No longer fear-based development, but customer based!

I've started doing my research and was have trouble finding the correct HTS number. So I got as close as I could using what I learn from pdf and called a customs broker to help narrow down number. 

He sent me all the forms I need but he thinks the product may have to be registered with FDA. He is researching that for me. 

I'm also certain when I connect the EEG to the  glasses the FDA may be involved because of possible side effects. 

I started building spreadsheet but ran into a problem when I got to column H. I wasn't sure about where to get quantity from.

Data was easy to get.

This is fun!!!!

Talk to you tonight

We worked out the problems he was having in trade data research.

I'm combining the features of 4 different tools and making one. 

This is very doable but I'm not sure how to proceed so I'm buying all the parts and build a crude device to test the concept. 

Then I can look for supplier and designer. 

Do you think that's a good plan or do you think I should just find the supplier first?

To which I replied: I think tinkering with a prototype is a good idea since you have so many moving parts...  there is an argument that "too much new" scares people away, so intro just one step new, and then go from there based on success upon success.  What you may actually have after you put the thig together, a road map for product development with first iteration coming out this september and once a year over the next five years...  think how apple goes from strength to strength...

and did you say I could blog this progress?

Your suggestions makes a lot of since and of course I would love for you to blog about my progress. 

I agree, people are afraid of too much newness so I will start with what got everyone excited when I talk with them, easy ways to relax and meditate.

Technologically this would be much easier to build than incorporating a EEG device.

I could create two products by just having two types of glasses and using the same controller for both.

I can have a working  prototype built by September and it shouldn't be that difficult. The glasses is the most expensive part, "$100-$200", and the micro controller is only $30. 

I will set a goal the having a prototype completed by September 14th. 

Talk with you on Wednesday.

Thanks

I really enjoyed the class and I think I've worked out a big of my prototyping problem by joining some forms and asking question. Now I know where to start looking for solutions.

 Now that schools out I have some time to dedicate to it.

Thanks for you help,

Greg 

Success!  .  I cannot make anyone successful, I only help people save time and money geting where they would go anyway.

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The End of Panjiva, PIERS, importgenius, Zepol, etc...

I recommended a new business hiding importers and exports info from public view, so as to not end up on the Trade Intelligence Services such as importgenius, Zepol, PIERS, Panjiva, all dotcoms.

Now at least one, and I imagine in time all, CHB is offering a service to make you invisible in the public reports.  Hey, what's another $150 to a trader?  To a CHB with 1000 accounts, it is another $150,000 straight to the bottom line.  Nice!

One could have always, and still can, hide their activity from public scrutiny by simply making the "to order" field on the OBL or AWB name the CHB, but this is more thorough.

The info at these services will degrade over time, and then they will disappear, I expect.  As I said, it was never tactically or strategically useful info for a real trader anyway.

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Detroit to Freeze Pensions

What will you do when the payments stop?

DETROIT — Detroit’s emergency manager proposed freezing pension benefits for some current city workers starting in 2014 and will launch a two-month probe into the city’s dysfunctional and error-prone handling of employee benefits.

OK, they go after the fraud first.  Even if the money is fraudulently gained, it is still useful, and what will you do when it sopts?  What is your alternative?

Eventually, the people who played by the rules (but should ahve known the promisese were impossible to keep) will find the payments stop.  then what?

If you spent thirty years in a city job destroying entrepreneurs, when the payments stop, where will you go for work, in your retirement?

Better figure out a job now, begin to undo some of the damage done.  If you are still working for the state, review my blog for ideas on how to make a switch to customer employment.

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Rethinking the Corporation

If I ever make the history books for business and economics, it will be for, as far as I know, the only original idea I came up with:

The symbiotic relationship between small and large business.  Riffing on Drucker, small businesses are innovators and large businesses are conservators.  Innovators introduce the new.  Large businesses lower the price of the new.  The Conservators "steal" the idea once it is perfected enough from iteration at the specialty level to warrant the application of the economies of scale to lower the price and widen access to the product, to the point everyone has access to what was once few, lousy, expensive and slow to come by.  Conservators make the innovation more better cheaper faster.

As an aside, IPR is ridiculous in this reality-based scenario since the innovaor is constantly changing the idea, and the conservator "steals" the idea and sells it into a market the innovator could never reach. Symbiotic.

Henry VIII was once one of the richest people on earth.  Today virtually every american has what Henry VIII had.  We did not get as rich has Hank, the costs were lowered to where we all have access to those goods and services. It was that period of economic freedom that got us here.

Conceptually, big business is benign.   It has been hard for me to reconcile the role of the conservator in realtity, with my theory.   Name a big biz does not depend on subsidies and special regulations in order to survive?  Where would Walmart be without food stamps keeping their employees alive?  Where would Costco be wthout imminent domain seizing private ptoperty to open a temporary tax advantage for the local authorities who tax both big and small until the small disappear, and there is only big? How can a small ISP maintain the records required for all ISPs?  Only huge need apply.

My research into cooperatives has convinced me the proper economic structure for "big business" is the cooperative. It is a funny thing, cooperatives seem to be borne of a socialist bent, and where the cooperative takes socialism seriously, they fail (such as the food co-op on Shattuck in Berkeley).  The ones that get biggest while succeeding would be called more anarchic, and anarchy looks conservative to liberals.

My favorite big businesses are REI, PCC and coop apartments. We have Group Health Cooperative in Seattle, but there are others that make more sense, as in buying cooperatives rather than provision cooperatives.

In any event, cooperatives give us all of the all of the benefits of the large business, but none of the aggregation of power unto the extremely few.  Eliminate the legal protections of the corporation, I agree with that, and they will go away.  But progressives are calling for the state, which they control, to add more control to corporations.  No, don't amend it, end it.

We need not overthrow anything, just stop protecting unnatural social structures.

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Importing Seminar At Portland Community College

If you want an eight hour in-person boot camp in the Portland, Oregon area,  come 19 October 9am to 5pm at the Sylvania Campus.  I'll be teaching in person that day.

Understand the role and the value of the small business international trader. Learn how to develop a product, find the best supplier and test market your product. Explore how to work within standard market structures to sell your products and financing the start-up company. 

  Sign up here now to assure a place in the room.  Feel free to forward this by email to three of your friends.

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All Hail Castro's Cuba!

Cuba is experiencing economic challenges, so what does it do?  It reduces the size of the State and deregulates a series of professions.

The goal "is to further develop... a climate of trust and legality," as Cuba makes the transition to an economy where private enterprise is not only tolerated, but actively encouraged, Granma wrote.

I wish the Capitalists would follow suit, and allow our economy to recover.  No, instead we are nationalizing yet another segment, "health care."  Why is it only communist countries are following good economic policy?  Is it because marxists are better economists?

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Chris Norstrom Learns Much

And then he shares it.

The main reason I do not claim to own anything I teach is because I learned it from others and then it worked for me too.  Next, others learn the same things doing it on their own, like Chris.  The only thing I can do is save people time and money.

It is absolutely fun to read step by step what I already teach, and then the conclusions Chris reaches.  His graph on process could be taken from this blog or my classes.

He is a believer in IPR, but note how he seems to be naturally drifting away.  He'll get to hating IPR eventually, but that will take time.

Also, he left out YahooStores as a ecommerce platform, which I have found for over a decade to be a gem.

That he finds GoogleAds is an utter waste of time only for terrible execution of interface is a universal experience.  What is wrong at Google internally that this is not fixed?

The idea of customer centered, self-financed, it is encouraging to see this being rediscovered.

Give him a read...

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MOQ FOB Letter Stamp

Just in time to match the MOQ FOB tactic movement, the USPS has an international mail forever stamp, currently $1.10, or a book of ten for $11.  When you are actively marketing directly to potential buyers by means of a letter in the mail, here is the stamp for the job, or more specifically for the envelope.

Add caption

Cool round stamp is sure to get attention, and there is apparently a Christmas version if you are actively marketing during the holidays.

Add caption

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Buckyballs

A fellow hits on a neat idea, and then...

In August 2009, Maxfield & Oberton demonstrated Buckyballs at the New York Gift Show; 600 stores signed up to sell the product. By 2010, the company had built a distribution network of 1,500 stores, including major retailers like Urban Outfitters and Brookstone. People magazine in 2011 named Buckyballs one of the five hottest trends of the year, and in 2012 it made the cover of Brookstone's catalog.

He sells millions of them.  And then goes out of business.  He never got a chance to try to turn a fad into a mania, because the feds shut him down.


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Alibaba IPO to NY

Callum spots this article:

China's Alibaba, the world's largest e-commerce company, has reportedly ended talks with the Hong Kong Stock Exchange and will try to list in New York.
Think of Alibaba as Amazon, eBay, PayPal and Groupon all rolled into one. Its initial public offering could be bigger than Facebook, whose IPO valued it at $104.2bn (£65.2bn).
Alibaba's profits are 10 times that of Facebook, but it may be wary about repeating Facebook's post-IPO dive. Analysts estimate that it could be priced at $120bn or as low as $60bn - that is about 84 times estimated 2012 net income.
Alibaba was seeking an arrangement that would have allowed the executives to control a majority of board seats. So the founder Jack Ma with 7% of shares and his executives, who together hold about 10%, could have appointed five of the nine directors on the board.

Imagine that!  Regulators who care about investors!  Regulators not owned by the regulated!  Alibaba plans to head where small investors can be scammed and ripped off, as in the USA.

Hong Kong is a village.  Regulators cannot get away from those whom they serve.  They literally must walk in the forum, like Caesar did.  And if they misbehave, they'll get it, like Caesar.

In USA, we have zero access to those who abuse us with impunity and immunity.  Alibaba.com will be an Enron some day.

Very good move, Hong Kong.

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Venezuela Needs a King

Venezuela is using too much government to solve its problems.

After a decade of currency controls set up by late socialist leader Hugo Chavez in 2003, the disparity between the official and black-market rates for the local bolivar currency is higher than ever. Greenbacks now sell on the illegal market at about seven times the government price of 6.3 to the dollar.

Right now a dollar is about 6.5 Bolivars, or a Bolivar is about 16 cents.

After 2003 the currency controls did not quite work so in 2008 they introduced a new controlled currency.

http://www.xe.com/currencycharts/?from=USD&to=VEF&view=10Y

Now that looks like a bar chart, not a human action graph.  Each one of those jumps was a part of government policy to make government policy work.  One might view it as a government failure graph, or a citizen misery index.  But is is the official exchange rate over the years.  Let's look at the black market exchange rate (in the inverse):

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/steve-h-hanke/venezuela-on-the-death-of_b_2853782.html

The idea is to build the economy by making exports more attractive and imports more expensive.   Such a policy is meant to, well, who cares what it is meant  to do, it does create winners and losers.  And take a wild guess what happens?  Answer - the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.  Even when socialism is in play.

The government is trying to fight the USA economic hegemony with government policy.  Can't win that one.  Things just get worse.  A  much better plan would be to go for freedom.  Here is a graph I made to explain this earlier...



When faced with a crisis, the more freedom the better the results, the less freedom the worse.  Now even if the government is huge, relatively speaking, it is no smarter at solving problems, but it is expensive.  Give people freedom to decide, and freedom from fraud, like a massive guerilla movement they will defeat the enemies of peace and prosperity.

I am an anarchist, of course, but if people are not going to be free, then an acceptable compromise is a kingdom.  With a King, Venezuela would have a leader who was truly jealous of who shears his sheep, and at the same time never allowing anyone to get powerful enough (by shearing) to challenge his divine right to rule.  This is something democracy cannot offer.

Have a DNA contest, and whoever has blood that is combination of the last Aboriginal chieftain and King Juan Carlos of Spain is declared the King of Venezuela.

Do you have a better plan?

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Comparative Advantage

There is a theory in economics of international trade called comparative advantage.  The idea is there are others to whom you can farm out work better done (in part defined as at cheaper cost) than you would do.

For example, you might be very well able to paint your own house, but since you can earn $20,000 in the time it would take you to paint the house, you are better off paying a painter $10,000 to do it.  Your house is painted and you are money ahead.  Everyone gains.

The theory should be suspect once the question of "int’l" is introduced, since “international” is merely a concept, a convention, with no constants that can be assumed.  Borders change, making "int'l" a squishy basis upon which to think..

The other part is politics within changing borders change.  And one part of politicws is regulations and taxes, in which every case there is a winer and a loser.  And finally, comparative advantage is widely cited in any effort to deny workers just compensation for their work.

But politics alone make it impossible to calculate costs and potential, since there are no constants.

To deal with this reality, chaos must be managed through testing.  In science, one tests by taking out variables, and breaking down components to testable parts.  One big varialbe is state interference.  Eliminate the state interference as a variable, and get down to what happens in a free market.  From there, you can build a hypothesis more easily, and test a cleaner hypothesis.  In this way you can formulate ideas to test, and make progress in business planning in spite of the chaos that is introduced by the state.

Hong Kong is showing what is possible when the state intervention of the wine market is eliminated.   It is proving to be a delightfully clean test of how things would work.  It provides for many new hypotheses, and opportunity to test them.

One reason peole are having such a hard time selling wine into China, I think,  is the market distortion, misallocation of resources, giving rise to unreliable economic data.  Better to think with those parts taken out, what would work?

You get better results with less effort in business if you are an anarchist.

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Prices: Sharpen Your Pencil

We do not compete on price at the small business level.  Nonetheless, price naturally comes up in discussions.

Any buyer worth his salt is going to squeeze you on price.  It is his job to do so, to discover what your true price is, what you are willing to sell for.  The buyer must also defend the agree price to his boss, with evidence, better in writing, that you refused to fold on price.

When a buyer tells you your price is too high, don't listen.  If the product is new to the buyer, he cannot possibly know whether the price is too high until he tests it.

You are giving the buyer and moq fob to test out everything, including the price.  So when a buyer squeezes, don't give in.  Here are some scenarios:

1. If he goes after you ExW price, reply there is nothing similar and he must test the price to know if it is wrong or right.  If he goes after FOB price, tell him there will be economies of scale to factor in if and when he will be ordering in larger quantities.

2.  If the buyer ignores you and just says "I need this price" and names one, then they have done their research and know what putatively competitive products run.  Differentiate the product and point out he'll miss offering new if he won't pay the price.

3.  If the buyer says something vague like the "price is too much..." then he has not done his homework  and he is just squeezing by rote.  Wake him up with a grand "Of course you want a lower price! We all do. But any lower and I will go out of business.  This is the right price, and you need to test it in your market."

At the small business level price is not the concern.  If anyone brings it up, make it go away without cutting price.

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Bo Xilai Gets Life

Bo Xilai took a life sentence in his trial for corruption.  It looks political, and with China, it may be he comes back for a round two.  Deng Xiaoping had three go-rounds, and in the USA we have the likes of Richard Nixon who goes down in an ignominious splash only to return as president, resign, and then on to elder statesman.

Bo Xilai saw his father take worse, and he himself has seen worse.  I don't think this is over.  Chinese politics is too subtle, like Chinese Opera, to take at ace value.

At least they are not executing political problems any more.

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He Probably Forgot About It

Ty Warner admitted he hid $3 million in Switzerland in 1996 and will pay a $53 million fine to the IRS.  He probably put the money there then forgot about it.

It is alleged that Mr Warner, who also has a reputation for philanthropy, set up a Swiss bank account in 1996 with the UBS financial services company.

Since he is a big shot the IRS probably required he admit guilt and pay a huge fine as a deterrent to others.

This is the problem of having the State with a monopoly on currency.  They can tax too much a pick off anyone they want.

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