Hi everyone! It’s me, Beth Anne, and today we’ve got a solo episode for you. I’m doing this solo episode because I’ve gotten so many questions from you brilliant business ladies about how I designed my planner. How do I import a product from overseas? How do I find a manufacturer? How does one scrappy business mama come up with a product idea and make it happen? I’ll give you all those answers. Let’s dive in!   Listen Now   On the Podcast 3:25 - First Product Iteration9:50 - Finding The Right Designer14:18 - Be An Expert In Your Niche17:54 - Your Minimum Viable Product24:03 - Improving On Your Product26:10 - Finding a Factory31:00 - Ordering Samples33:30 - Taking Presales (with Kickstarter)35:41 - Delivery Dates37:34 - If You’re Having Trouble Finding A Factory44:11 - Clearing Customs52:14 - Fulfilling Your Orders   My experience with designing and manufacturing a product, as you might expect, has to do with planners. My product started originally as the the Brilliant Business Planner which launched in June 2015. That first iteration morphed to the Brilliant Life Planner, which launched via Kickstarter in August 2016. I’ll take you through this process. And rest assured the takeaways will apply to you regardless of your nice. (But to that point. I’ve heard from many of you with great ideas of planners, journals, and other paper products that solve problems in your niche.) If you have a fabulous idea for a product that you just know is going to improve people’s lives, and you know it’s a better product than what’s on the market currently., JUST GO FOR IT! Yes, there are a lot of steps and unknowns, and you’ll learn a lot along the way, but you’ll be so glad you did it. When you’ve produced a fabulous product that you can put into people’s hands and help them, it’s really an incredible feeling. That’s my pep talk as we get started :) I’m going to share my journey and the big takeaways you can keep in mind for your own product launch. First Product Iteration As my sister and I were writing our book Time Management Mama we wanted a planner that allowed us to plan our business and lives in one place. Our planner idea started with lined, blank paper. We sketched out what we wanted on those pages. We really wanted work and personal to do lists, and top 3 priorities for each week. And we knew we wanted our weekly layout to be time blocked. We just sketched it out our ideas. I should go pull up our old sketches for fun :) Neither of my sister or I are very artistic or good at drawing. These early sketches were SUPER rough. We just knew what the end result should be, but we needed help bringing it to life. From there, we found a designer to take our sketches and turn them to a digital file. Takeaway #1:Those of you trying to produce a totally unique physical product, will eventually need a CAD file. CAD stands for Computer Aided Design. You’ll need an expert to translate your ideas to this digital format, so that your factor can use and produce your product in mass quantities! We got off easy when it came to finding a designer! As soon as we mentioned we were working on creating a planner, one lady in our community reached out and said, “Hey! I make planner pages and am well versed at using Illustrator to create printables. I’d love to work with you.” (SUCH a gift, right?) This gal took our very rough sketches, translated them to Illustrator, and gave us ideas about how to make the planner even better. Takeaway #2: When you find your designer, one of the best things you can do is be really prompt with feedback. Design and development takes a lot of time. It’ll take way more back and forth than you imagined. If you want to keep your project moving forward, you need to write back to that person within 24 hours every time. Otherwise, you’ll be the kink in your own system. Then a year will go by without having a product, but it’s because you didn’t give prompt feedback! Since this time, we’ve worked with a few different designers and they