Go to any forum involving Inventors seeking help and you will see plenty of people/companies offering to help by selling Inventors services. Everyone is quick to tell you that you need to do patent searches, make a prototype, do design work, etc. What you don’t see is these people posting their success rate getting the Inventors product on the market and the Inventor making more money than they paid for all those services. The main reason for that in my opinion is because the number is very low.
What you do see is they only offer to speak to most Inventors offline. Why can’t they tell more of what they have to offer in front of the rest of the people on the forum? That should be a red flag and make you suspicious of what they have to hide. And do they push the hard sell when they have you alone? Don’t allow companies to pressure you into thinking this is your only option and you have to take the offer today or it might not be available in the future. That is just part of the hard sell. If their service is that great it should still be great if you decide to wait a couple of months to see if you REALLY need their service.
First let me say I have nothing against Davison as a company, they seem to deliver the services you ask them to provide. I am using their own posted information to prove a point. Plus they are one of the few I could find that post their information. Go to their webpagehttp://www.davison.com/legal/ads1.html and you will find the below information. Read it carefully and pay attention to the last couple of sentences and look at the percentage rate of success they achieve.
They state “The number of consumers who obtained a written license with a company that is not affiliated with Davison is one hundred seventy eight (178). The total number of consumers in the last five years who made more money in royalties than they paid, in total, under any and all agreements with Davison, is six (6). The percentage of Davison’s income that came from royalties paid on licenses of consumers’ products is .001%.” I applaud them for posting their actual numbers when a lot of other companies don’t. The truth is, even with these facts posted I doubt most Inventors will even take the time to read it.
As I have said before, everyone is happy to help you with some form of service you pay for. What the Inventor has to do is make sure it is a service you REALLY need. Don’t let your emotion override your common sense and just blindly start throwing money at it because you love your idea.
To many Inventors get caught up in the trap of well I have already sunk X amount of dollars into the idea I can’t stop now. That in my opinion is exactly what the people selling you services count on to keep you coming back for more services.
Think about it. If you come to a company and say I want you to do a patent search on exploding cereal they will be happy to do it. Because they know if they told you that your idea is not marketable and a waste of your time they know you will just go find another company to do the search, so why lose the money.
Same goes if you told a design firm to work you up a portfolio on this same product. They will be happy to do it because they are in the business of doing designs. They don’t care if it makes it to market. They are just delivering what you asked for. It is up to you what happens after you get the design drawings.
You could probably get a patent on it and spend thousands for the piece of paper saying you have a patent. The question then is what do you do next? Who is going to buy this? Is there even a market for it? Those are questions you could answer long before you spent any money. But in most cases the Inventor will not do the boring work of research first and goes right to spending money.
So who is to blame?