How to Finance Your Product When Working with MAKO Design + Invent

At our Toronto industrial design company, MAKO Design + Invent, we aim to be very transparent with our clients to ensure a relationship built on trust and a design process that is communicative and helpful.

We understand that a major factor that every inventor must face is the cost of getting their product and small business up and running. Properly financing your product is a big step towards a successful product launch! As such, today, we will share the best ways to finance your product venture.

Understanding the Costs of Your Product

In the same way that creating your product comes in different stages of design steps, so does financing and spending on your product. As a Toronto industrial design company that runs fee-for-service, MAKO only charges what we do for your product in steps.

We outline the costs of design sketches, CAD design, and prototyping in different steps to help you properly finance, understand the needs of your product, and plan out your project budget at a healthy and safe pace.

The costs of your product will always vary depending on what our design team determines its needs – for example, certain projects require mechanical and electrical engineering – and the sourcing of the material. As a result, it can be hard to give a definitive answer to the exact cost of your product idea, without a thorough free consultation with our product strategist, Ryan Davidson.

Ways to Finance Your Product as a New Small Business

Since starting out a small business carries a lot of new roles and responsibilities, it’s important to understand and know your options of how you can properly finance your business in the best, most strategic way possible. Here are some common methods that our Toronto industrial design company recommends for new small business owners to take in order to get their small business and product design up and running.

Friends and Family

By far, one of your biggest allies when it comes to starting a business is reaching out to your closest networks. Having a strong vision that can be supported by friends is a great way to get others on board to help see you succeed.

Asking or teaming up with those closest to you to begin a new business venture is definitely easier than going into the journey alone, so make sure to reach out, communicate, and share your dreams with a group of people who are on board with your goals and visions!  

Crowdfunding

Crowdfunding is by far one of the most popular tactics that start-ups or small businesses use in order to get their products and businesses ready and prepared for their audiences. There are many different sites that help new small business owners and inventors get more exposure, audience attention, and a clientele base interested in your service or product.

From our experiences as a Toronto industrial design company, Crowdfunding sites such as Indiegogo, Kickstarter, and GoFundMe are amongst the most popular crowdfunding portals that a lot of successful small businesses start out on. Take your time to research each site and decide which is best for you and your goals!

Pre-orders/Presale

Another way to finance your product is simply through the power of marketing and presales. If you have an audience who are interested and want to see your product come to life, beginning with presales and pre-orders is a strategic way to get funding for your product in order to develop the product and immediately have a list of different clientele ready to receive and try out your newest idea.

Not only is this great for receiving funding support, but you can allow your initial clientele to try out your first product in order to garner feedback on how it performs. Then you can go back in to fix issues and make major improvements to advance your small business to its next level with the comfort of knowing you already have an invested consumer base.

If you have a great new invention and you’d like to learn more about this process, get in touch with MAKO today and visit our website to find out more. Or feel free to give us a call at 1-888-MAKO, and we can set you up on a call with our product strategist!

About: MAKO Design + Invent is the original firm providing world-class consumer product development services tailored to startups, small manufacturers, and inventors. Simply put, we are the leading one-stop-shop for developing your physical product from idea to store shelves, all in a high-quality, cost-effective, and timely manner. We operate as one powerhouse 30-person product design team spread across 4 offices to serve you (Austin, Miami, San Francisco, & Toronto). We have full-stack in-house industrial design, mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, patent referral, prototyping, and manufacturing services. To assist our startup and inventor clients, in addition to above, we help with business strategy, product strategy, marketing, and sales/distribution for all consumer product categories. Also, our founder Kevin Mako hosts The Product Startup Podcast, the industry's leading hardware podcast. Check it out for tips, interviews, and best practices for hardware startups, inventors, and product developers. Click HERE to learn more about MAKO Design + Invent!