Source:
https://www.podbean.com/eau/pb-abee7-11257f8
Episode Twenty Six features Alan Beckley Talking About His Invention The Wonder Wallet And His Podcast Inventors Helping Inventors!
My Key Takeaways:
Alan was a great guest and understood well the challenges faced by inventors.
Fun Fact: Alan is learning Mandarin to keep his brain active and engaged as Mandarin is one of the hardest languages to learn.
Another Fun Fact: Alan was born in the Panama Canal Zone
Before becoming an Inventor, Alan was in the Telecom industry as a Project Manager and still has many close friends in it.
Alan said that the role of Project Manager served him well as an Inventor as he has to manage his own product, assigning due dates as well as talk to customers and determine what their needs are.
Alan invented the Wonder Wallet when he realized that Men's wallets were growing bigger with cards and that was causing discomfort and medical issues.
He created the prototypes himself out of swatches of leather and plastic inserts and went through about nine to ten iterations before he was satisfied with the end result.
Alan wanted to license his invention to a wallet manufacturer but struggled to do so as his product really needed to be demonstrated to be understood.
It wasn't until he went on QVC that he had any real success. Because of the short QVC format Alan learned that he had to do the demos in a timely matter.
After he went on QVC Alan licensed the Wonder Wallet to a Direct Response TV company called All Star products that in turn went on to sell in over 10,000 stores and accrue 30 million dollars in sales.
Alan started his podcast, Inventors Helping Inventors, to help provide other Inventors with the information that wasn't readily accessible to him starting out.
Alan advises Inventors to avoid anything too niche and liked both the Pet Industry and Travel Industry in particular. He also advises that your cost should only be about 20% total of your retail price.
He also advises Inventors to do a thorough search to determine that their invention does not already exist before they go too far with moving forward on it. He recommends USPTO.gov, Patents.Google.com and even using a reverse image search on Google as potential tools to vet your idea.
Alan also recommends the Licensing model versus Venturing it out on your own. He recommends LinkedIn for being able to find companies and their officers to prospect to.
To learn more about Alan Beckley, his website is AlanBeckley.com and his podcast, Inventors Helping Inventors is available on all of the major podcast directories.
Now next week, we'll have on Dana Knowles talking about how she overcame addiction to straighten out her life and to invent the Shower Caddy as well as help other Inventors. Be sure to hit subscribe in your podcast app so that you don't miss it or any other episodes.
Show notes and more can be found at EntrepreneursOver40.com
