The Cleaning Fluid Injection Device

Issue 001 - 2019-01-14

Lesson: We often spend too many resources on the product, and not enough on marketing

As a little boy, my dad went deaf in one ear. His mum took him to the doctor, who discovered wads of cotton wool lodged inside his ear canal. You might have experienced similar misfortunes. Usually the good doctor washes out our ears with a syringe and a thin plastic hose.

But what if there was a better mechanism? What if there existed a machine that allowed the doctor to squirt at different speeds? Wouldn't every self-respecting physician be clamouring for one of these?

That's what my father thought. Somehow he met Rudolph M. Du Toit, inventor of the Cleaning fluid injection device. My father acquired the rights to produce this fantastic machine. He bought hundreds of small pumps and transformers. He had the pistol and tank injection moulded and decorated with his HIC logo. HIC stood for "Hans Ingo Chris", the three partners.

It took him forever to assemble a single machine. He was too meticulous. He even covered the wires that went into the AC plug with solder. It had to be 100% perfect. Built by hand. German craftsmanship. He expected that he would sell thousands. But there were several problems:

1. He had not done enough market research beforehand. Doctors were happy to continue using their cheap syringe. They still do today.
2. The price was too high. Assembly was too expensive and the inventor's commission too high.
3. He had spent too much money on buying parts and almost nothing on advertising.

We grew up with hundreds of little pumps at home. My father once reluctantly gave me two for a science experiment. My mother scrapped it all when he passed away, together with many of his other entrepreneurial ideas.

I do not blame my father for trying to make a living. I have also produced software and courses that I could not sell. Delphi used to be very popular in South Africa. Close to Turbo Pascal, the old teachers were happy to introduce that to their students. Armies of gung ho hackers graduated from the Technikons armed with a Delphi compiler. They could code anything, and I mean, ANYTHING in Delphi. One of them told me that Delphi was more powerful than Java. I asked if it could solve the "Halting Problem". He said yes. Delphi could solve anything. NP-Complete? Yep, in polynomial time. Awesome.

And so I decided it was time to introduce some science to this software proletariat. My design patterns course had been successful with the Java programmers. And if I translated the examples to Delphi, it would sell like hot cakes. I did not know Delphi, but my friend did. I paid him to translate it. After a few months, we were ready. 15 years later, we have not sold a single course.

We so often focus on the product. We spend months building it, not thinking about how we can one day sell it. We know that if it works well, then "word of mouth" will make it fly off the shelves. Nope. That's not how it works.

Thank you for being in the "Living Entrepreneurially" Community. This is the first of our newsletters. Over the next few weeks we will look at how to make sure that we can sell the things we create. Plus other topics that would be interesting to anyone wanting to live entrepreneurially.

Kind regards from your friendly entrepreneur

Heinz

Living Entrepreneurially Archive

• 012 - Crashproof Your Business
• 011 - "Was weg ist, ist weg"
• 010 - Fear of Rejection
• 009 - Quality, Reliability, Be Nice
• 008 - Be Prepared
• 007 - Riding School
• 006 - Inner Dynamo
• 005 - The Fuel Light is ON
• 004 - "I filled it in exactly as your father did"
• 003 - The Espresso Machine Guy
• 002 - "Escape is Giving Me Bad Dreams"
• 001 - The Cleaning Fluid Injection Device

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