Inventor Services Commission-Only
Although popular in principle, the notion that marketing services to help inventors with patents or ideas for products should be for commission-only is terribly inequitable and dysfunctional for many reasons. To my knowledge, no one has ever made a living that way unless they got lucky with one invention and used it to budget all the others.
Look at it this way. Car salesmen and real estate agents work for commission. But, with the success rate of invention marketing being so low, even on a good day, there is really no comparison in the reimbursement models. Tell me, how many real estate agents will you attractive when you tell them they will get commission on one of every hundred homes they list? Not many, if any.
If you know of any entities whom have been in business more than five years working for commission-only to help inventors, please let me know, I'll hire them.
If you want to find the best company to license your invention, pre-qualify them, develop a licensing strategy, ascertain the potential value of your invention and/or potential international sales, and all the other things that may enter into the licensing/commercialization business decision, then you will likely have to (and should) pay a fee. But, this work is more akin to research than it is to sales.
If you want use what is learned from this research and instead, use it for the marketing section of your business plan and go it alone, you are free to do so. However, legitimate marketers simply don't give away $10,000 to $20,000 worth of market research for free, nor should they be expected to.
Instead, some reputable service providers provide valuable market research, prototyping, product development, find potential licensees, and other such services to help inventors for a very reasonable fee, much less than a corporation might pay for a similar service. This, BTW is what Docie Marketing does to help inventors with ideas for products or patents.
In many cases you will need to purchase some type of service before you will ever know whether you have a marketable invention, or for that matter, before you ever 'pitch' it to a prospective manufacturer or licensee. This preliminary work supports possible future sales, but it is not the actually selling itself.
Another reason why commission services may be very inequitable is because with the low success rate, the marketer must charge an exorbitantly high commission in order to make up for all the failures. It takes nearly as much time to try to market a failure as it does a success. So if you have the lucky success, you will need to pay for the marketer’s services for dozens of failures. Sounds like the definition of socialism, if not communism to me. Not that this is bad, but every time you spread out the expenses, that's essentially the system you are undertaking, not unlike the insurance business.
These reasons and more are why the notion of commission-only services may not be as rosy as it sounds. The problem is, most people who recommend that marketing services should be for commission-only have never marketed their way out of a brown paper bag, let alone had to make a living by commercializing inventions. Reminds me of the blind leading the blind. Don't succumb to it.
If you want to save money and do it all on your own, I wrote The Inventor's Bible: How to Market and License Your Brilliant Ideas, with a workbook that takes you through the entire process, step by step, for that purpose.
But remember, doing your own marketing is almost like trying to write your own patent. You may do it, and in the end wish you'd paid a professional who could have saved you time, grief and mistakes from your inexperience.
