Kevin Cronins last blog post..Kevin Cronin of REO Speedwagon

My opinion is that people who are going to steal will do so with or without a patent. And can you imagine the expense of suing someone for patent infringement?

In my eyes, the guy is throwing valuable time and energy straight down the toilet waiting for a patent. If he instead did a major marketing push, he’d be FIRST. First counts for a lot when it comes to sales. You can be years ahead if you are just first. Trying to wait for some protection is a waste when you have an amazing product.

even if the idea was stolen 2 years down the road, he’d still be first, where he’d still have his base built while the theif was just getting started.

To bring this to full circle, this guy could OWN a particular niche of product, but instead he chooses to wait. He could be anything in this niche he wants to be, but fear is holding him back.

A good place with lots of metrics is studying successful inventors. Something like 10 in 1000 ideas make it to a patent, and only 1 out of 1000 patents will make it to product and only 10 out of 1000 products will make money.

Statisticallly as little as 3-10% is the fun stuff, the origination of the idea, the creative process. The rest sadly is bringing it to fruition: keeping skills sharp, banding the streets, looking for new possibilities, connections, marketing, good sales, looking how to scale.

Since art is subjective, a painting/artists worth while they are living is directly proportional to the degreee they are marketed (be it word of mouth or conventional, putting on shows, albums etc). It’s also possible to achieve success through almost marketing alone. e.g. pet rocks.

Where exactly would one leave off?

“Sara you can be a great defense lawyer, but stop there. Don’t shoot for judge because you’ll never make it.”

“Brian, you have the aptitude to be a world class short order cook, but never try to be a chef, you’ll never make it.”

Having been at the bottom and seen that most of our limitations are self-imposed illusions, I can say that God or one’s higher power doesn’t put a dream into your head that you cannot do.

But everything does come with a price. You can’t just say I’m going to sell a million prints and that be that. Investments in learning, marketing, learning more, advertising, learning even more and adjusting are required.

I think most artists fail at their art because they are under financed and under marketed. But the artists who understand that half their job is marketing and advertising do rather well at their profession.

I was comparing how the HITS of today can’t even compare to his success as a fringe artist.

I think one thing I left out of my post was the need to adjust and learn. If you are a yodeler and you yodel for a year and don’t sell any records, you probably need to convert your yodeling to a different music style.

A few artists like Weird Al started out with Polka, yet, his most successful albums have been parodies of rock songs. He got feedback from the marketplace and adjusted. But had he listened to the people who surely said “Al, polka sucks. You suck…go back to school and take up engineering” Then we wouldn’t be able to hum “I wanna new duck.”

I’ve upgraded all my computers to IE 7.0 any web gurus with 6.0 have a quick fix I might apply?

What browsers are you using?