A white paper on early-stage companies and Big Box retailers

My draft white paper is titled “10 Ways to Blow Your Chances at Getting Your Early-Stage Company’s Consumer Tech Product or Service Distributed via Big Box Retailers.” Whew! I need to work on that.

My initial list:

1. Assume that you can find Big Box corporate staffers who will care.

2. Figure that if some do care, they will have the influence to get you “on the shelf”.

3. Expect that buyers (merchants) are motivated to find and buy innovations from young companies.

4. Propose “partnerships” for product and market develop to merchants.

5. Compare your company to a winning early stage company product such as the Slingbox.

6. Load up your product or service with cool features and add a monthly subscription service to give the retailer reoccurring revenue.

7. Plan for enthusiastic response and sales velocity through in-store sales personnel.

8. Assume that because your product is digital and can be bought online from home, you’ll leave Big Boxes in the dust if they don’t distribute your thing.

9. Approach Big Boxes about first launching at their e-commerce Web sites to prove their merit for in-store distribution.

10. Read 1 through 9 and give up.