It’s undoubtedly exciting to watch the launch events for new products showcasing the latest innovations in the industry, but we’ve all been disappointed when an almost perfect product misses the mark because it lacks a crucial feature. Most companies create their products behind closed doors, making all the decisions themselves, and announcing the products to the public once they’re already being produced. The people making these decisions are often out of touch with what the end users need and end up creating a product that either lacks crucial features or includes ones that most users will not make use of.
The New Way to Develop Products
Dough was created to solve this issue by offering a crowd development community where consumers and experts can come together to crowd-develop the products they need the most. Our development model allows us to listen directly to the true end-users of our products who help us understand what experiences are important to them, what can be left out, and how much they are willing to spend on the right specs. The consumers are part of the process from the start and are deeply involved in every step. This allows us to achieve the perfect feature set at the right price, creating a product that offers a unique experience to its users.
How We Choose Our Products
While there are countless products we could develop, we turn to our community to define where we’ll focus our development resources. Through suggestions, surveys, and thorough discussions, we can find niches in the industry where the desires of the end consumers are left unheard. That’s where crowd-developed products redefine the standards that are proving to be inadequate for their consumers.
Defining Product Specs and Features
Once the product is defined, we turn to our partners and suppliers to discuss component options, taking note of options in every price range along with their benefits and unique features. This information is reported to our community, who, through surveys and discussion, help us understand their unique requirements for specs, user experience, and usability features.
The Design
When we’ve locked in the desired specs and secured the required components, our design team gets to work on the initial product design concepts. These concepts are presented to the community, and through their feedback, we can take the best characteristics of each concept and merge them into the final product design.
Development and Production
With the design finalized, we begin the development of the product, consistently reporting on the progress to our community, who supplies feedback allowing us to ensure we’re on the right track. At this stage, we can provide an estimated completion date for the project, and we begin with the first round of pre-orders, offering the best price possible to our earliest supporters.
During the development, we put our products through various internal tests, but to ensure the products perform ideally under every use-case, we also work with external labs and with our community members to test the product for specific functionality and ensure compatibility with a wider variety of devices. At this stage, the products are tested for eligibility for third-party certifications.
Once the products are mass produced, we arrange stock shipments to our regional warehouses and begin fulfilling the existing pre-orders. At this point, new orders will ship from stock and are available at the full price of the product.