I’ve Brought Dozens of Inventions to Market. Here’s How I Know Which Ones Will Sell.

I run a company built entirely on farmer-invented products, tools that farmers engineered to fix a real problem in their own operation. I get pitched dozens of them a year, and my job is to find the ones worth betting on, then do the hard part: build the market and sell them to farmers all over the world. Here’s what surprised me after doing it over and over.

The product’s brilliance has almost nothing to do with whether it sells. Every product I get pitched is brilliant. That’s never what separates the ones that take off from the ones that go nowhere.

I know that because I didn’t come up through farming. I came up through sales. For twenty years, I sold houses, then windows, then internet service, and in every one of those industries, I was an outsider who had to figure out how to make people care. That part never changes, no matter what you’re selling. So here’s what actually decides whether a product sells.

An inventor who’s all in

The biggest predictor of whether a product sells isn’t the product. It’s whether the inventor truly believes in it, and believing means putting your own money and time behind it. Every product I take on is already great. The ones that make it are the ones where the inventor is all in.

The other kind is easy to spot. They have a great product, and they want it to sell itself. They won’t invest in building it, and that catches up with them the moment demand shows up. They land a wave of orders, fill a fraction of them and leave paying customers waiting. The best thing that happened to the product becomes the thing that kills it.

So back your product before it’s proven. Fund the manufacturing before you’re certain you’ll need it. Put a budget behind getting it in front of people. The inventors who win aren’t the ones with the best idea. They’re the ones who bet on it as they meant it.

Does it move the customer’s number?

A great product isn’t enough to sell. Before I take anything on, it has to pass the only test the buyer actually cares about. Does it lower their risk or raise their return, and can they see it? If a product can’t show the customer a number that moves, it doesn’t sell, no matter how clever it is.

Farmers taught me this because they’re the most ruthless buyers alive. They bet everything every season, so every purchase comes down to one question: will this cut my cost or grow my yield? Not is it impressive? Not is it new? Will it move the number? Every other buyer is doing the same math; they’re just quieter about it.

Most founders sell the wrong thing. They pitch what the product is, the features, the cleverness, the story of how they built it, when the customer is sitting there doing one calculation: what do I get back, minus the risk of switching to you. So before you sell anything, name the return. If you can’t say exactly what number you move and by how much, you don’t have a product the market will buy yet. You have a clever idea.

Does it have a story?

The third thing I look for is whether the product comes with a story, because the story is what makes the number believable, and it’s what I actually have to market.

I figured this out by watching what closed people. Early on, I leaned on the same tactics that worked selling houses and windows: draw a crowd, put on a show, and get attention on the product. It worked; I’d pull a big crowd every time. But a crowd isn’t a sale. The people who actually bought weren’t reacting to the spectacle. They were the ones who heard where the product came from: that it was built by someone who hit this exact problem in their own work, got fed up and engineered the fix themselves. That origin is what flipped them from interested to convinced.

That’s also the difference between having something to sell and having nothing. When I take on a product, I’m the one who has to build the campaign around it, and a real origin gives me something concrete to work with: a person, a problem, a reason it exists. A product that’s nothing but a spec sheet leaves me with nothing to say that anyone will remember. The number gets you considered. The story earns you trust and gives you something to market in the first place.

It was never about the product

When something gets pitched to me now, I barely think about how good it is. They’re all good. I think about three things. Is the person behind it all in, or are they waiting for it to sell itself? Does it move a number the buyer can actually see? And is there a real story behind it that I can build something around? Clear all three, and it sells. Miss one and it usually won’t, no matter how good it is.

None of those three is about the product itself. They’re about the person, the buyer and the reason the thing exists. That’s what holds true across every industry I’ve sold in, and it’s why the best idea on the table is so rarely the one that wins. The product is the easy part. Whether anyone’s set up to actually buy it is what decides everything.