Inventions? Ideas? Dragons Den TV is Now Looking for Inventors Online

I bet you've thought of an invention before. Maybe you've even bought an Inventors Kit before, or looked into Inventors Kits. Some people have many invention ideas in their lifetime. Most of us have had a few ideas about inventions over the years. Maybe you've got one invention or idea you've had in your mind for a number of years.

Inventors Kits

Did you ever get as far as getting an Inventors Kit? They're pricey and, usually, not what you expected at all. For most, a complete waste of money. Getting an invention to market is a really frustrating, long-winded, risky and expensive thing to try to do. Many people spend their lives as inventors and never produce a thing. A lot of them are GREAT ideas, but they are inventors, not marketing gurus.

Maybe you sat and thought through your invention, imagining it being produced and sold, thought how useful your invention would be. How your invention would save people time. Your invention would be the best idea since sliced bread. Then you've realised you've got no money to develop your ideas and inventions, and no clue on how to take it forward.

The only way forward is to get your inventions seen, find out how to make those essential contacts with investors. Discover how to pitch your fabulous product to milllionaires like in the Dragons Den TV programme.

The Dragon's Den TV programme was a real eye opener as you could watch inventors pitch their inventions to a panel of savvy millionaires in an attempt to get them to back the idea with hard cash and expertise in exchange for a share of the company.

Now you can do something similar, but without the pain of standing in front of the panel under the gaze of the ever-critical UK TV watching public.

Your great idea, your fabulous invention, your time-saving gadget .... now you can find out if they really would be of interest to a company who has the time, money and expertise to develop them for you.

There was a company called Boggleit who provided online software to screen your idea. It tested your invention for commercial viability and its likelihood for success, providing you with an instant report, giving you a score and some feedback on your invention.

Score more than 70% and you might be onto a winner! Your idea, invention or product would then be evaluated by professionals.

But Boggleit closed down and there was nothing to fill its gap .... until the Dragons Den TV programme went online.  Now you can pitch your idea, show your invention, online via a simple video.

In April 2009 Dragons' Den introduced two new venture capitalists in a brand new format when it launched Dragons' Den Online. Dragons Den Online enables people to pitch their ideas online, using video. This is a major step forward for most people, who might not have the cash/time or luck to be able to pitch in front of the Dragons Den entrepreneurs on the TV.

Dragons Den contestants seem to often be pitching for large sums of money, but there are a lot of people out there with great ideas that want, or need, a lot less. Now, entrepreneurs looking for less than £50,000 have the chance to face two of Britain's business high-flyers in an online-only version of the Dragons Den.

Firstly you have to submit a 3-minute video pitch. These video pitches are viewed and from these they select who can go into the Den. You can view the video pitches on the Dragons' Den website - and you'll be able to debate and rate the ideas prior to them being put before the Dragons.

The Online Dragons are highly successful business people who are ready to commit their own money. The two newest Dragons are Edinburgh-based business man Shaf Rasul, who has made his millions in property and computers, and American born Julie Meyer, who runs an investment advisory company.

The Online Den is open all-year round, 24/7. If you think you have an idea ready for investment why not apply ... all you have to do now is create your 3-minute video!

Now there's another, easy, option - you can pitch your idea online by joining an innovative online marketplace helping to match inventors, artists and creatives with investors, benefactors and business angels.

Pitch Your Idea are the only site where members can pitch ideas, crowd fund, freelance, form contracts with interested parties, sell a business, find partners, do a royalties deal or retail your latest work.

Many Dragsons Den inventions have been successful - and quite a few have been unusual.

One of the more unusual pitches on Dragons Den was for Reggae Reggae sauce. Levi Roots turned up with a guitar and started his presentation of his hot sauce by singing his Reggae Reggae sauce song to the dragons.

Reggae Reggae sauce is a Jamaican jerk sauce Levi Roots started by selling his sauce at the Notting Hill Carnival in London and when he presented his product at Dragons Den he had two Dragons offering him £50,000 for 40% of his company.

Since then, the sauce has gone from strength to strength (pun?) and you can now buy it bottled in supermarkets, but also it's available in a lot of national food chains too.

The first supermarket to stock Reggae Reggae sauce was Sainsburys and they started selling it nationwide in March 2007. Sainsburys expected to sell about 50,000 bottles/year, but once it got onto the shelves it was selling nearly 50,000 bottles a WEEK!

You can find Reggae Reggae sauce in many places now, including: Subway, JD Wetherspoons pubs, Hungry Horse restaurants, Slug and Lettuce and even the Scream Pub chain. Birds Eye also launched a range of chicken chargrills coated in Reggae Reggae sauce.

Dragons Den inventions are appearing all around us in our everyday lives - maybe yours could be next.

One of the contestants on Dragons Den actually made his first million within just three months of appearing on the programme - and all without spending a penny of the £150,000 he'd won in the Den.

Peter Moule, 53, had invented a plastic electrical wire junction box, called a "Chockbox". Two dragons backed his invention and invested £150,000 in him, in exchange for a 36% stake in the business. He then went on to secure some deals with national DIY companies and has had enquiries from around the world.

Peter Moule has now become an unofficial Dragon himself as dozens of wannabe entrepreneurs started asking him to help them get their inventions off the ground. In fact, he's already signed up two exceptional inventions, with the potential for those to be even bigger than the Chocbox. He's also in discussions with other people to go into partnership.

Ernst and Young even selected Peter Moule to be the focal point of a 2-day training seminar for their up and coming prospective partners.

Peter, from Goff's Oak in Hertfordshire, won investment from both Duncan Bannatyne and James Caan when they were impressed with his polished pitch for the Chocbox.

The device is a simple plastic housing that protects cable connections, eliminating the need for untidy and potentially-dangerous electrical tape. Peter invented it some years ago when new regulations came into force restricting the use of electrical tape on some connections.
He was initially selling it direct to electrical distributors, in relatively small numbers, through his own company Electro Expo Ltd.

Within days of being in the Den, Peter signed a multi-million pound deal with one of the world's biggest electrical distributors.

The Chokbox cost just £1, but is expected to sell 5,000,000 units per year in 152 countries during the five-year deal - netting a whopping £25million in sales.

In the UK alone, there are 15million connector strips sold every year - each of these could use four Chokboxes, so that's a potential 60,000,000 units every year just in the UK.

The Chocbox is manufactured in Harlow, Essex.

Also known as Crowd Funding or Micropatronage, there are now an increasing number of websites springing up where you can have projects funded, just by asking! You simply create a project on the site, which means you tell people who you are and what money you want and what it'd be used for - and interested people around the world will club together to make it happen. If you raise enough cash, you get it all - but if you fail to raise enough interest/cash then the donations are never collected.

The people you invite to fund your project might be people you know, past customers, or complete strangers from advertising it (social networking, local/national/radio advertising). Thre's no one size fits all, maybe you can find the money for your new product or service from strangers across the world!

Why not try some out:

http://www.indiegogo.com - in 120 countries round the world

http://www.kickstarter.com - US projects only

http://fundable.com/

http://www.pledgebank.com/ - pledges for all sorts of reasons, not just funding.

If you're an inventor, or thought up some great ideas in the past, why not fill out our poll to show how serious you were about your new product.

How far did you take it?  Maybe you've already got it in production and are successful.

Fill in the poll - and why not leave a comment to let us know your experiences!

Thanks for reading.

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Dragons Den TV: miss604