You all know Anova when you love cooking.

Anova is known as THE sous-vide expert in cooking.

Anova has developed a fine piece of kitchen equipment, the sous-vide precision cooker. Just type in “Anova sous-vide cooker” into any search engine and you can see what I mean (click here).

Now, Anova has a much bigger project: a versatile oven that comes with improved temperature control and with an integrated temperature probe for measuring the core temperature of the food that you are cooking. The new oven also comes with a steam generator. That one is needed for cooking delicious bread. Both the improved temperature control and the steam generator are of utmost importance for advanced cooking.

Here is what Anova did. They have developed a sufficiently good prototype of the new oven and they are now using that prototype for market response testing.

This is what was displayed on the company website today, on 06 September 2020:

You can pre-order this oven, which I did because I love cooking.

Today is September, and Anova promises shipping in December 2020. If I get my oven by March 2021, I am still ok. Or in case that there is too little market response, if Annova pays me my money back by January 2021, I am also ok.

That is how one reduces risk of introducing a new product. Test the market response. Frequently.

Watch this pre-sales video, it may even have been made with a dummy oven that still has many flaws. Nobody sees the oven working, and everyone focuses on the speaker who is explaining his product:

Do Thou Likewise.

Please note: I have no business interest in the Anova company, at all. I present this case only because I find that it contains a valuable lesson.

Martin “Market Response” Schweiger