My Exit Strategy

My exit strategy for this venture is to obtain design patents for my product and eventually pitch my venture to some of the existing companies out there in the hopes of either selling the rights to the design completely or coming to a deal that would allow them to use my design in exchange for a portion of each item sold. My plan is to do this sometime within the next 5 years. 

I have selected this particular exit strategy because as much as I would like to pursue this further, it is not something I would say I am truly passionate about. I think that selling the rights for a profit would be more beneficial to me in the long run because the money that I make from this would allow me to pursue a venture that I am more passionate about or at least help me to pay off some of my student debt.

I don't think my exit strategy has had all that much influence on the decisions that I've made throughout this venture. I am a perfectionist and a people pleaser, so I've tried to explore every suggestion that has been made to me as well as every opportunity related to my product that has presented itself. I think the one decision that my exit strategy has affected is which product I chose to stick with. I originally had 3 different product ideas that were all related, and I think that if I knew this was something that I planned to stick with and not sell, I probably would have kept the other two around as possible product ideas in the future. But since I knew that this was something I would likely be selling, I instead chose to focus my attention on the raincoat and only made notes about the others in case I ever decided to return to them.