How to Validate Your Product by Preselling

Preselling your idea before it’s even created sounds scary right? I personally think what’s scarier is spending months or even years creating something that no one buys.

Preselling ensures that you will have sells before you spend any time or money creating. After you’ve grown your email list, you can ask your audience what they want from you to get some great ideas on what you should create. However, until you ask them to commit with money you never know if they will really buy.

[clickToTweet tweet=”People will tell you all day that they will buy something, preselling makes them actually commit.” quote=”People will tell you all day that they will buy something, preselling makes them actually commit.” theme=”style1″]

Benefits of Preselling

1. Time won’t be wasted.
2. Money won’t be wasted.
3. Builds excitement.
4. Puts a fire under you to get it created.
5. Gives you funding up front.

Drawbacks of Preselling

1. Disappointment if sells are lacking.
2. You are committed, now you must deliver.
3. Because of commitment if something unexpected comes up you’ll have to figure out what to do.

Preselling Expectations

1. Set a goal that you must meet in order for it to be “worth” it to create the product.
2. Be clear whether or not the presale buyers will get charged immediately or charged at the time of the product release.
3. Come up with a refund policy/ cancelation policy.
4. Have a plan for how you will cancel or make returns if you do not hit your goal.

The Presale Event

1. Create an outline of your product idea, create a simple Presale page.
2. Connect the page to your payment processor ( I use Gumroad because you can presale through this platform and the customers won’t be charged until the release date).
3. Share your page via email and social media.
4. Create urgency around the presale.

The Promotion of the Presale

1. Send an email out to your list or to the segment of your list that is interested in the subject of your product. Tell them all about your idea and share your outline or product description with them.
2. Be honest and let them know that it is a presale so they are reserving the product at a discount for being early adopters.
3. Promote the Presale anywhere else you feel comfortable. I’ve promoted exclusively to my email list and then I’ve also run a full out email challenge that ended in me pitching my course idea/outline (which made of $8000 in sales to a very small group of under 300 people)
4.  Once you feel like the number of presales is equal to what your goal was, you can start moving forward on creating it. My goal was to sell 10 I sold 42 so I was totally motivated to start making my course.

The Delivery of the Product Presold

1. Make sure that you make creating your product your number one priority.
2. Get it to your customers when promised. If something happens to delay it YOU MUST communicate the delay to them.
3. Deliver the product. If you are using Gumroad you simply upload it to the product listening. If you use a course software you will add each module to the course. If it’s a huge course you can work on each module one week ahead and release the new one each week. That way your customers aren’t waiting months for the course to be ready.

Wrapping it Up

Preselling your idea with a presale is the absolute best way to get your idea out there and to ensure it’s actually worth creating. I’m not just saying this with no evidence I’ve personally sold over $10,000 in digital products that were just ideas.

Yes, that’s right I was paid over $10,000 in good faith that I would deliver the product I promised. I used a Facebook Challenge Strategy to lead up to the presell and you can read about how to do this yourself here.

Remember you have to deliver what you promised and you must continually provide excellent customer service and connection after the sell to ensure continued customer loyalty for future launches.