How To Pre-Sell Products Like A Pro (Before You Even Create Them)
Do you have an idea for a new product but aren’t quite sure if it’s something your audience would buy?
Offering new products in an established niche can feel like a gamble, especially if your niche is pretty well saturated.
In this post, we share tips on how to test how profitable your product idea is without mass producing it.
1. Understand what pre-selling is and isn’t
Pre-selling is a sales technique you can use to test how interested your audience or target market are in a particular product.
Normally, you’d fully produce a product before marketing it to the public.
If it’s a physical product, you’d mass produce it and sell off your inventory of it. If it’s a digital product, you’d complete it in its entirety before promoting it.
Pre-selling is different.
When you pre-sell a product, you either sell a concept of that product, a condensed version of it, or an incomplete version of it.
It’s not a scam. You let your audience know the product hasn’t been perfected and finalized, but you offer it at a discount to gauge how likely they would be to buy it.
Sure, a lot of consumers wouldn’t even waste a penny to test an incomplete product, but if you can drive enough interest and support for that product, you can acquire hundreds or even thousands of contributors who are willing to help pay for the completion of your idea.
In short, pre-selling is a useful technique that…
- …allows you to gauge your audience’s interest in a product.
- …markets your product before it’s completed.
- …allows you to gather audience feedback to improve the quality of your product.
- …generates revenue for a product that’s not yet completed.
If you’re curious to know what types of products you can pre-sell, you can generally pre-sell anything your audience can use or consume.
2. Come up with a good product idea
You might already have a product ready to pre-sell to your audience, but let’s go over a few tips on how to come up with a product idea in case you don’t yet have one.
The most important thing you need to do is audience research. Find out which social media platforms they use and which forums they’re active on.
Survey them, and ask them questions one on one.
What you’re looking for are problems your audience has that you can solve with a product.
That product can be a physical product, a digital product, a SaaS app, an online course or even a book.
Once you have an idea in mind, find products that are similar to it to see how profitable your idea might be.
Look at their prices, the number of reviews they’ve received as well as their mentions on social media.
Lastly, turn that product into a keyword, and search for that keyword on Google Trends. You’ll see how popular it’s been over time.
Try to break your idea down into a more generic keyword when using Google Trends, such as using “blender” instead of “Ninja” or “smartwatch” instead of “Apple Watch.”
3. Develop a basic version of your product
While it is technically possible to sell consumers an idea, it’s better if you have something tangible to offer them. If you’re pre-selling a digital product, give them something they can consume.
To do that, you need to either develop a prototype if your product is physical or develop a small portion or condensed version of your product if it’s digital.
This will make it much easier for you to sell your idea. If your target market is able to see your product, even in a basic form, they’ll be more likely to support it.
For physical products, use a 3D printer to develop a prototype, and commission an artist to design concept art.
Digital products work a little differently depending on what your idea is.
If your idea is an online course or a book, develop a fourth or a third of it for your audience to consume right away.
If your idea is an app, develop a lite version that offers limited functionality.
The idea is to give your target market a small taste of what you have in mind, then let them know you need to crowdfund the rest.
4. Gather testimonials and early feedback
You might think we put this step here by mistake, but it’s actually very important for you to gather feedback on your product before you try to pre-sell it to a wider audience.
This is also why it’s so important that you develop a working prototype or a small portion of a digital product.
It’ll give you something to hand over to early testers so you can collect feedback, and more importantly, testimonials you can insert on a sales page.
Pick your testers carefully. They should be experienced in your niche so they can give you constructive feedback that’ll help you create an even better prototype.
If you don’t know anyone experienced in your niche personally, get in touch with a few influencers, and run a survey on your website.
Some survey builders, such as Google Forms, Typeform and SurveyMonkey, have branching conditional logic features that allow you to show or hide certain questions based on how respondents answer previous questions.
If you ask the right questions, you’ll be able to vet qualified candidates and ask them to become early testers.
The most important part of this step is gathering feedback you can use to perfect your prototype as well as testimonials you can use to demonstrate social proof for your product.
You might even figure out that your idea isn’t as marketable as you thought.
5. Determine how much funding you need
Developing a working prototype or a small portion of your digital product along with collecting feedback will give you a better idea of the amount of work you have ahead of you.
You’ll have a better understanding of the types of materials you’ll need in order to create the real thing and how much it’ll cost to mass produce.
You’ll know if you need additional employees to help you complete the work and how much you’ll need to sustain your business once the first lot is sold.
Do a lot of studying and research to determine an exact figure that you need to produce that first lot. Your audience will be much more likely to support you if you know exactly what funding goal you need to achieve.
6. Choose a funding platform
You should be ready to launch by this step. You just need to decide where you want to receive funding.
Kickstarter and Indiegogo are popular platforms for crowdfunding projects, especially projects for a singular product.
You can also run your own crowdfunding campaign by launching an ecommerce site with platforms like Sellfy and Shopify.
Even if you use a platform like Kickstarter, you should still create a dedicated website for your campaign that includes a landing page that leads to your Kickstarter page.
If you haven’t built an audience, yet, you may want to go the Kickstarter route.
While Kickstarter and Indiegogo’s terms state that neither platform is obligated to facilitate refunds if a campaign fails, consumers assume they do and may, therefore, be more likely to fund a campaign that operates on a proven platform.
Popular Kickstarter campaigns you might have heard about include the Exploding Kittens card game, Critical Role’s Vox Machina animated series on Amazon Prime, the Secret Hitler board game, and Brandon Sanderson’s fantasy novel collection.
At the same time, running a crowdfunding campaign on your own website may help make the transition from crowdfunding campaign to full-fledged ecommerce business much easier.
Once you launch your product, your backers will already know which website to visit to purchase more.
If your product is an online course, use Thinkific. It has pre-selling functionalities built in, and it also doubles as a community platform.
7. Create a sales page
Your sales page is the page you’ll use to collect payment.
This will be your project page if you use a platform like Kickstarter or your course page if you’re creating an online course.
If not, you’ll need to launch an ecommerce website, and create a sales page for your idea by adding it as a product.
After creating a basic version of your product, figuring out what price to charge for a product that’s not even complete is the next issue.
With Kickstarter and Indiegogo, you can create several pledge levels for supporters to choose from with the lower levels only providing basic privileges, like updates about the project.
Receiving the product free of charge can be reserved for higher levels.
For digital products and projects you’re funding through your own website, choose a price within the range of $1 to $25.
It’ll be awhile until your backers get the product into their hands, so it’s best not to ask too much. Having a price is mostly to prove whether or not your product is something consumers in your niche would actually purchase.
8. Complete your sales and landing pages
The design of your sales page will look different depending on where you create it, but it should more or less have the same content:
- A video showcasing the product and campaign itself
- Images of the product, even if they’re just concept images
- Features and benefits of the product
- Funding goal
- Explanation of why you need that specific funding goal
- Your estimated timeline for when the campaign ends to when backers can get the products in their hands
- Testimonials
As consumers react to your campaign, you can add a FAQ section that answers common questions you receive.
You don’t necessarily need a landing page as well, but it can help you market your idea more effectively since landing page designs are a lot more flexible than sales page designs.
Note: If you don’t have a solution for building landing pages yet, I’d recommend OptimizePress if you use WordPress. If you don’t use WordPress, go for a SaaS builder such as Swipe Pages instead.
9. Generate interest from your existing network
Your existing network are friends, family, coworkers, influencers you’ve worked with and subscribers you’ve labeled as high-quality leads in your email list.
Market to these folks first to get the ball rolling.
You can share it with everyone, but it may be best to only share it with folks who you know would be interested in the product. This will keep your conversion rate high.
If you’re part of a Facebook group in your niche, share the campaign with them as well.
10. Promote your campaign to your target market
The best ways to promote your campaign outside of your core audience is social media, your email list and your blog.
For social media, upload your campaign video, at the very least.
Upload additional videos that showcase your prototype as well, including videos of your early testers using them.
You can even use influencer marketing and social media ads if you have the budget for them.
Build up your social media profiles on the side while you develop your product idea. This will give you a much larger audience to market your product to.
For your email list, consider sending the following emails to your entire list:
- Teaser email that shows the prototype but doesn’t yet say why you’re sharing this with your audience
- Campaign launch email
- An explanation of why you want to create this product and how it’ll benefit your subscriber
- Multiple emails that showcase your prototype’s best features. Send one email for each feature, and use a feature/benefit explanation
Create a segment in your email list that labels subscribers as backers so you can exclude them in emails that promote your campaign. Your email marketing tool should integrate with Sellfy, Shopify and WooCommerce or vice versa.
If you have a blog, add the following elements to it:
- Blog post announcing the launch of your campaign and details about it
- Landing page that promotes your product idea
- Hero section on your homepage dedicated to your campaign. The call to action (CTA) should lead to your landing page
- Button in your main navigation menu dedicated to your campaign. The CTA should lead to your landing page
11. Keep your supporters in the loop
Like I suggested in the previous step, it’s important that you create a segment in your email list that labels your supporters as backers.
This allows you to keep them up to date with campaign milestones and setbacks as well as your progress in creating the finished product after the campaign ends.
You don’t need to do this if you use Kickstarter or Indiegogo since these platforms have internal communication features.
Final thoughts
You can do all the market research you want, but you’ll never truly know how well a product will sell until you actually sell it.
That’s an unpredictable approach that can result in wasting a lot of time and money.
Pre-selling your products means you can avoid all of those downsides.
You’ll have funds to cover your startup costs and a customer base that can start building hype for your product, before it has even launched.