“You don’t need a product to start selling.”
People like Eric Ries and Steve Blank (a.k.a. “the founding fathers of startups”) recommend taking pre-orders.
The argument is that the earlier you test your assumptions, the more feedback you can gather about your product.
But what if you get discouraged by a small amount of sales? What if you can’t finish on time? What if… anything bad happens?!
Last week, I stumbled upon a lively discussion in the Small Bets chat. “Should you take pre-orders?” one fellow member asked, “Can you actually sell something you haven’t built yet?” In my head, it was an obvious ‘Yes’. But then I realized I don’t actually have proof that taking pre-orders works.
Does pre-selling work in real life? To find out, I spent the past week gathering real cases of people who have done it.
Let me show you what I discovered.
Pre-orders work well for more than just books
One of the things I believed is that you could only do this with infoproducts. I was surprised to discover this works for almost any type of product, even for SaaS.
- eBook: Tom Hirst got 28 pre-orders for his $19 “Pricing Freelance Projects” ebook in a single day. It gained 230 pre-orders and made $4,530 in revenue while he was still writing it.
- Course: James McKinven crossed $200 in pre-orders for his podcasting course “2 Hour Podcast” in just a few days.
- Boilerplate: Dan Mindru got $2k in preorders for his boilerplate “Shipixen” in just two days.
- Newsletter: Kevin Conti pre-sold his newsletter “Software Ideas” to 11 people before deciding to start working on it. This helped him get almost $20k ARR in less than a month.
- Community Membership: Ellen Yin started her community “The C-Suite” by offering memberships to 100 founding members at $100/year.
- Notion Dashboard: Janel sold over $2k in pre-orders for her “Newsletter OS” Notion dashboard in just one week.
- SaaS: Prasanna Mestha made over $350 from her visual editing SaaS, “UI Bun”, before launch.
Now that we’ve debunked the myth that pre-orders only work for books and courses, let’s address the next natural question.
What if I don’t have an audience?
You might think this only works for those with large audiences, like Lenny Rachitsky. He announced his book, “The Best of Lenny’s Newsletter—Volume 1,” to a big list of followers and email subscribers and got over $70,000 in pre-orders.
But that’s not necessarily the case. Although a big following will definitely help you, there are other ways you can promote your pre-orders besides sharing it with your audience.
- Samuel Briskar got 400 signups and pre-sold a Photoshop plugin for generating banner ads by sharing a demo video in several Facebook groups.
- Gene Maryushenko made over $6k in pre-orders from Swipe, a database with conversion strategies. He “had no audience, other than ~500 Twitter followers, and a handful of friends I chat with via DMs.” So he messaged everyone he knew and announced his product on Twitter.
- Prasanna Mestha made over $350 in pre-orders for his SaaS, UI Bun, without a big following: “I am a maker with barely any social connections and I get about 20 views and 2 likes (if lucky) on my Twitter posts.” He published posts on Indie Hackers, engaged in online communities, and shared code snippets on GitHub.
That’s why I love the internet. You can find people who are willing to buy an unfinished product even if they don’t know you.
So, let’s say you’ve decided to take pre-orders. Your next question might be…
How soon should you start taking pre-orders?
I looked at various examples, and it seems like there’s no ideal time to start taking pre-orders.
- Brennan Dunn, who crossed $1k in pre-orders, launched his course “Segment With Surveys” five months after announcing it.
- Mateusz Wierzbicki made all modules for his course available three months after starting his pre-sell campaign, which ended with 191 sales.
- Nick Haskins, the author of the Rails book “Playbook Thirty-nine,” started accepting pre-orders one month before his book launch. He got $1.5k in pre-sales.
Whether it’s one month or six months, I believe the important thing is to communicate often with your customers and manage their expectations.
How to launch a successful pre-order campaign
Alright, this whole pre-orders thing seems like a good idea. What should you do if you want to do it right?
Here are what others have done to have a successful pre-selling campaign:
- Create a persuasive offer
- Prasanna Mestha from UI Bun says: “Make sure that the title of your post is catchy and gathers attention.”
- Create a demo or show a sample
- Gene Maryushenko from Swipe provided a sample of his database with a locked view.
- Jane from Newsletter OS shared a sneak peek of the Notion dashboard in her pre-order announcement thread.
- Dan from Shipixen made a video showing how he built his landing page and blog.
- Create a landing page with a clear CTA to receive orders
- KP from Build in Public set up a simple landing page with a form to get pre-orders for his guide: “How to Get the First 1000 Early Users for B2C Products”.
- Promote your product, repeatedly
- Samuel Briskar from Lunadio posted his demo video in several Facebook groups.
- Create a sense of urgency
- Karthik from Drotion, a drag-and-drop landing page builder, sent a FOMO email to their entire email list saying that pre-orders were ending soon and prices would increase later.
- Launch more than once
- Alex Hillman on his ebook pre-sell: “That’s also why there’s no such thing as a single ‘launch day.’ Launches contain mini-launches and can be repeated over and over with improvements based on what you learn.”
My recommendation? Do a test and see how it goes. Only experience can tell you if this is for you or not. And if it doesn’t work, it’s not the end of the world. You can always re-launch and try new things. The important thing is to keep trying.
Hope this helps,
Paulina