How Pre-Launching can Help You Validate Demand and Save Resources with Narek Vardanyan: An EOFire Classic from 2022

0:28Boom! Shake the room, Fire Nation. product or idea as soon as possible. Don't rely on what your consumers are saying, but what they are doing and owe so much more. And a big thank you for sparsing today's episode goes to Norek and our sponsors. Are you ready for the ultimate all-in-one platform for entrepreneurs, marketers, coaches, and agencies? Build funnels, automate follow-ups, manage clients, and even white label your own software. Say hello to our featured partner, High Level, and visit highlevelfire.com to start your free trial today. Fire Nation, success isn't a solo journey. It's about who you surround yourself with.

1:08That's why I built the Freedom Circle, a powerful community of entrepreneurs ready to support, inspire, and share the ideas that move you forward. Visit freedom-circle.com to learn more. Narek, say what's up to Fire Nation and share something that you believe about becoming successful that most people disagree with. Hey, John, what's up, Fire Nation? Thanks for having me. Everything is amazing. So you can be wrong a lot. Your experience, your gut feelings, and your genius ideas in the shower mean absolutely nothing if you don't have reliable data that you can trust on. Fire Nation, I really hope you're taking this in because you know what?

1:54A lot of people are scared. They're scared of being wrong one time. They're scared of being wrong twice in a row. You just need to realize this is part of the process. This is part of the experience gathering. This is part of the process of becoming successful as an entrepreneur. And that's why we're talking about how pre-launching can help you validate the demand and save resources spent on products that nobody wants. And I want to dive right into this, Narek, with why. Why do 80 % of product launches fail? That's a great question. So, you know, on average, there is this research which says that creators spent about 15 months and about$300 ,000 on product development.

2:38And as a result, as you said, most of them fail. And the common reason is that actually there is no market demand. And it is really hard for creators to predict which products will fly and which ones won't. solely based on their experience and available market data. And when creators pass through all these stages of creating a product such as ideation, design, prototyping, production, and then launching into the market, by the time they meet their consumers, they've already spent significant amount of time and money. And then you either succeed or you fail. And if you fail, you have to go way back to the beginning and start all over again, which many can and some don't want to.

3:23And I think one of the reasons is that creators meet their consumers when it's already too late. Fire Nation, you don't want to wait until it's too late. And what are you seeing, Narek, that the 20 % of product launches that succeed, what are they doing? One of the ways is pre-launching your product, your idea, your product concept as soon as possible and not rely on what your consumers are saying, but rely on what they are doing actually. There is this guy, his name is Alberto Savoia. He's the first engineering director at Google and has worked as an innovation educator for a long time there.

4:05And he's a big fan of pre-launching and he explains how Google has been failing a lot of their products. And then they figured out this pre-launching concept, which he calls prototyping and started to go early on to their consumers, see whether they're buying it or not, and only after start building it. And it was behind some of their major successes. So the idea is that you can simply create a basic website, basic page, and go and see whether people are buying it, whether people are interested in it, and only then start developing it further. So one thing that you're very adamant about is that we must meet our real customers before the launch.

4:50This is something that's hard to grasp for a lot of people because they don't even know where they would start. So why do you believe this is true and how would one go about doing that? I wanted to tell a little story about how we came up to this concept. So with our agency, TCF, it's a product launch agency. we've been receiving a lot of applications, a lot of submissions from many creators from all over the world. And then we have been failing a lot. We saw that, you know, the products that we have been believing in were not doing that great. And the ones which we were sure that, you know, have biggest potential were kind of not doing that well.

5:32So we thought, what if we can kind of recreate and imitate this real-life procedure and create a website basically as simple as a real website and start testing it with real customers. So how it looked like was the following. We've been creating a two-page website. On the first page, we've been putting the idea, the concept of the product, and then there is this place where people can subscribe if they are interested in. And then on the second page, we're putting some more data, some specifics, and have been putting the price and saying, if you are interested into this product, reserve the discount by placing as low as$10.

6:17So people have been giving like$10 to receive a big discount when the product will launch into the market. And this way, we have been following the data, following the analytics, like looking at the dashboards, comparing it with the other products and trying to assess whether this product has potential or that one has potential. And this helped us succeed a lot and be actually one of the most successful product launch agencies. Fire Nation, this is a key step in the product launch process. And I really want you to understand that without going through this type of due diligence, you're really just taking a swing blindly.

6:56And that's what we don't want you to do here, because we want you to be able to validate both your idea and your customer's willingness to pay before you put in so much time, effort, money, resources into something that might not work? I mean, guess what? It might work, but it might not work. So, Narek, how do we validate both the idea and the customer's willingness to pay? There are these two types of falsies, like false negative and false positive. False positive is that you're so sure about the product that this is going to fly and you're absolutely sure that this is going to be a success. And then you're looking at the data and seeing that this is not going that well.

7:41And then there's this false negative like a lot of products where people have been thinking that they're going to do great. After the launch, they're not doing that great. So you can create, as I said, this simple website and try to drive traffic, drive real traffic to those websites and look at the data. Or we have built a website, it's called the prelaunch.com. This is specifically for those kind of prelaunches because we saw there's a big need into the markets and many have been failing into their prelaunches. So with Prelaunch.com, you can create a simple website, simple page, get the data, and then in your dashboard, you can see how well you're doing, whether your concept is validated, whether your price is validated, increase or decrease the price, play with it, and then see whether you are in the top 1 % of your niche or are you falling behind, how well basically you're doing when you go into the market.

8:47So this eases the overall process of pre-launching. So Fire Nation, again, there is a process, there is a step-by-step system to follow, and that's what we're talking about here today with Narek. And this is why we want you to not be one of those 80 % of launches that fail, yet one of those 20 % of products that succeed. And we're going to talk about so many more strategies and tactics around this topic when we get back from thanking our sponsors. It's January, and that means new goals for your business. And because I know you actually want to hit those goals, it's time to stop messing around and start knowing exactly what's happening with your money.

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11:50Yeah, sure. So prelaunch.com is a product validation platform and we brought all these learnings from the past three years into prelaunch.com. It's a platform designed for creators to pre-launch, showcase, and validate their coming soon products. So how it works is very simple. You create a two-page campaign on prelaunch.com. And on the first page, you showcase the idea, the concept of your product. And on the second page, you put the price and some discount that you're ready to pay. And then in the dashboard, you can see how many people are reserving your products. and why is this so powerful is because when people are pulling out their credit cards and giving you actual money that's the best validation ever because this is based on their actual behaviors and then if you decide to cancel the the production which is pretty okay then your customers will receive their money back so they are getting refunds so it's pretty pretty okay in here to cancel the product if you see things are not working well.

12:56And if you see that things are good, then you more confidently move forward, launch into the markets and succeed. So one thing that I think is very important to Fire Nation, and I know it's important to you, Narek, with what you do in your business, is how our customers and our consumers are actually going to benefit from this process. Talk us through that. This is an important step in here because from a consumer's perspective, imagine you're getting access to your favorite brands and you're getting access to the coming soon products that they have. And then you can reserve those products before they launch into the markets, right?

13:35So imagine if you're a fan of Samsung, you can go and see what Samsung is working on. And then if it launches into the market, you can reserve a discount and you can get a significant amount of discount when it's live. So it's a risk-free, for consumers because if you don't like it or you change your mind, you can go and cancel your reservation and get a full refund before creator starts the shipping, right? So it's basically a marketplace of comics and products, I would say. And then another important aspect of this is that you can also participate in product creation. So basically what you can do is you can give feedback, you can customize the products, and the product creation shouldn't be the only prerogative of creators.

14:25It should be both processes. Consumers also should participate into the product creation as early as possible to make something that they really love. So Fire Nation, I really hope you're understanding all the different options and benefits and just overall processes that Narek's talking about when we go through this whole concept, which is pre-launching so you can validate the demand. So you can save resources spent on products that simply nobody wants. Like we don't want that for you. Narek doesn't want that for you. I don't want that for you. We've done our systems and our processes and our launches in a certain way to help avoid that as much as possible in our businesses.

15:05So what do you want to say in closing here, Narek? Talk to us about what you really want to make sure our listeners, Fire Nation, get from our conversation today around this topic. Yeah, so the main idea is to rely your important decisions on the data, on the important data. Like creators, many creators are spending their lifetimes developing products that turns out that nobody really wants out there. So I would really recommend everybody to do pre-launching, whether on prelaunch.com or doing it on their way, but making sure that they are basing their decisions based on the customer's behavior, actual behavior, not on their desires, not what their mom says, not what their friend says, but on the actual data, and then moving forward confidently.

16:00I remember like a couple of years ago, when I was in the innovation industry, I was just beginning in there. And a lot of people have been asking me whether this product will work or that one will work, what I'm thinking about those. And I was confidently giving some bets, you know, this one will work, this one won't work. And I was thinking that a lot of time I'm wrong. So I thought maybe this is because of experience. And if I get a bigger experience, I will be more confident. My bets will work better, et cetera. And with the experience, I understood that when I'm getting this question, my answer is I don't know.

16:40Because it's not about me. It's not about my experience. I am not my customer. This is an important realization also which Fire Nation should take into consideration. And actual customers think and behave differently. So when you go and see the data, when the data is out there, you can move forward confidently and increase your success chances a lot. And this is why we built the prelaunch.com to ease all these processes where you can build easily campaign pages and in the dashboard, you can basically see how well you're doing, whether you're a beginner or a successful creator. All right, Narik, let's end with a bang.

17:24Where can Fire Nation find out more about you, about Prelaunch, any call to action you have, any ways we can follow you, and then we'll say goodbye. Prelaunch.com. You just go there. You can demo some calls, and the guys will be happy to show you around. And you can follow me on LinkedIn and write any messages, and I'll be happy to answer. I love that because, Fire Nation, you're the average of the five people you spend the most time with. You've been hanging out with NV and JLD today. So keep out the heat. Head over to eofire.com, type Narek, N-A-R-E-K in the search bar. His show notes page will pop up with everything that we've talked about here today.

18:04And make sure to visit prelaunch.com. And Fire Nation, check them out on LinkedIn as well. Narek, thank you for sharing your truth, your knowledge, your value with Fire Nation today. For that, we salute you and we'll catch you on the flip side. Thanks for having me. Hey, Fire Nation. Today's value bomb content was brought to you by Narek. In Fire Nation, successful entrepreneurs are great at three things, productivity, discipline, and focus. That's why I created the Mastery Journal so that you can master productivity, discipline, and focus in 100 days. And we're talking step-by-step. Visit themasteryjournal.com and I'll catch you there or I'll catch you on the flip side.

18:44Are you ready for the ultimate all-in-one platform for entrepreneurs, marketers, coaches, and agencies, build funnels, automate follow-ups, manage clients, and even white label your own software, say hello to our featured partner, High Level, and visit highlevelfire.com to start your free trial today. Fire Nation, success isn't a solo journey. It's about who you surround yourself with. That's why I built the Freedom Circle, a powerful community of entrepreneurs ready to support, inspire, and share the ideas that move you forward. Visit freedom-circle.com to learn more.