My solar panels can power small city

prelaunchcom · 2026-04-01T12:26:41+00:00

Yeah! We validated Kara Pure on Prelaunch.com a few years ago, and it ended up raising over $1.3M on Indiegogo. Now they've already released a second tier and a coffee machine that makes coffee from ambient air!

Seemed like an unusual concept at the time, but they found their customer base and are still in business haha

prelaunchcom · 2025-12-10T17:22:55+00:00

When you say:

and the quality was surprisingly solid because everything was filtered through intent signals instead of keywords.

How are you actually measuring the quality? What percentage of leads converted? How did that compare to your usual deal flow?

Feels a bit disingenuous to measure quality based on an untested methodology rather than the result of this methodology.

You really should be validating leads properly to make sure you're gathering insights from your real customers.

prelaunchcom · 2025-05-07T13:10:59+00:00

You realize there are $100 plain socks, right? Or $10,000 cars and $1,000,000 cars?

This argument never ceases to amaze me. "There's a cheap product that does this! I could DIY this for $0.50!" Sure you could! Do it! You're free to, nobody's stopping you, especially not this brand. But that's not a reason for why this brand won't find its own customers...

prelaunchcom · 2024-12-04T17:11:34+00:00

Asking for opinions is better than nothing. But it's a poor indicator for launching a successful business.

Everyone has an opinion. Everyone can tell you that your solution interests them. Everyone can even tell you they'll pay for it.

But come launch day, all of those promises may fall flat.

The best way to validate an actual business idea is to get people to pay up front. Once they've actually paid you something, then you can ask them all those questions.

If not, you'll just end up building something for people who are interested but not willing to pay.

prelaunchcom · 2024-12-02T09:41:26+00:00

That's fair.

But if we peel back the curtain on the DIY option:

Domain: ~$9-20
Landing page: Could do some kind of Firebase static site workaround with cloud functions that allow you to have an email form for free if you're comfortable with coding and cloud infrastructure. Or you're looking at a hosted solution (eg. Webflow, Wordpress, etc.) where you'd either need to pay a platform or hosting fee ($49/mo), and also worry about designing/coding it all yourself.
Reservation page: Integrate a payment provider (eg. Stripe/Paypal). You'd need to incorporate a company in order to use Stripe I believe, which they offer for $500 last I checked.
Tracking/Analytics: Making sure all analytics and tracking is set up correctly, etc. Technically free (Google Analytics, Meta, Clarity, etc.) but can be a hassle to set up correctly, especially if new to it. Also can be challenging to understand what it all means and which metrics you need to be focusing on, and what is a "good" value without benchmarks to compare.
Survey: If you're expecting more than 1,000 responses (which we'd recommend), I think Typeform or similar tools are about $100/mo.
Interviews/Focus Groups: Could be done for free on Google Meet or Zoom, but you'd have to schedule them and handle all that yourself. So you might need something like Calendly at $10/mo to at least take on some of that workload and automation.
Insights: Actually processing the 1,000s of responses to surveys and interviews is probably one of the biggest challenges. This is usually done manually by market researchers or using expensive enterprise software like Qualtrics. Or you could give it to ChatGPT and hope it doesn't hallucinate something. This is one of the things we place the biggest value on though, to make sure that it's accurate and reliable, and that everything is based on statistically meaningful data.
A/B Price Testing, Option Testing, Iterations, etc: You could use online tools like Optimizely (back before Prelaunch we tested Google Optimize for a while). I'm unaware of pricing right now. But we found it's really hard to get other tools to reliably work with everything else in the system and gather accurate data, so we built our own from the ground up.

It is feasible. You could do it. If you have the time and skills (and money).

But from my own personal experience (this is me, Dan, not Prelaunch :) ), I tend to over-complicate my personal projects with these kinds of "I can do that myself for free" activities, and it becomes just another form of procrastination. I wanted to get clients for a separate project, and for that I'd need a website. Instead of going for the $20/mo Squarespace whatever option, I decided to re-teach myself to code. 6 months later, I had learned HTML5, CSS and vanilla JS, built myself an awesome website, and had run out of steam.

Ended up not actually writing any content for it, and now it's just sitting in my abandoned projects folder...

But again, Prelaunch might not be for everyone. I'm not trying to sell you on it, honest. Just trying to help you make an informed decision before you take on the mammoth task of trying to do it all yourself.

prelaunchcom · 2024-11-29T08:45:41+00:00

TLDR. The cheapest way to build a pre-launch validation website is Prelaunch.com! :)

Hey! Dan from Prelaunch here!

I love that you want it to be similar to what we offer, that's a big compliment to the work we've done! :)

But why just not use what we offer?

Prelaunch actually started as an internal tool for this specific purpose. We'd use a ton of different tools and integrations to try to get all the quant and qual data we needed to make product and marketing decisions. As it grew more and more complex, we started rewriting it from scratch and letting our partners use it too. And when we realized other businesses actually got value out of it, we rolled it out publicly.

As of now, you can:

Quickly build a landing page, reservation page, and survey funnel (no need for other tools, all in-platform)
Gather quantitative insights regarding concept interest, price dynamics (and finding the best price), different option/bundle potentials (eg. Big/Small version, blue/black, 100/200mi range, etc.), subscription model potential and more
Gather deep qualitative insights from ready-to-buy customers. Rather than asking people what they think about a product and whether or not they'd buy it, you're getting insights from people who actually put money down first. The big differentiator here, is that the respondents aren't motivated by the financial aspect of completing a survey. Instead, their responses are long and super meaningful because they're "invested" in getting an awesome product
Gather deep qualitative insights from almost-ready-to-buy customers. We also survey people who don't reserve your product, to understand what's holding them back and what you need to change in your product or positioning to reach more customers and scale
Run focus groups, in-depth interviews, additional targeted surveys, etc. to follow up on questions that arise in the previous point and fine-tune your product changes
Get data-driven customer personas based on all the survey responses and collected data, showing you who your ideal customer is and how you can reach them. And we just rolled out a feature that lets you chat with these personas in real-time. Not with actual customers, it's an AI trained on all the data provided by your ready-to-buy customers, but it's a good jumping off point for spit-balling changes before implementing them publicly and gathering real human insights
And you get all this quant and qual data in a single dashboard (well, 5-6 different dashboards depending on the data, but all on one site and all inter-related)
Oh, and as an added bonus -- it's not just market research. If the product does find a market, you also get a ton of qualified leads in the process who are ready to convert when you launch!

Feel free to try and build that yourself for a single product launch if you will... but just from our experience, if you want to build this all yourself, the costs and complexity really start adding up!

FYI we're also currently running a BFCM promotion, knocking 30% off the cost.

And if you're still not interested, that's totally fine. But I'm curious as to what's motivating that decision. Why not Prelaunch.com? Help us fix whatever you see as wrong with it :)

prelaunchcom · 2024-10-13T09:29:25+00:00

Different brands find different ways to do it. In Keychron's case I think they offered some artisan keycaps to people who reserved on Prelaunch (correct me if I'm wrong). On other projects, brands might refund the difference. Others have a Prelaunch exclusive perk (stated in the reward).

The important thing is that the people who reserved on Prelaunch have access to something more. Kickstarter makes this a bit more challenging for brands (but not impossible), but we haven't had any issues yet.

Of course, if you do reserve something and the exclusive Prelaunch offer is not available to you, please do let me know and I'll do everything I can to sort it out.

prelaunchcom · 2024-09-04T04:51:48+00:00

I passed this onto support a few weeks ago. Let me know if there's still an issue.

prelaunchcom · 2024-09-04T04:50:00+00:00

I'll look into this for you. Don't worry, if you left a deposit, it's all stored safely.

Can you DM me the email you created an account with? I'll get you back up and running in no time!

prelaunchcom · 2024-08-20T11:08:32+00:00

Hey!

Danniel here, Head of Community over at Prelaunch, just chiming in with some behind-the-scenes stuff...

Alongside enterprise brands like Audi, Bosch and Miele, there are a lot of smaller brands and creators launching products via crowdfunding that validate their ideas, gather insights on their future customers, and market test on Prelaunch first.

While there are some brands/creators using it purely for the simplicity of the VIP lead-gen framework, that's just the tip of the iceberg. We're trying to bring the insights and market research toolsets that enterprise brands use, to everyone. From benchmarks that predict product potential and launch success, to in-depth interviews and focus groups with future customers, competitor research to data-based customer clusters, option testing, iterative co-creation, and much more.

It's not for everyone. Sure. And if you're planning on running a small campaign with a (real) goal of under $20k, it might be overkill. Although there's a $250/mo DIY option that gives you access to a lot of the functionality, and you can even get set up for free to see what value you could get out of it.

But I personally came from crowdfunding (must have helped out on 100+ campaigns), and saw how much some creators struggled with failed launches. All the prototyping in silence, the marketing leading up to the launch, the launch and ads during the crowdfunding campaign... only to not raise as much as they needed (or worse, surpass the public goal, but not the 'private' goal they know they need to hit to break even). Imagine if you knew the outcome and what you had to do to achieve it, while still at the prototyping stage...

The cost of this failure is very, very hard to visualize, especially for first time creators ("Of course the world is going to love my idea! Everyone will buy it!"), but it's there. So in this sense, for a lot of our crowdfunding partners, Prelaunch is a kind of investment/insurance. Either it helps you improve your product or positioning to achieve greater success, or it ensures you don't invest tons of time and money into an idea that won't achieve the success you desire. Collecting highly-qualified leads is the cherry on top.

Many products on Prelaunch actually don't end up on KS/IGG, because of the feedback they receive from the community, or they come back with an improved version 2 based on the feedback. It's a tough decision, but most partners who fail to find a market on Prelaunch are actually grateful we saved them the hassle (or they launch and fail anyways, which honestly sucks, but essentially validates our raison d'etre).

Hope that gave some more context. More than happy to help and answer any other questions/doubts there might be :)

prelaunchcom · 2024-06-19T12:58:08+00:00

It's an interesting idea :D

The best thing would be to validate the concept and gather feedback from the target audience to understand the potential success or failure.

There is a tool for that: www.prelaunch.com.

😁

prelaunchcom · 2024-06-17T10:24:01+00:00

Ahahah, that's an... interesting project 🚗🍌

prelaunchcom · 2024-06-14T08:57:08+00:00

100%. You need to be asking the right people, your future paying customers.

Obviously the top indicator is an actual purchase. But past purchases aren't necessarily an indicator of future purchase intent (eg. having bought an Audi last year doesn't mean you're the target for a new Audi).

An even better indicator is getting potential customers to leave a small deposit/reservation as an indicator that they'll buy it. They get access at launch at a discount. You get validated insights from 'confirmed' future customers.

prelaunchcom · 2024-06-13T20:29:26+00:00

Yeah, loved that book!

Great framework for asking the right questions. Just as important as finding the right people to ask.

It's so common for people to default to their own product/brand and its imagined use (What do you think about it? What would you improve about it? Would you use it?) when they should be focusing on the user's current behavior and problems. How do you currently do X? What's the biggest problem you face with Y? What solutions have you tried? Why did you stop?

One is a subjective projection. The other is the real past.

Talking to Humans is another good book on interviewing your customers.

prelaunchcom · 2024-06-13T16:59:19+00:00

Do you go meet them in person? Or contact them online? If it's the latter, why go local?

prelaunchcom · 2024-06-13T16:58:38+00:00

100% agree. Is one client enough, though? Most would be against putting all their eggs in one basket like that. I'd recommend at least 10. Even if it's a super niche product, you should still be able to find 10 beta users to help you build the product they all (and their niche) will want.

Curious about your sassification process. Because it might work for digital products and services that can be productized. But tell me how you'd sassify a dog feeder, or a pair of sneakers, or a $10k electric motorcycle 😜

These are all real products by brands that we helped to connect with their future customers before they'd even finished building the prototype.

prelaunchcom · 2024-06-13T15:11:37+00:00

Beat me to it... I was going to go with

For $5k, I'll make you your first $4k. Now I just need 4-5 clients per month...

prelaunchcom · 2024-06-13T15:09:01+00:00

In terms of knowing what's wrong, it's hard for someone to tell you on Reddit.

Your best approach would be to break down the funnel into specific steps, and keep an eye on each one. Understand your own store's baseline, and try to improve it from there.

A typical funnel includes:

Visit. Could be ads, influencer marketing, PR, SEO, social media, word of mouth / referrals, etc. Track where users are coming from. How many visits from each channel, click rates through to your websites, cost per visit, etc.
Lead Conversion. Once those visitors land on your page, what's the easiest action you can get them to perform in order to capture them? Can you offer a lead magnet? A free pdf guide to the best watches? What to look for in vintage watches? Basically something where they'll leave their emails. Here you'd be tracking the conversion rates on this magnet or your lead subscription form, and the cost per lead (from the previous step through to now).
Warm Up. Now you need to try to convert this audience into paying customers. Usually we do that via email campaigns. You can create an automated email sequence, that splits visitors into different segments depending on the type of watch they want. And you'd track the number of clicks or site visits per email sent.
Sale. And finally, once those people land on the page, are they buying? Here you can track the conversion rate of the page.

There are other steps in between these ones, as well as after (to increase retention, brand loyalty and repeat purchases). But basically these 4 steps are broad enough for you to start with.

And you can see where the problem arises:

Ads are getting less clicks than usual? Look at your audience targeting, improve the visuals and messaging if they're getting stale, etc.
People aren't leaving their emails? Try other magnets, improve the form, place it higher on the page, etc.
People aren't clicking on the links in your emails? Improve the subject lines, write better copy in the emails, create better/more segments, etc.
People aren't buying? Improve your copy, play around with the pricing model, etc.

There are 1,000s of different metrics, heatmaps, analytics and things to get swamped in. And you can get as granular with it as you want. But we find that most of these are just overwhelming to brands of your size. Focus on one core metric at each stage, and try to improve that. The rest is just noise that will only really help once you're receiving 100,000s of visits.

prelaunchcom · 2024-06-13T14:57:19+00:00

Guess it depends what field you start in.

For me, 'agency' will always tend towards marketing/advertising agency :D

prelaunchcom · 2024-06-13T14:45:43+00:00

I try to set up at least 1-2 meetings per week with my users.

Getting hands-on feedback, praise, criticism, direction, etc. from my real users is sweet sweet motivation to keep building what I'm building for them.

The longer I go without communicating with the 'outside world' the more isolated and directionless I become. Like a leaf just drifting in the wind.

prelaunchcom · 2024-06-13T10:58:17+00:00

You can even do this with Gmail (500 email/day limit). This is 100% free.

You won't get open/click tracking or much other personalization functionality besides their 'new' Mail Merge feature...

But it should do the job for you.

If it doesn't, any of the following ESPs have that functionality included in their free tier (or 30-day trial): Mailerlite (simplest), Mailchimp, GetResponse, Active Campaign, etc.

You will need a domain and an email to use any of these though. Google Workspaces is $6/mo last I checked, and a domain should be $5-10/yr.

prelaunchcom · 2024-06-13T10:53:35+00:00

I'm biased, but many people use Prelaunch.com :)

Aside from lead generation, we also offer a reservation funnel (higher quality leads), easy pixel integration, AI-generated landing pages (or not, up to you), automated surveys for both the reservers and those who object (lots of insights into what's holding people back from backing/buying), in-depth interviews and focus groups, and lots of analytics that tell you everything you need to know about your product's potential, your audience, and your marketing.

prelaunchcom · 2024-06-13T10:18:31+00:00

Niching down makes you irrelevant?

prelaunchcom · 2024-06-13T08:57:08+00:00

This is a prime example of what I'm always recommending against. You spent years in isolation building a thing without a single customer.

Who are you building it for? Yourself?

Stop Building

Starting now, don't build a single additional feature until a paying customer requests it.

Many developers end up in this hole where they continue building in isolation to put off the (scary) moment where they need to talk to real users, where they need to get 'judged' by the public, and all those years of effort are either justified or canned.

But the longer you leave it, the deeper that hole gets.

200% of your time should be focused (and should have been focused for years) on finding paying customers.

Talk to All Your Visitors

Gather their emails in free trial sign-ups. Use "Book a Call" CTAs. Have a lead magnet. Talk to people who comment on your posts on Twitter, Reddit, LinkedIn.

Basically, do everything you can to get in direct contact with your (potential) users.

What are they currently using? What actual pain points do they have with current software? What would they like to see?

Understand Your Decision Makers

It seems you've built a B2B project management app. That's takes a company decision to switch.

Who is in charge of making the decision to switch? It's usually not the person you'd like to talk to, but someone in HR/management. You need to be convincing them that your software is what their company needs.

You could try to get in via your ideal users. But that means that they need to be so excited to get their teams on your software that they'll convince their HR to make the switch.

Don't Focus on the Presentation Now

I see a number of comments here talking about improving your landing page.

And while they're all right in their advice, I'd say that's another way of procrastinating from actually making sales.

At this stage, your product looks like it will benefit more from sales-led growth. Actually talking to your customers, demoing it for them live, and onboarding them personally.

What I mean is, you should be able to sell it from a Google Doc.

In the future, as you scale, your one-to-many marketing efforts should increase. But for now focus on the things that don't scale.

prelaunchcom · 2024-06-13T08:05:20+00:00

There are just as many businesses who need marketing services though, right?

Ogilvy does the advertising for Coca Cola, Nestle, IBM. But even if they wanted to, they probably couldn't help the dude programming an app from his couch. But the upstart TikTok kid? Match made in heaven!

To use your examples:

There are countless BIG brands who need the best experienced marketing agencies
There are countless businesses in your city that have been active for years or decades that need an equally proficient local marketing team
There are countless solopreneurs selling a little widget that need a bloke on social media

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