Page 34 - The 7 Day Startup: You Don’t Learn Until You Launch - PDFDrive.com

validation techniques that don’t work. This is how pre-selling works.

You make an offer for people to pre-purchase your product at a discount.
People are getting a good deal, but since the product isn’t live yet, they
accept that they might have to wait a while and are happy to make that
compromise.

There are a few reasons why this approach is often not the way to go:

Your goal at this stage in the business is to test your assumptions. Making
overly generous offers is only testing whether or not someone wants to pay
you the heavily discounted amount. It doesn’t test your real offer and is
therefore a flawed experiment.
People get excited about launches. Time and time again I get higher
conversions on pre-launch pages than I do once products actually launch.
The same applies to pre-selling. Just because you can get a few people to
sign up for your “coming soon business,” it doesn’t validate the business.
You may find after you launch that you have no momentum to continue
building the business. In that respect it might be a useful way to fund your
idea, but it’s not a method of validation.
The people who sign up to pre-sold deals may be your best customers. By
providing them with a yearly (or god forbid lifetime) plan, you have killed
any chance of building momentum with those people as you grow.
Momentum is a key part of a successful startup. Countless businesses have
died after an over-hyped launch and a failure to build ongoing traction.

The idea of someone paying you actual money before you build something has a
lot of appeal, but you have to ask yourself what you are testing. To really test
whether you can build a business, you have to start building it.

A few one off sales doesn’t get you any closer to knowing whether you can do
that.

The Concept of “Validation” is Too Simplistic