MBA2123 Guest Teacher – Narek Vardanyan – How to validate your ideas with pre-launching

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Hey oh. Welcome to the $100 MBA Show. Business lessons you can count on every single day with our daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of Webinar Ninja, an independent software company I started with my co founder back in 2014 and today's episode is a guest teacher episode. On our guest teacher episodes we bring on an expert to teach their area of expertise and today we have Narek Vardhanian and Narek is going to teach you how to validate your ideas with pre launching. Narek is a pre launching expert. This is why we brought him on the show. He's the founder of the Crowdfunding Formula, one of the most successful crowdfunding marketing agencies. He's also the founder of Prelaunch.com and he's here today to show you how to validate those ideas you have for your product, for your service, for your whole business before you launch actually make sure people actually want what you have are willing to pay money for it. I was very excited that Narek will be teaching today's lesson because if you know a little bit about my story back in 2014 I pre launched our software webinar Ninja and follow a lot of the advice that he gives in today's lesson, he's going to show you how to validate your idea with pre launch. He's going to show you what are the biggest problems or reasons products fail in the first place and how to pre launch your product as soon as possible and not rely on what your customers are saying, rather what they're doing. This one's packed with value. Let's get into it. Let's get down to business.

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Making sure your audience, your potential customer, actually wants what you're building. Even if you're building something that's okay, that's not enough. You want people to be dying for this. They're desperate for this. Business is hard. Don't make it harder on yourself by creating a product people are not really, really interested in buying that fulfills a pain that really strikes home for them. And that's what pre launching is all about. To make sure you're hitting that mark, people are willing to give away their hard earned dollar for the promise of a solution to their problem. I'm going to pass it on for Narek to teach his lesson on validating your idea with pre launching. He's going to give you real examples, he's going to give you data and how to get started. I'll be back to wrap up the episode but for now, take it away Narek.

Hey everybody, Narek is here. Thank you for joining me today. Today I'll be teaching you how to validate your product ideas and understand if there's a demand for them. So let's get down to business. How to validate your ideas with pre launching. Imagine there are two typical products and try to guess which one of them has been more successful. On the one hand we have Raven. It's a smart helmet with a mounted dash cam. Now Raven has this amazing qualities. It records front and rear, it has AI blind spot detection and you can connect with other riders. It has AR screen too. On the other hand we have blank mask. Now blank mask is an egg shaped mask, doesn't have any tag and is designed for those folks who prefer privacy and don't want to showcase their faces. Now which one do you think would outperform the other one? Let's take a look. Actually, blank mask did 500% more sales than Raven. Unfortunately, Raven didn't manage to get enough sales, faced problems, and went out of business because simply, there was no demand for it. As they've spent years and hundreds of thousands of dollars on production, like many others, they were not able to fully recover and start all over again. Launching a product is hard. On average, creators spend 15 months and $300,000 on product development. And as a result, about 80% of them fail. The most common reason is that actually there's no market demand. When I was starting my career in crowdfunding, entrepreneurs asked me all the time what I thought of their products, how much they would raise, whether their brand would become the next Oculus or Peloton, and a million other things about their imminent future success. So I share my predictions. I always had strong opinions based on my experience in this area and tried to make projections based on current or previous industry trends. And guess what? I was wrong a lot. You would think that as you gain experience within this niche, your ability to predict success would increase, but it turned out to be the exact opposite. The more I learned, the more I realized. The only thing I know is that I know nothing. Seriously, I don't know. If I can't predict success after seven years in product launching, how can founders, entrepreneurs, and startup owners expect to? It doesn't matter what you think about your product. You are probably not your ideal customer. And this small fact doesn't come cheap. Founders typically spend months coming up with and refining their ideas by themselves or with a very small group of friends. They spend thousands of dollars on developing their first working prototypes, and then up to hundreds of thousands of dollars making their first batches. But when they actually launch, they realize that journalists ignore their pitches. Influencers don't want to promote their products even when they are paid and potential customers just not buying. And soon they realize it's just not going anywhere. It's really hard for creators to predict which products will fly and which ones won't, solely based on their experience and available market data or their gut feelings. And when creators pass through all these stages of creating a product, such as ideation, design, prototyping, production, and then launching into the markets, by that time they meet their consumers, they've already spent 15 months and $300,000. And then you either succeed or you fail. And if you fail, you had to go way back to the beginning and start all over again, which many can't and don't want to. We think creators meet their Consumers when it's too late. We know it firsthand because as an agency working with innovations, we've been receiving products from all over the world. And despite all our experience, market research, focus groups or surveys, we couldn't correctly estimate whether they have market potential or not until we started to use pre launching and developed our own methodology and techniques through which we managed to get a valid data based on the customer's actual purchase intent. It helped us get 90% accuracy on the best performers and ultimately built one of the most successful product launch agencies in the world. With pre launching, if something doesn't work, you don't really fail, you reiterate. And if it works, you move forward confidently, listen to what your consumers say, make the right decisions, develop community, and succeed. Here's how it works. It's really very simple. On the first page you showcase the idea, the concept of the product. And then there's this subscribe button for whoever wants to learn more. This way you test if there's an interest in the concept itself before showcasing the price. Now on the second page, you showcase the price of the product and you say if you put down a small amount, like $10, you'll reserve a really cool discount when this product launches into the markets. Now why this is so powerful because people actually pulling out their credit cards and giving you money is the best validation ever. So then you drive some traffic and try to assess how many people passed from the first page to the second page. If enough, it means your concept is really interesting and people love your idea. And if enough people pulled out their credit cards and reserved your product by actually giving you money, it means they are ready to buy. And that's the best validation. It beats all the surveys, focus groups and everything out there because it is based on behavioral data. And then you can play with the price, increase it and decrease it, and try to get the best price equilibrium out there. You can also incentivize your customers to record videos and explain why they reserved your products for additional discounts. This is invaluable info that will help you a lot in your product development. To help creators make it easy and understand their metrics better, We've created a prelaunch.com, a separate platform where we aggregate the data and show you how you're doing based on your competitors. Are you in the top 1%, in the top 5% or lagging behind? It is a product validation platform designed for creators to pre launch, showcase and validate their coming soon products. So from consumers perspective, they see a coming soon product which they can reserve and which are not live yet. Imagine getting access to what your favorite brands are working on before they are available to the large public and being able to reserve what you like, give valuable feedback and get significant discounts. Reservation is risk free for consumers as when creators decide to not move on with the production, consumers can get a full refund and also before creator starts the shipping, consumers can cancel their reservations whenever they want by actually pulling out their credit cards and reserving products that they really want to buy. Consumers provide very credible and powerful data insights to creators who, based on the data, decide which product they should move on producing and which one they should pause. Pre launching your product concepts helps you not only see if there's a demand or not, but who is your customer, why they reserved your products, what features they love the most, and many other things. With rumors of impending economic crisis, avoiding failure and wasted resources is now more important than ever. Recap. So make sure you make your decisions based on your customers actual behavior rather than their desires. Your mom and your friends will cheer you up when you come up from the shower with another brilliant idea. But are they your customers? Probably not, so you need to emulate a real life situation to see what your audience will do close alright, this was Narek. If you want to continue learning more about pre launching, you can visit prelaunch.com make a campaign, get valuable insights and move forward confidently. Thanks a lot for joining me today. Now back to Omar Flowers Die in.

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What a powerful lesson by Narek Vardhanian. If you want to continue your learning and pre launch your next product, go to prelaunch.com to learn more. You'll find Narik and his resources there. One of the best things I did for our software company webinar Ninja is pre launch it. Why? Because one I didn't spend years building something people didn't want. I would have wasted a lot of time and money and opportunity costs. It could have been done doing something else in that time to achieve my goals as an entrepreneur. Instead, I just put up a landing page like Narek mentioned detailing what this product will do. I asked people to pay for in advance with a deposit with a money back guarantee. This did two things. One, it validated that people were hungry for my solution and really wanted it bad. And two, it gave me some funding to build the actual product. And lastly, it gave me some really dedicated founding members. Founding users, people that are willing to use the product, give me feedback so I can improve it quickly. Those founding members I know by name even eight years later and they're our biggest fans. Thanks so much for listening to the $100 MBA show. If you love what you hear, the best way to pay us back to show us love is to share it on social media. Go ahead and share 100- MBA-NET on Twitter, on Facebook, on Instagram, on whatever platform you choose and let people know to subscribe to to the show. Tell them what you love about the podcast. Tell them why they should subscribe. Thank you in advance for doing that. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. I've run surveys, I've run questionnaires, I've done focus groups. Nothing talks like money, okay? When people are willing to spend money, it means they want what you have. It's the ultimate validation and that's what you want before you start investing time and money into your project. It also attracts your ideal customer. For example, one of the items I last bought was a puzzle set. It was called Magic Puzzles, the fun twist on puzzles. It was pre launched. I bought three puzzle sets because I love puzzles. I love solving things. I love games that you can play with your family and friends. This. This thing is made for me. So I was willing to pay for it in advance, wait six to eight months for it to get produced and shipped to my door. And boy, when it got shipped to my door, I was excited. I started opening it up, taking a look, taking pictures, sharing it with my friends. That's what you want. You want viral marketing and that happens when you really, really nail your avatar. And by pre launching, you actually attract the people that really love what you have. Thanks so much for listening and I'll check you in tomorrow's episode. I'll see you then. Take care.

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