Pre-marketing your startup to hack your way to success.
Sigma School
18th August 2023
The best marketers are visionaries. They don't sell a product, they sell a solution. They sell a vision of a better future, and they sell it even though they don't yet have a product.
Steve Jobs is a visionary. And so are Bill Gates, Elon Musk, and Jeff Bezos.
They sold a vision of a better computer, a better electric car, and a better electric grid. And they sold that vision even though they didn't yet have a product.
These individuals all built companies by selling a vision of a better future. That's why those companies are still around, and why their founders are so rich.
When Gates and Bezos were starting out, you didn't really need their vision. You didn't need their ideas about a better computer, a better electric car, or a better electric grid. You could already buy a personal computer and a car and an electric grid. You could already build those things yourself.
But the vision of a better future was more valuable. If you bought a personal computer, you would still have a problem. Your computer would get slower and slower over time. You would have to buy it again and again. You would have no guarantee that it would always be reliable. And it wouldn't do everything you want.
If you bought an electric car, you would still have a problem. It is impractical, most of the time, to drive an electric car long distances. You would have to charge it frequently, and the batteries would last only a few years. And they would make an awful racket.
So Musk sold a dream of a better car, one that is sustainable and solved the current problems plaguing the electric car market. It was tough. But people ultimately believed in him, his ideas and conviction. He pre-sold his first cars based on the vision.
Selling before you have a product has two major advantages. First, it saves money. It saves you from sinking money into building something that customers don't want. And it also saves you from losing customers. Second, it saves you from wasting your own time. If you haven't wasted your own time building something nobody wants, you have less of it to waste.
The catch is that pre selling isn't easy. You have to develop the product while selling. You have to find customers before you have a product. You have to persuade them to give you money before you have a product.
The pre-selling process begins with a "proof of concept." A proof of concept is a preliminary version of the product that proves you can develop it. You deliver a proof of concept to potential customers. You show the customer that you can do what the customer wants. You show the customer that your product is profitable.
A proof of concept usually costs a few hundred dollars. Instead of spending hundreds of thousands of dollars building a prototype, you spend a few hundred on a prototype. Instead of spending months or even years developing a product that customers don't want, you spend a month or a week or a day developing a prototype. Instead of spending thousands of dollars on market research, you spend a few hundred on market research. And instead of spending thousands on designing the product, you spend a few days sketching a few iterations.
This is a beauty about pre-marketing in that you can start to test and validate all your ideas without the huge upfront risks.
A pre-market is that part of the development process where a company tests its product with actual customers. In premarketing, the company's product isn't finished, and it isn't sold yet. But the company can start testing it. The premarket allows the company to get feedback early, when it is still easy to fix any mistakes; and it allows the company to gage the market's reaction, even before the product is finished. The premarket also helps the company to avoid wasting resources.
The purpose of pre marketing is to learn what the market wants. Product development should be about building products customers want. Premarketing helps managers learn what the market wants by testing its reactions.
Premarketing is a way to test an idea early. It is particularly important for startups, because they are usually working in a new area. Premarketing allows them to be fast to the market.
Premarketing is cheap. In a commercial setting, premarket testing is often done using internal employees or volunteer customers. This is free.
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