One of the issues that new online entrepreneurs face (and even seasoned ones) is putting a lot of time and effort into creating a product or service that people don’t end up buying.

It can be super frustrating when this happens, especially when you’ve poured your heart and soul into bringing your offer to the market, only to launch to the sound of crickets in the night — there’s no swarm of eager people showing up to buy.

The question is, how do you avoid this happening?

The best way is to use a validation process to test the demand before you commit to creating the product.

Validating your product in advance means that you will only go through with it, if enough people actually take action on buying it in a presale offer.

Pre-selling your product or service

Pre-selling a product is where you take your product idea and actually present it to an audience with an offer to either register interest by joining a waiting list, or to buy in advance of the product being actually created. This way you can get hard numbers to make a decision on whether or not to go through with creating the product.

Most smart entrepreneurs actually make people pay in advance rather than joining a waiting list. This is because joining a waiting list does not require much effort  — it doesn’t cost anything to do that.

If you get people to put their money where their mouth is by pre-purchasing the offer, this is a much better way of gauging things. If you don’t pre-sell the product, what may happen is that a lot of people may sign up to the waiting list, but when it is time to actually purchase, after the product is ready, most of them may not purchase.

What to do if not enough people buy your pre-sale offer

First of all, you have to have a goal for your pre-sale. Setting a target number of sales will be how you know whether or not it is a success.

The way you would approach this is to simply tell your audience or potential customers that you are only going to create the product if you reach a certain minimum purchase within a certain time frame. Also let them know that if you do not reach this target, you will not go ahead with it.

If you don’t meet your target you’ll need to refund every single person that pre purchases. Of course they will be disappointed, but because you already made this clear to them beforehand, it is not a problem.

What should my presale target be? 

You will need to do your own calculations to determine how much money you’ll need to make from an initial launch, for it to be worth the investing time, money and effort.

Based on that, you would then need to work out how many pre-sales you will need to reach this amount. 

One thing to note is that your pre-sale price should be discounted to incentivise early adopters to buy now. Your calculations will need to account for this.