Earlier this year, I came across a video from a content creator who wanted to launch a course.

So the creator got to work on building all these modules, recording a ton of videos, packaging it together in what seemed like an attractive way, and started promoting it.

The result?

No sales, not even a single customer.

Fortunately, this creator went on to create a successful business by taking a different approach…

But so many people run into this same problem which causes them to give up entirely.

We can avoid that with these 2 approaches:

Approach 1: The Waitlist Strategy

Instead of creating a normal sales page with a buy button or three, you create that same sales page but replace the buy buttons with a button that takes your visitor to a page where they can sign up for a wait list.

You won’t make money up front with this method, but it will at least show you if you can create demand around a product before you spend a ton of time creating it, and if you can get at least 25 people on that list pretty quickly, your odds of making a sale go up dramatically.

And if no one joins or very few people join?

Then you simply let the waitlist know you’re going to work on another idea.

I’ve done this a few times over the years and most of my “bright ideas” had no demand, but one turned into an actual offer that sold a dozen copies from a tiny audience just by doing a waitlist.

I could probably write a whole ebook on waitlist strategies from that experience alone, but this is the general idea.

Approach 2: The Pre-Launch Strategy

This one is a bit tricky to pull off, but when it’s done properly it just might be the best strategy to validate your offer.

Instead of offering a waitlist, you simply go ahead and sell the product before you create it.

The reason it’s tricky is because you need to have a launch date and the entire product ready to fulfill any promises made on the sales page by that date.

This can be stressful especially if you’re creating any videos for your product, so the fix is to have 2 dates.

You’ll have a date where the pre-launch ends, then you’ll have a date no more than a week apart (the sooner the better) where the product goes live.

If you do make sales, it’s absolutely go-time on product creation.

If you don’t make sales, you simply go back to the drawing board and there’s no one to notify because no one “bought in” to the product like the waitlist strategy.

This is exactly what I did when I created The Blueprint earlier this year and 2 of my email marketing products some years back which led to sales before I created them.

This is also what I did for another niche product last year and zero people bought so I moved on.

At the end of the day, the goal with both of these strategies is to save yourself and your customers from a giant headache, because not only will you validate a product idea, you’ll stop promoting something your audience doesn’t want and find that thing they do want a whole lot faster.

There is one final thing to note…

Whether you use these strategies or not, one of the biggest things to pay attention to is traffic.

If you’re not getting at least a few hundred visitors to the sales page, it’s hard to actually determine demand so it’s important to pay attention to the stats here considering the average conversion rate of a sales page is 1-2%.

At 300 visitors, that would be 3-6 sales.

And with the way stats work, if you only get 62 visitors to the page you could make 3 sales right away, or zero sales until visitor number 93.

Something to think about there…

In any case, these two methods are a great way to save time and make sure you’re doing the right thing.

Any questions? Let me know.

Talk soon,
-Gabe