Product Genius, the Podcast for Inventors, Entrepreneurs, and Startups

Steven Julian

So you think you have a great idea for a product. Maybe you're wondering, will other people think it's a great idea? Or maybe you're just tired of listening to your mom talk about her opinion of your great idea. Well, today's guest is going to help you know if you have a great idea for a product to bring to market. Next on Product Genius.

Announcer Lady

Do you want to be a successful inventor entrepreneur? Struggling to get your product from idea to market? Well, You've come to the right place. Welcome to Product Genius, the down-to-earth podcast that explores important topics about inventing and launching new products. Noah McNeely is your trusted guide. With more than 20 years of product launch experience, he's here to help you on your journey to become a product genius. Let's get started. Here's your slightly annoying co-host, Steven Julian.

Steven Julian

Welcome to another edition of Product Genius. I am your slightly annoying host, Steven Julian. We are coming to you almost live from deep in the lair of Product Quick Start. Sitting across the table from me, next to me is Jody Smith, our producer, but across the table from me is the host, is the star, is the guru, he who is known as Noah McNeely.

Noah McNeely

And I do pride myself on being slightly less annoying than you.

Steven Julian

You're doing a great job of it. Yeah, you're doing a great job of it.

Noah McNeely

If the only person I annoy is you, it's a good day.

Steven Julian

You never annoy me. That's why you're slightly less annoying than me, because you don't annoy me. I think if you annoyed me, see how I can see? There we go. I've already been slightly annoying. We're only one minute into the episode. Fantastic. Noah, good to see you as always. We've got a little bit of a... A little bit of a cool show. We're not alone, and I'm not just talking about Jody on the other side of the table from us. Tell us about today's episode and what's so special about it.

Noah McNeely

Yeah, so I am super excited about the person we're going to talk to in just a minute. His name is Narek Vardanyan. And one of the things that are the main reason I'm excited is that people ask me questions about certain topics around. how do I... How do I see if? there's a market for my product? How do I kind of do pre-sales? How do I get exposure? I don't always have a good answer for those questions, but Narek, I think he has all the right answers.

Steven Julian

All is a big word.

Noah McNeely

I'm super excited to talk to him.

Steven Julian

Yeah, absolutely. So we are excited and thrilled to have as our guest today, Narek Vardanyan. He is with PreLaunch.com. Narek, welcome to the episode today.

Narek Vardanyan

Hey, thanks for having me.

Steven Julian

Absolutely. So why don't we just kick it off with the main biggest question? because Noah kind of really set it up when he used the word all. But he gets asked questions about various parts of the launching and the pre-launch that he doesn't necessarily have the answers to. Sounds like you might have some of those answers, if not all of those answers. So tell our listeners what pre-launch is and what you guys do.

Narek Vardanyan

So pre-launch is a product validation platform. And whenever somebody has an idea. You know, everybody thinks that this idea is going to be like really bestseller. And while the founder's optimism will definitely help you in the long run, there's nothing. worse than blindly believing your idea and just working in isolation without talking to customers and just, you know, going to the market and failing. So pull on shelves to understand your market potential at an early stage. It does that with the data-driven methods. So all the analytics is based on the actual purchase intent that people provide.

So basically, on the one hand, you have brands replacing their early-stage concepts on the platform, and then you have community who is placing $10 to $20 to reserve a discount if the product comes to life. And then Pliners takes the data, analyzes it, and provides very credible signals on... Two main questions, basically, whether there is a potential for the product in the market and who the customers are and why they are buying your product.

Steven Julian

So, Noah, I can see immediately for long-time listeners of the show or slightly annoying hosts who sat across the table from you and done some shows with you, I can see why you got so excited when you first met Narek because these are some of the questions you get and these are some of the things you help your clients and. people you've come in contact with kind of wrestle.

Noah McNeely

Right. So, so. Yeah. So, so I meet so many people and they, you know, they design their product or I design their product for them. And at the end of the day, they really don't understand their market as well as they thought they did. So we ended up designing the wrong product and we have to go back and, you know, they've already launched and now we get back to the drawing board. And sometimes it's really simple, like just change the name, just change the color, but it's always expensive to do that.

So I love Nurex company pre-launch. based on what I know about it is. Because based on what I know about it, it's basically taking what a lot of people use Kickstarter for, but it's really not what Kickstarter is designed for. And Narek has made that a streamlined process, a formal process, really designed around those two things of, hey, is there a market? And who is my market? And am I going to be able to make sales to these markets? Those are questions that are... Critical to get early in the process.

Steven Julian

Yeah. Now, Rec, let me ask you this question. So let's kind of try to paint a picture here, and I'll try to do it in a slightly annoying or even non-annoying way. So let me just ask, I come to prelaunch.com, and I have my widget that I have invented that I want to bring on to the market. What would it look like? Can you kind of narrate my way through some of the first, The ways that I would use pre-launch or some of the main ways that I could use pre-launch with my new widget that I want to put on the market and how I would use your platform.

Narek Vardanyan

Yeah, absolutely. It's super simple, actually. So you create a page and we have a very intuitive page builder. So you basically can create a page of a widget within like 20 minutes or so. So you'll have a page within in pre-launch.com and you'll start the pre-launching. So basically like. If the price of your widget is $100, people will put down $1 to reserve a discount if you actually produce your widget, right? The cool thing from the consumer side is that actually they're. not risking their $1 because we'll give you these deposits only if you start the production and start the shipping.

But if they change their mind for some reason, like they bought another cooler widget from the nearby store, they can just cancel it and they'll receive a full refund. So it's basically very safe from their side. But when they are giving this $1 to you, they give very credible signals that they really want to buy this widget, right? And then what Pre-Launch does, Pre-Launch takes into account the data, analyzes it, compares it with its own benchmarks, and basically tells you how well you're doing, like how your concept validation is going on, how your price is going well, whether the $100 is the right price, or maybe you need to increase it.

In a lot of cases, it turns out that maybe you need to like... Pricing $200. So you're underpricing your product. So for all those questions, and then you'll understand who are those people who are buying my widget? Are those like, you know, the high school kids or those are people who just want to have fun or people who are working in? the office and they need some fun during the lunchtime, et cetera, et cetera. So those are all questions where you could have all those hypotheses and pre-launch will help you to validate it with the data.

So you will see the real data and you will see which one works the best. And at the end of the period when you already be ready to go into the manufacturing part, you'll basically know what price works the best for your widget, what colors works the best, what positioning works the best, who is the best audience, why they are buying your product, what messaging you should use, et cetera, et cetera. And all this data will help you to kind of launch confidently and succeed. And in case you see that, you know, it doesn't work, you can just stop it and move to, you know, another product.

Noah McNeely

And that's a lot better than just asking your neighbors, hey, do you like my product? You get a lot more actionable data and data which I think, as you and I talked the other day, it may actually change the direction of your product development. So early on, you haven't. done all the heavy engineering. You haven't gone into manufacturing. You may, through your system, get feedback that's like, oh, Nobody's buying it because this feature doesn't even make sense. You go back to the drawing board, you change it, and then you do another pre-launch campaign.

Narek Vardanyan

Yeah, 100%.

Steven Julian

And please help the slowest person in the room trying to keep up with you guys. So you create this page. You've put out a concept. Other people have paid a very small entry fee because of their interest potentially in that product and because their willingness. To give you their feedback, to give you maybe some ideas or maybe some thoughts. And so the idea is I put out this page and I have 20 people, I have 100 people. Is there a limit to how many people can kind of come give their input?

And I guess to go with that, let me ask the entry question at the end here. The people on the other side who are paying the dollar or who are paying this small entry fee, how do they find pre-launch? Are they just like, yeah, I'm interested in new ideas and new topics or. they've searched online and they found this? Talk a little bit about how the people who are going to give me the data, how do they find pre-launch?

Narek Vardanyan

That's a very good question, actually. A couple of ways. First of all, we have an organic community of about 1 million people. Those are people who are subscribed to our newsletters, who are coming, checking our website for some new good products, etc. So some of the traffic will come from our sources. Like the Prilence.com will bring you some of the people, like several thousand people will find you through Prilence.com. But most importantly, we'll do advertising. So we'll advertise it on Facebook and on Google. To bring you some very specific type of audiences.

So if you want to check like very specific demographics or geographies, you're getting this data through advertising and there's definitely no limit on how many people you want to get. We have some minimums on like minimum thresholds to have the viable significance level for the data. Essentially, you can get hundreds of thousands and even millions of people to your page to get more feedback, more data, and more reservation. Essentially, you're creating. a community at an early stage, and those communities is helping you a lot.

Steven Julian

And so Noah talked about if I do one of these campaigns on pre-launch, and you talked about how easy it is to set up a page. So I set up a page. I start with my product. My concept at the very beginning, are there small tweaks that I can make based on responses before I have to relaunch a new campaign? Is there a certain amount of threshold of, you know, okay, I'm going to now test it with a different color or I'm going to now test it with small differences rather than, okay, I'm going to go back and I'm going to do a whole other concept where I take out these five features and I put in three new ones.

You know, when you have to do a whole nother page type scenario.

Narek Vardanyan

Yeah, we have some recommendations on what to start first. So it all starts from the concept. Like basically you need to validate whether the concept resonates with the audience or not, right? So if people just don't engage with your concept, know any, it doesn't make sense. to work on the pricing, for example, or work more on the org details or on the colors, et cetera. So the first thing is the constant validation. And we have specific benchmarks where you will see basically whether you're doing good or bad. So whether people like it or don't like it.

If people like it, then we have some several testings where you can, you know, change the colors. You can change a bit the messaging. You can change the, then you can move to the pricing point. So you can change the price. And then if everything goes perfect, then you can come up with some variations, some add-ons. And based on your hypothesis, which you want to test, you can create some endless tests, like, you know, change the pricing, the messaging, test different audiences, et cetera, et cetera.

Steven Julian

Fantastic. Noah, I want to bring you in here because before you met Narek and kind of learned about prelaunch, I would imagine... The best people had was talk to a neighbor or talk to you.

Noah McNeely

Yeah, so the advice I would have to give people before looking at pre-launch would be, you know, don't find out. what your mom thinks about it. Don't find out what your neighbors think about it. You need to find independent viewpoints from people that really are going to be objective. However, that's very hard to do. So one of the things, unless you go out and you hire a market research firm that's very expensive. So one of the things I love about... I keep saying that is that it is very accessible in the sense that, and Narek, correct me if I'm wrong, but I think you've got, you work with very big companies that will do like 20, 30 products at a time, but you also have packages that work with a very small company or even an entrepreneur level that just has the one product at a time. they're testing.

And that's at an accessible price. So they're getting the level of data and analysis that would in the past. That's a $10,000, $20,000, $50,000 market research exercise. They're actually getting that in a very, I'm going to use my buzzword of the day, democratized way that everybody can access it.

Steven Julian

Good word.

Narek Vardanyan

Yeah, definitely. It's even like free to start. So people can just jump on. great page and experiment with it for quite some time, even without paying anything. And it's very, very affordable. Compared to the amount of failure that you will get if you're working on the wrong idea, I think it definitely makes sense. And it's very accessible, it's very easy, and yeah, it helps you to make decisions based on the data and get all these agile benefits.

Steven Julian

So Noah's word was democratized. I'm going to kind of use the word... Frugal or capitalist or let's talk kind of dollars and cents a little bit. It sounds like, and based on these great answers you've given, the two main ways that prelaunch.com kind of engages with the public in a financial sense is if I'm the entrepreneur inventor who's looking to create a product, I would pay to do a campaign. And I'm sure the pricing is very transparent there. But it sounds also like this community that you've created. You mentioned kind of a million members.

Is that a second way? Is there a monthly membership if you want to kind of be a part of a community and kind of be around the world of product development and invention? and market research? Is that the organic group that you've talked about? Is there a monthly membership to be a part of that?

Narek Vardanyan

It's free. So there's no membership piece on the community side and they can just freely subscribe and get really interesting deals on a weekly basis. And the main benefit is to just access on the product creation at an early level, right? And we call it a co-creation and it makes a lot of sense for the community because the main benefit is to get really good products. So this is the main incentives, right?

Noah McNeely

I was going to say in your car, co-creation, because it's actually co-created between the, you know, the inventor, entrepreneur, the company that had the idea and also the community. So the community and the company, they're almost, they almost become partners in developing this thing in a way because of the feedback that comes through your system.

Narek Vardanyan

Exactly. Because in the hardware, specifically in the hardware, like all the product launches and production are happening in the isolation. So no community members typically are involved and providing feedback during the production process and only they are exposed to the products. at a final stage where it's already too late. But in this case, we want to bring this notion of co-creation and make it a new behavior, I would say, where the customers will jump on board at an early stage, support and co-create the products alongside with the creators. And just make sure that they are getting a very right type of products that meets all their requirements and also help the creators.

So it's a win-win situation.

Steven Julian

You know, Narek, Noah just asked a great question. I know it was a great question because it was the question I was going to ask and he interrupted you to do it.

Noah McNeely

See, I beat you to the punch.

Steven Julian

You did.

Noah McNeely

I could see a question forming in your brain. I just grabbed it and asked.

Steven Julian

Which I would say might be slightly annoying, but then I won the title back by pointing out. Of course. That you were slightly annoying, which makes me even more slightly annoying. So anyway.

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Steven Julian

We are speaking with Narek Vardanyan. He is with prelaunch.com. And Narek, I think this is the point in the interview. We've got to stop. We've been talking concepts. We've been talking definitions. We've been talking your description. And you've done a fantastic job of painting us a picture. I think it's time for Noah and I to both get out of your way and ask. You've got to have a couple, at least a couple, and probably you've got hundreds. But you've got to share a couple of good success stories. Of people who have used, especially on the individual side, someone bringing an individual product and doing a campaign.

Give us an idea of some successes that you've seen through prelaunch.com.

Noah McNeely

And if you can't be specific to the confidentiality, you can talk in generalities. That's okay. Whatever you're comfortable with.

Steven Julian

I forgot. That's right. We got to say that.

Noah McNeely

I have to do that with my clients too.

Narek Vardanyan

Yeah. You know, the interesting thing with us, like with our. success stories is that whenever we prevent somebody from launching a product, that's also considered as a success story for us because we kind of save them a lot of money, a lot of time, a lot of nerves essentially on like working on a product, which is basically does the resonance with the audience. But we also have like really, really interesting success stories where we basically help to reshape the product from. Inception to something totally different. For example, we had these guys, it's called Poma Brush, and they have been launching this toothbrush.

And the initial idea was totally different, like to make a toothbrush for travelers, to make it comfortable, to make it, you know, the big, like from some other materials, etc. And essentially it didn't work. It didn't resonate with the audiences that they were targeting to. So they were continuously tweaked the product, iterated, continuously changing. They even changed the name of it. So the materials, the size of it, the concept. And essentially when they see when things are working, they launched it and boom, it worked and they did like millions of dollars of sales.

So these kind of cases are. a lot with us. Recently we... We had this electric motorcycle campaign. The founder of it was a Sarlene Davidson senior engineer, Eric Buell. He's a kind of legendary person and they prelaunched the product for eight months on prelaunch.com. And although it was like groundbreaking innovation on its own, like they changed and tweaked a lot of nuances and a lot of stuff before launching it finally to the market. And they just launched it like a couple of weeks ago and did $3 million of revenue in just a matter of days.

Noah McNeely

Is that a good enough success story for you, Steven? A million in sales, three million in sales in two weeks. Does that qualify?

Steven Julian

I guess it's all right. I'll tell you what I love is hearing Narek's passion, not only for the success in terms of the sales very quickly, but again, long-time listeners or even short-time listeners of this show, how many times have we heard Noah sitting across the table from us? Talk about. one of the things he's very proud of is helping people not waste a ton of money on an idea that's not going to work. Helping people realize their. baby's a little ugly and they need to change.

Noah McNeely

Yeah, I think Narek's an excellent parallel with how I think. I can tell people it's not going to work, it's ugly from a physics standpoint, or you're never going to be able to manufacture that standpoint. I can't tell them whether people are going to buy it. I can give my opinion, but I'm a focus group of one. But Narek, yeah, the numbers and the science behind it, that's what tells them through pre-launch.

Steven Julian

And see, you don't have to go to your neighbor or your mom because, and even if they had the guts to go, I don't think this is going to work. So let a community of like-minded individuals, and most of them you don't know, but at least they show passion and they're interested in helping you with your project. Even if that biggest help is to go, this isn't going to work. Don't waste a lot of your time and money unless you're willing to make some changes.

Noah McNeely

That's right.

Steven Julian

Let me ask this. You've talked a lot kind of about the campaign. Let me just ask, and this might be an unfair question. By the way, you didn't know this. I didn't tell you this before you came on the air. As the slightly annoying co-host, I am allowed one really, really stupid question every show. I had it written in my contract that I'm allowed to do that and face no consequences other than being told that's a stupid question, which I can handle. So this is potentially my stupid question. I say all that as a backdrop for this.

So here's the question. You've done such a great job, again, of painting the picture. I think everybody's got a kind of a good idea of what prelaunch.com does. Is there anything maybe on the outskirts or anything that's a... Something you haven't talked about, an additional, hey, there's a whole nother step or there's this other section where people may want, you know, people, I haven't been able to talk about this yet that pre-launch would help people with. Is there anything kind of additional that pre-launch would do? Maybe after somebody's run a couple of campaigns, got a pretty good idea, and they're starting to actually do the prototype.

Is there some other level that you want to mention about? pre-launch?

Narek Vardanyan

That's one of the best questions, actually.

Steven Julian

Yes, I get to save it for the next show. I love it.

Narek Vardanyan

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I want to underline a nuance here because pretty much everybody is very much interested about, you know, the viability of the product itself. But it's a really interesting consumer validation tool as well. So like the going outside and asking around and asking neighbors and mom. Like the one main danger that it has is that you definitely don't know whether they are your target customers or not, right? If you're sure, you can ask them. Like there are some right questions where you can ask and you could get like really good answers, but you really don't know.

And Prelaunch helps you kind of validate the right customers as well. So it's a kind of puts a filter where like you can drive anybody on the page and whoever pulls out their credit cards and gives you actual money. Even one dollar, they are kind of validated as a customer. And then you can dig deeper and get them on board and ask them all kinds of questions to understand who they really. are. Like we create a lot of like fancy AI type of stuff where we create these segmentations, you know, combine customers and then with the AI, like, you know, summarize all what they say in their surveys, their focus group type of discussion, et cetera.

But essentially, at the end of the day, you're getting to know who your customers are at a very deep level. So this is one thing that, at first of all, some of our customers don't realize, but then they understand how important it is to just know who are some people who are interested to buy their products.

Noah McNeely

It reminds me, in a good way, a little bit about the so-called betting markets, where you can go and you can place a bet on who you think is going to win an election. And there's some people that look at that even stronger than polls because people are actually putting money down based on what they believe. But in your case, it's actually useful for a company because people are, you know, it's not a lot of money, but if you're going to put $2 down or $3 down, you're not going to. do that just because you want to be nice.

You're going to do that because you have an interest in that product. And that's a legitimate and powerful data point, especially when you get a lot of data points behind it.

Steven Julian

I was waiting for a question. Yeah, absolutely.

Noah McNeely

It was more of an extemporaneous speech, not a question.

Steven Julian

Sorry, I'm sorry. You were being the product genius that you are. You almost got some of your first customers. You got some of your first clients. And then as you bring the product to market and they become your first purchasers of your products, they can also give you testimonials. And you've got this community that can go with you into launching the product. So I like that. Narek Vardanian of prelaunch.com. If people want to engage, if people want to either, so first of all, we know if anyone's interested kind of in product development or finding out about some of the newest, hottest ideas, things like that, they can obviously go to prelaunch.com and there's a way for them to join just as part of the community.

But how specifically do people potentially start a campaign? With a? new product, what should they do when they go to the website?

Narek Vardanyan

They can just go to the website, register, create an account, and create a project. And it's very intuitive, simple, and I think they can even do experiments and they will end up with having a landing page. And the next step would be to just go and put some data, like the price of the product, et cetera, and then they submit and the product will be live in our marketplace in a very short period of time. It will start getting traction, it will start getting traffic, and they will see some data on their dashboard.

Steven Julian

I don't think it's a stretch to think that listeners of our show, people who've worked with Noah and who've just listened to our show, aren't going to become members because this sounds like a fantastic opportunity.

Noah McNeely

I wish I'd known about it years ago. This is great.

Steven Julian

But we know about it now. So Narek, thank you very much for being here today.

Narek Vardanyan

Thank you, guys. This has been amazing.

Steven Julian

Absolutely. Noah, let me wrap the show up with you and just kind of get your final thoughts, let. you kind of put a bow on this because this isn't like something you've been hiding. This is a brand new relationship.

Noah McNeely

Yeah, Narek and I got connected fairly recently and it started like, oh, it's just another contact. And then I did a little digging and I was like, wow, this sounds pretty amazing. And so I got really excited about talking to Narek and getting him on the show. Yeah, I would suggest a lot of the people I've worked with in the last 25 years, frankly, if this had been available, they'd be a lot further along than they got in some cases, or a lot further along, a lot faster than they got in some cases.

So, no, I'm excited about what PreLaunch is and what it's done and what the future of it is.

Steven Julian

Everybody can go to prelaunch.com, become a member. No cost to become a member of the community and then start working on your project if you want. In addition to that, people can go to productquickstart.com. There's a contact us page. And if you want to do your own podcast, you need to see Jody Smith. Jodysmith.com. He helps people podcast. I am, you can come, you can search me, but I can't give you my website because I didn't pass it through compliance. So for Noah, for Jody, this is your Slightly Annoying co-host, Steven Julian saying we'll catch you next time from deep in the lair.

Product Juice.