Summary

An entrepreneur reflects on the lessons learned from launching a product that received no sales, emphasizing the importance of pre-sales validation, understanding one's audience, and the misconceptions about the correlation between social media following and product sales.

Abstract

The author recounts the experience of launching a product that failed to attract buyers, despite initial confidence in its success. The article outlines key insights gained from this setback, including the necessity of preselling a product to confirm market interest before investing time in development. The author also confronts the misconception that a large social media following guarantees sales, noting that the quality and intent of the following are critical factors. Other lessons include the limited effectiveness of discounts as a primary sales strategy and the crucial need for consumers to inherently understand a product's value and usage. Additionally, the author emphasizes the importance of aligning product offerings with the interests and needs of the community one is engaged with, rather than chasing perceived profitability. The article concludes with the author's acceptance of the failure as a learning opportunity and a commitment to applying these insights in future endeavors.

Opinions

Preselling is crucial for validating product ideas and avoiding unnecessary investment of time and resources.
A large social media following is not a reliable indicator of product sales potential; the following must be engaged and interested in the product's value proposition.
Offering discounts alone is not an effective strategy for driving sales if the product does not resonate with the target audience.
Products should be intuitive to use, and their benefits should be immediately clear to potential customers without extensive explanation.
Understanding and serving the needs of the community you are a part of is more profitable in the long run than pursuing trends or ideas outside of your area of expertise and influence.
Reflecting on and learning from business failures is essential for personal and professional growth.

I Shipped A Product And Nobody Bought — Here’s What I Learnt

Fail Fast, Learn Faster

Last week, I shipped a product nobody cared about.

I failed.

If I was still in contact with my old football mentor his response would be along the lines of, “If you don’t shoot you don’t score.”

Obviously, this doesn’t mean you should take reckless attempts on goal from everywhere on the park.

There’s some positions where it makes more sense to pass than to shoot.

There’s other positions where you’re in a decent position to shoot but it will still require a good level of skill to score.

And there’s the positions where it’s impossible to miss.

The person who gets into positions where it’s almost impossible to miss more often scores the most goals.

I know a guy like that; he’s not the best technically, but he scores a sh*tload. He once told me, “After every game, I think about where I could have been to score more goals and I just put myself in those areas in the next game.”

When I launched my first major product, I thought I was in a position where it was hard to miss, but I did.

Here’s what I learned…

Always presale before you create

When you’re not Google or Amazon, you have much less room for error.

You need all the validation you can get before you invest the time in building something for one simple reason.

It can flop.

You’re time, as what Sahil Lavingia refers to as a “minimalist entrepreneur,” is a precious resource.

It must be spent doing the most valuable to you at the moment.

Before the product is built, that thing is getting sales to confirm people are interested, and before building a product it’s identifying what people need.

Fortunately for me, I ended up doing a presale but it wasn’t on purpose…

The platform I was going to use to build the product offered a free trial so I didn’t have to spend, and something important came up on the day I was going to start building the product out, so I didn’t do it.

I was hell-bent on releasing the product on the day I did so instead of pulling it, I decided to switch the sales letter to “presale.”

Now that it’s flopped, I’m glad things turned out the way they did cos I didn’t waste any time building something people didn’t want.

A large following doesn’t mean you’re guaranteed to sell

I’ll be honest…

The minute the presales email went out, I was expecting the dollars to come rolling in.

I estimated at least 30 customers before launch and 200 after.

My assumption was —

If my combined following on social media is 20,000+, 1% of them will buy.

Boy was I wrong.

Followers do not equate to buyers.

You can have a large following of people unwilling to buy from you whatsoever.

How you build your following matters…

It must be deliberate and directed.

Discounts aren’t enough to get people to buy

I offered 3 discounts in the sales letter:

50% off for the first ten buyers,

25% off for the next ten,

and 10% off for the last ten.

I told you, I genuinely thought I’d get 30 people to purchase presale.

I thought adding a discount would be enough to move people's hands in my favor, but when I relayed this back from my mentor he had this to say…

“It’s more likely that you’ll end up giving a discount to people that would’ve purchased anyway.”

He also added that he thought 10 presales may have been a bit too optimistic let alone ten and it would have been better for me to use a different scarcity metric or none at all.

His justification for this was that my first goal shouldn’t be to get rich. It should be to just make my first few sales.

Consumers must understand how/why to use it (without you telling them)

Out of the 899 emails I sent out, I got one response.

The person wanted to know two things:

If they qualified for the product
What benefit it will do them if they purchased

I thought I covered these profusely in the email letter but clearly not.

This explains why so many people clicked to view the product but none took action.

Know the community you’re apart of

Of all things I learned, I think this was the most important.

Failing forced me to look back.

Part of my reflection included revisiting all of my old direct messages on social media and tallying up the main thing people reached out to me for.

TLDR: It has nothing to do with what I built.

People know me for being the self-taught machine learning guy.

The last ten messages in my LinkedIn inbox are all about building a career in artificial intelligence.

I neglected those people.

I pushed them aside for what I thought was more profitable even though I’m not embedded in that community properly.

It’s ironic I’m saying this cos I’m usually the one preaching to others to avoid focusing on money.

This isn’t to say that I should now go create a course for them or anything, but it’s a clear indication my AI skills are valuable – sounds stupid but I’ve been neglecting them.

Fail fast, learn faster

Even though my product idea flopped this time around, I’m not upset…

I feel like I know what positions to put myself in to get a better chance of scoring in the next match.

Now, it’s just about putting myself there.

To recap what I learned from my failed launch:

Always presale before you create
A large following doesn’t mean you’re guaranteed to sell
Discounts aren’t enough to get people to buy
Consumers must understand how/why to use it (without you telling them)
Know the community you’re apart of

Thanks for reading!

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