Sell Your Product BEFORE You Build It – Changes EVERYTHING
You can spend a year and tens of thousands of dollars developing a product that nobody buys.
I’ve watched it happen over and over, and it’s almost never because the product was bad.
It’s because the founder built first and sold later, and by the time they found out something was off, it was too late to fix it cheaply.
But there’s one thing you can do, before you even have a prototype, that changes the entire trajectory of your product.
You can sell it first.
In this video I’m going to walk you through three stages of selling before building, and show you how each one builds momentum for the next, so that by the time you’re ready to manufacture, you already have proof that people want what you’re making.
Most product creators follow the same sequence: come up with an idea, build a prototype, refine it, get it manufactured, and then try to sell it.
It feels logical, and it’s what almost everyone does.
But here’s what actually happens: you spend months, sometimes over a year, refining the engineering, getting the enclosure just right, maybe even ordering inventory, and then when you finally put it in front of real customers, you discover that the thing they care most about isn’t even a feature you prioritized.
And by that point, every change is expensive and slow, a new PCB layout, new molds, new packaging, recertification, and months of delays, all because you learned something about your customer that you could’ve learned much earlier.
Those things are easy to fix when you’re still in the idea stage, and brutal to fix once you’ve committed to tooling and inventory.
So the goal is simple: learn what matters while you can still act on it.
Stage 1: Customer Conversations
The first “sale” you need to make isn’t for money, it’s for honest feedback from strangers.
Most founders skip this step entirely, or they substitute it with feedback from friends and family, which is almost useless because people who care about you will soften their responses every time.
So a better approach is to frame yourself as someone researching the problem, maybe evaluating the idea for an investment, rather than someone who’s already emotionally attached to the solution.
People speak way more honestly when they think you’re a skeptic rather than the creator.
Go where your target customers already spend time, whether that’s a gym, a baby store, a hardware store, or an online community, and start asking questions about the problem your product solves.
A great starting question is something like, “How do you currently deal with this problem, and what’s the most frustrating part about it?”
Product creators who do this consistently say the first few conversations feel awkward, but after that, you start hearing patterns that completely reshape how you think about your product.
And don’t just talk to end users, talk to the people who run those businesses and communities too, because they see the problem from a completely different angle and often know things your customers won’t think to tell you.
Surveys are tempting, but they’re unreliable because people click “yes” to hypotheticals when it costs them nothing.
What you’re really after in this stage is whether the problem is real, how people describe it in their own words, and what they’ve already tried.
That language becomes the foundation for everything that comes later, your product page, your crowdfunding campaign, and your marketing copy.
Stage 2: Reservation Funnels
Here’s the first rule of validation: nothing matters unless money changes hands.
And the second rule is that the first dollar is always the hardest to get.
A reservation funnel asks potential customers to put down a small deposit, usually one to ten dollars, to reserve one of the first units when it’s ready.
That tiny transaction separates “sounds cool” from “I’d actually buy this,” because pulling out a credit card, even for a dollar, requires real purchase intent.
The page itself looks like a normal product listing with good visuals, clear copy, your target price, and a buy button, but with a message explaining the product isn’t available yet and offering a reservation spot, usually with a discount at launch.
But here’s where reservation funnels get really powerful: the setup becomes a testing engine.
You can swap out feature descriptions and see which version gets more reservations.
You can change the price and measure what happens.
You can rewrite the headline and watch the conversion rate shift.
Just make sure the features you test are ones you’ve at least sanity-checked for technical feasibility, because in hardware, adding something like Wi-Fi or a display can completely change your architecture and BOM cost.
So instead of guessing which features matter most or what price the market will bear, you’re getting real data from real people spending real money, and often the version customers respond to most is not the version you originally planned.
You can set this up on your own website or use a platform like Prelaunch.com that’s built specifically for this.
Now, a reservation page is only useful if the right people actually see it, so you’ll need a way to drive traffic, whether that’s through the online communities you’ve been engaging with in Stage 1, targeted social media ads, content marketing, or outreach to niche publications and influencers in your space.
Even people who don’t reserve are valuable, because you can collect their email addresses and follow up with them later as the product develops, building an audience of warm prospects before you ever launch.
What you walk away with is a measurable demand signal you can show to investors, manufacturers, and partners, a growing email list of real prospects, and data-driven clarity on features, pricing, and positioning, all before you’ve committed to a design.
Stage 3: Pre-Sales and Crowdfunding
At this point you’ve got a prototype that looks and works close to the final product.
A lot of founders push straight to manufacturing here because they’re confident it’ll sell, but the smarter move is to pre-sell first.
Customers are now paying full price before the product ships, which requires trust, but it puts you in a position most founders only dream about: funded manufacturing with proven demand.
The key to making this work is that you’ve already built credibility through the earlier stages, because you’ve been talking to customers, collecting reservations, and showing real traction.
One member named Nick started with just an idea, built an audience around the problem his product solved, developed a prototype within six months, and launched a Kickstarter that raised over $300K, proving demand long before he ever started production.
Another member named Ronald opened pre-sales on his website, got a tech publication to review his prototype, and that single review drove over $60K in pre-sales within days, which funded his manufacturing and attracted suppliers.
But there’s a responsibility that comes with this.
Hardware always takes longer than you expect, and certification and manufacturing will throw surprises at you.
Promising unrealistic delivery dates is one of the fastest ways to create angry customers and damage your reputation before your product even ships.
So by the time you pre-sell, you need enough clarity on your timeline to make promises you can actually keep.
Now here’s why this whole approach changes everything, and it’s not just about validation.
Each stage builds on the last in a chain reaction that compounds over time.
Customer conversations reveal the real problem and give you the exact language your market uses.
That language makes your reservation page convert better because you’re speaking in your customer’s words instead of your own.
Reservation data tells you which features and price points actually work, so you stop guessing and start building with evidence.
Those numbers give you a credible story for investors, manufacturers, and distributors, the kind of proof that opens doors you’d never get through with just an idea and a pitch deck.
With my own product, I presented a crude, barely functional prototype to a major national retailer.
They gave me a letter of interest saying they wanted to carry it once it was available.
That letter helped me secure a manufacturing partner who invested over $100K in tooling, lent me their engineering team to finalize the design, and gave me 90-day payment terms so I could get paid by retailers before I had to pay the factory.
Their exact words were, “We get pitched products all the time by entrepreneurs, and 99% of them we just ignore, but we feel that your product warrants an exception.”
None of that happens without proof, and proof comes from selling before you build.
And here’s what most people miss: I didn’t have a finished product when any of that happened, I had traction and a story to tell, and that was enough.
Selling first doesn’t slow you down, it keeps you from racing in the wrong direction.
It shapes the product, exposes weak assumptions, teaches you what customers actually care about, and gives you an advantage you simply can’t fake.
None of this guarantees success, nothing does with hardware, but it dramatically reduces your risk and puts you in a much stronger position than building blind.
So build with proof, not hope, and almost everything else gets easier.
If you want to start this week, go talk to ten strangers about the problem your product solves, write down the exact words they use, and pay attention to what surprises you.
