The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Narek Vardanyan, Founder and CEO at Prelaunch.com

Episode Date: September 20, 2023

Narek Vardanyan, Founder and CEO at Prelaunch.com Prelaunch.com Prelaunch is billed as the Most Reliable Way to Get Product Insights on its website. Validate your product concept with data you can trust. Then, co-create with your community to ensure a successful launch. Narek Vardanyan is a serial entrepreneur, author, and keynote speaker. He speaks about business-related topics, about management, growth, culture and leadership. Together with his team, Narek is on a mission to create an ecosystem where all impactful innovations thrive. It contains service, software and media companies to help innovators and creators succeed. Among them, Prelaunch.com is a product-market fit testing platform that helps creators validate their concepts and ideas through a unique trusted methodology before actually launching their products into the markets. It helps to save hundreds of thousands of dollars and years of product development otherwise spent on products that nobody wants, as well as save millions of tons of waste going into the environment. Narek is the author of the bestselling “Crowdfunding Secrets” book and has been featured in Forbes, Bloomberg, TEDx etc.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. The CEOs, authors, thought leaders, visionaries, and motivators. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms, and legs inside the vehicle at all times, because you're about to go on a monster education rollercoaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, folks. This is Voss here from the chrisvossshow.com, the chrisvossshow.com. Welcome to the big show, my family and friends. We certainly appreciate you guys.

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Anyway, we have all that going on on the show. So just so you know, it's there if you want it. And we appreciate you guys tuning in. As always, we have amazing guests on the show. And they bring us some of the most brilliant minds because everyone knows my mind went a long time ago. The billionaires, the newsmakers,

the CEOs, the hottest new authors, they're always on the show talking about whatever it is that they want to talk about. I just come on and go, what the hell do you want people to talk about? They're like, we got some stuff, Chris. And that's what we do. Today we have Narek Vardanian, who is the founder and CEO at PreLaunch.com. We're going to be talking about crowdfunding, marketing products, selling products, buying products if you want to get involved with crowdfunding, and some of the different things. He's an amazing author as well. He wrote the book 57 Secrets of Crowdfunding, a step-by-step strategy to win big. You can get that on Amazon as well. And we're going to be

getting all the lowdown, seeing how the market's going over there on the crowdfunding service as well. Narek is a serial entrepreneur, author, and keynote speaker. He speaks about business-related topics, about management, growth, culture, and leadership, my favorite topics. Together with his team, he is on a mission to create an ecosystem where all impactful innovations thrive it contains service software and media companies to help innovators and creators succeed among them pre-launch.com is a product-driven fit testing platform that helps creators validate their concepts and ideas through a unique trusted method methodology method method, I flunk second grade, before actually launching their products into the markets.

It helps save hundreds of thousands of dollars and years of product development. And he's also the bestseller of the crowdfunding secrets book we have aforementioned. And he's been featuring in Forbes, Bloomberg, and TEDx. Welcome to the show, Narek. How are you? Hey, Chris.

Thanks for having me. I'm doing great. Awesome, Sauce. It's wonderful to have you as well. So give us your.com. I've kind of already plugged it a little bit, but give us any other.coms or wherever you want people to find you or get to know you guys better on the internet. It's narekvardayan.com, actually, or prelaunch.com.

There you go. It's an interesting product there you go what's the origin of your name in in history it's an armenian name actually there you go and vardayan is the yan is the is the armenian surname i mean last name so that's where it comes from there you go well all right so you're related to uh who's that one chick who's the big fashion guru? I don't know. Is it Sheremenian? Yeah. Are you related?

Well, she's also Armenian, so yeah. Yeah, yeah. You guys own like Glendale or something like that. I grew up in La Crescenta near Glendale. You should ask her for money sometime. She's got plenty of it. Just an idea. That's what I do, man.

Tell us a $30,000 000 overview you call her hey can i get some money chris said so uh and she's like yeah and you're like holy shit that worked uh so give us a 30 000 overview of what your company does and how it does it well pre-launch is a product validation platform as we call it so So it helps creators, innovators, creative minds to validate their concepts before actually launching them into the markets. So basically what we do, we help them to understand

how well they will be doing in the market and who are their customers. So on one hand, you have creators who are placing their early stage concepts on the platform. So before investing time and money in developing them. And on the other hand, you have a community who is placing $10 to $20, like a small amount of money, to reserve a discount if those products actually are produced. And then what the company does, takes the data, analyzes it, and provides very credible

signals to creators on how well they are doing at an early stage. So that's what we do. Now, are you guys a replacement for crowdfunding sites like Kickstarter and other things? Or are you guys like a pre-Kickstarter where you can just kind of see if anybody really likes your widget and maybe they don't and maybe you shouldn't waste your time? We are pre-everything, I would say.

Pre-Kickstarter, pre-Amazon, pre-Shopify. So whenever you just have an idea, you have a concept, maybe you have a prototype, work a little bit on it, and then you really don't know whether you should invest it or not, then you're going to pre-launch, then you can go to Kickstarter to raise some funds there.

There you go. And you're going to know, you probably have a better idea by doing it this way, if it has potential to succeed on kickstarter absolutely yeah yeah there you go well that's good i mean so basically it's kind of like you're getting in on the ground level it's kind of getting those early stocks on something if you really like it and then you're going to get like a discount on it so you're you know a lot of people like to get on the kickstarter thing because you know you kind of get a discount before

it you know goes full, blow retail, and it becomes like a big company, then you got to pay full price. So this is one way to get early, early on, almost like seed investor sort of stuff for pricing. Yeah, absolutely. And the coolest thing is that, so it's based on real purchase intent, basically. So it's not that you just go and ask random people what you think about these products etc not that you are paying them if they pay you if they really like it so it's like based on real behavior so they put down like skin in the game and then like that's the best validation ever right when people pull out their credit card and give you money for something

that doesn't exist, that beats everything out there. So then we take the data, analyze it, compare it with our benchmarks and tell you how well you're doing basically. Like how is your price doing? How are your customers? Why they're buying your products or why they're not buying your products? How you can improve it?

So then you work them. We call it the co-creation. So you kind of work with some enthusiast groups that are really engaged with your products who really want to buy this product. So you co-create with them the products. And then when you launch already in the market, you're 100% confident that you're going to really succeed. This is really interesting, too. You guys help give feedback and analytics on how to discover insights about your audience. And you may find out the people that are interested in buying your product are very different

than maybe what your original thinking of Target was. Yeah, yeah. That's the goal. And, you know, entrepreneurs and creators, they are very, very emotional, very, they love their inventions, their thoughts. Everybody thinks that they're kind of genius. Some of them really are. But you don't really know whether you'll succeed or not until you really talk to real customers.

But how you'll know whether the people whom you are talking to are real customers or not. So this reservation funnel is what we found out is the best validation out there. There you go. And, you know, the market really is, and the consumer really is a good indicator. I mean, I guess sometimes it could be a business for you doing B2B, but the market is a good indicator of where you want to go. I think I talked about it in my book, but you, you, you know, there were times where we where we thought

okay we're going this way with this new company we're launching and here's our business model and we're going that way and then after tripping either tripping into some other uh um industries that were like hey we really like your product you're like really because we were just going to go that way but i guess if you want to pay pay us, we'll do some of your way. And then finding out that it was much more profitable to go that way, and there was a lot more business and money that way, and a lot less competition because it was an untapped market. And that saved us because we ended up in a much better place.

And so sometimes you, as an entrepreneur, you think you're going one place for the market and you end up going someplace else. And so getting that feedback early on just saves you time, money, research. You're not $10 billion in investments and R&D down the road. And then you're like, we got to go someplace else,

but we don't have enough money to do it. A lot of entrepreneurs don't have that money to do that change up. No, 100%. That's typically what's happening on prelaunch and how creators are pivoting with the insights that they are getting, right? So what's happening is that they're ending up getting a totally new product sometimes. Like we had a couple of recent interesting stories

where somebody launched a product, you know, people for some reason don't like it. Then they gradually work with them, changed it, transformed it, changed the materials, changed the positioning, basically everything, even the name. And then like after working with them like about eight months or so, they launched it and already knew that the metrics are good. So it was a really big success. There you go. And then you're throwing better money after good stuff instead of throwing bad money after bad stuff. And there's nothing worse you can do because usually you,

you're on a limited timeline with funds and you're like, Hey, we got to make this thing work or it's game over and we got to get it going on. And so we've got a limited amount of energy limited amount of funds for startup funds and your burn rates you know eating you up on what it takes to create something and so i love this concept so so people in the audience that are out there listening they can join your website and be able to browse all these different offers that are out there in the marketplace, in your marketplace? Yeah. And on the other hand, it's also pretty interesting for the community and early adopters, as you say, right?

So you're able to join your favorite brands and discover their coming soon products at an early stage. And then if you like something, you can put down like like ten dollars or twenty dollars like a small amount of money and then you can reserve a really interesting discount if these products are released into the market so you're not really buying the full product per se you're kind of like putting in a an option if you will maybe exactly exactly and the cool thing is that if you change your mind for some reason like you bought something else from nearby stores, you can come and cancel it and you'll receive a full refund. Oh, really?

Yeah. So in case the company decides to not move on with the production, which is totally okay with us, you can just, you know, receiving your funds back and everybody's happy. And probably that gives some feedback too if people, you know, it's kind of like when you have a high bounce rate on a website or you have a high cancellation on sales rate you have to kind of go why don't we have high cancellation on sales somehow people are having uh what's that term regret sales regret purchasing

regret they're having they're having regret of what they bought and there's something maybe they either don't understand uh that they're thinking they're it's causing them second thoughts or you know there's something going on you know they they're really excited to buy it and then once they buy it and they're looking at it they're like i don't know about this now and so um that could be a feedback uh lesson too for people yeah no definitely like um we encourage a lot of feedback and typically on the other side, on the community side as well, if you really want to buy something and you see somebody's up to producing it, you have this opportunity to customize it according to how you want to shape it. You can provide feedback according to the colors, functionality, storage, etc.

And then creators listen because uh like that's that's that's super helpful and then they're listening to their customers and creating best products that's a good match definitely and uh so you also have an ai system or engine or market research assistant tell us how that works that's kind of interesting everyone's into ai now yeah so uh ai is becoming kind of an electricity type of thing it's everywhere so uh the thing is that um i had some for breakfast in my wheaties this morning so like when you're doing a research and you're an early at an early stage as an entrepreneur you also need to understand what your competitors are doing. Like typically the companies or the creators,

they go out and then they read hundreds of thousands of reviews of some of the similar products to understand, you know, what people like, what people dislike, et cetera, et cetera. So we've created this feature basically in pre-launch, which goes and then scans all these reviews, what people tell about your competitors, and then summarizes it into an interesting summary and basically tells you what they liked, what they disliked,

and what are some of the missing opportunities out there that you can kind of feel with your product. That's pretty brilliant. And so it helps you understand your potential. 35 data points. Yeah, the 35 data points is our, we call it a pre-launch score. Yeah, so we have this score because, you know, like you're getting this data, you're doing your pre-launch, your validation, and you're getting a lot of metrics.

And you need to understand, like, you know, how well you're doing your pre-launch your validation and you're getting a lot of metrics and you need to understand like you know how well you're doing somebody needs to tell you because there's a lot of data in the dashboards right so this pre-launch score is a kind of combination of all these metrics in one which which basically tells you like are you are you doing good or bad and then you're changing stuff and then you you look at this metric, and it's a kind of guidance and North Star metric which shows you whether you're on the right track or not. Have you found that if people are meeting in your research or people are meeting those tick points, that they have a better trajectory when they get on Kickstarter

and crowdfunding sites? Yeah, definitely. Like we have about 80%, 90%, I would say, accuracy. Wow. Yeah. So if you see that something is really good on prelaunch, that's almost guaranteed it will work out on Kickstarter, on Amazon, on your website if you want to launch it.

Because the correlation is super high because that's tight on actual purchasing intent, right? So that's why, you know, it's not biased. It's not compared with these focus groups, these surveys where you go out. Typically, most of companies go out and pay people so they tell their opinions. And in this case it's vice

versa yeah like you know people are paying you and also are more engaged in telling them what you need to produce how you need to produce how you need to shape it uh so that's why it's very accurate there you go and uh you know that that just helps you to get on the to get more on the deals. You talk about how to validate your idea being more of a moonshot or a shower thought. I thought that was kind of interesting. What does that mean? It's a kind of a little bit humorous way on how to put it. But shower thoughts, everybody is having shower thoughts special entrepreneurs you know you have these great ideas in the shower we have

even a very funny video about that and then you think that you know it's definitely gonna work you need to put your you know all the resources on it your time on it you're selling your house your car and putting all the money all the energy into the product which it don't really know whether it will work out or not, right? So like our suggestion and advice to all the entrepreneurs, especially in the hardware, we're more a bit specialized in the consumer hardware domain, I would say. Especially in there, the energy and the investments are pretty high.

Like, you know know to produce a single product on average you need to spend from 300 to 500 000 dollars uh to to get it going so that's that's the minimum and before doing that uh it's it's uh it's it's better that you you know get the data uh which tells you um whether you are on the right track or not and how to improve it. So it's not a binary. It's not just, you know, yes or no, but it's more of a kind of a guidance on what you need to improve your audience,

your pricing strategy, your colors, your variations, what people tell about this, how they like it, et cetera, et cetera. There you go. And you guys have got over a thousand people that have signed up to market their products. I'm looking through it right now.

This is really cool. It's kind of like, you know, being on one of the crowdfund sites, you can see all the different cool products and there's, there's a lot of cool things on here, man. All right,

give me a deal. And you know, I like this because people can really, you know, focus groups are really hard and expensive to try and do as a business try and get a bunch of people together to talk you know a lot of entrepreneurs turn to their family and friends they're like hey do you think this widget's a good idea and their family friends like i don't know you know they're usually the worst people take advice from unless

they've run companies and do business um and uh you know i mean you can call you you can't and sometimes if you have a really good idea too you know you got to worry about people stealing if you tell them about it so sometimes it's better to get closer to market now uh do you want to tell us how you guys work i mean is there is there a lot of fees charged up front that a company that might want to test out their pre-launch with you guys or do you guys take a portion of sales on the back end or how does it work oh it's it's very affordable like we have a it's a platform basically it says it has a free plan so you know people can register it and with the free plan they can even play it around understand how it works etc the metrics the dashboard um and then the subscription starts from 95 dollars a month basically uh and then the most popular plan i would say like where you have all the functionalities

all the advanced stuff etc is about five thousand dollars a year uh that includes also this concierge service this is where our guys also kind of take on board and try to support the teams, you know, with some of their stock that's going on. And that's it, basically. You don't need to spend really fortune on getting all this accurate data. There you go. Hey, I already found a product I like on here. This is pretty cool, eh? So I have Huskies, and one of the problems with huskies is they shed a lot and they and there's two times a year where they basically molt if you will and they blow their whole coat as they as

they call it and it's a nightmare and we're halfway through right now there's a product on here called we pack i think it's uh i'm seeing that right through around the camera uh the ultimate hair solution and this is brilliant somebody's taken like a a pet glove for hair where you can it's got some things on it so when you pet them with your hand it pulls the hair off but it's hooked to a small vacuum that's pretty darn brilliant eh that's why i would buy that product that is that that is i've been wondering because you know my dogs uh you know they're not big fans of vacuums but you know if you're petting them and stuff they don't like the the hard brush they don't like the wire brush you know that it

has tears out their undercoat and really digs that stuff out they don't like they don't like any of it but this might be a whole lot nicer and the problem with the brushing i have is you know you once you brush it out it's everywhere it looks like you exploded a dog in your backyard and i'll take a picture and there's like there's like the exploded a dog in your backyard and i'll take a picture and there's like there's like the whole area is covered in fur and they're like holy crap that came in on one dog and you're like yeah it's just the start so there's a lot of great products on here as i'm looking through here a lot of cool things uh do you have any product successes you want to tell us about any any standouts i know you don't probably don't want to play favorites

but yeah we're having a lot of uh we have a lot of successful products and also a lot of unexpected successes i would say like products that probably nobody was believing that they're gonna be super successful and eventually they turn out to become so so one of the recent cases that we had was an electric motorcycle by former Harley-Davidson senior engineer, Eric Buell. This is a legendary person, like, you know, pretty much the most famous guy in the motorcycle. Like really, really big brand there. So they started validating the concept of the motorcycle about eight months ago and got a lot of data, changed a lot of interesting stuff on the bike,

listened to the customers, et cetera. And they launched it, I think, a week ago. And they did about $4 million in one or two weeks. Holy crap. Is that the hyper speed? No. Fuel? Fuel, weeks. Holy crap. Is that the Hyper Speed? No, that's Fuel. Fuel, yeah.

Fuel Folded, the ultimate fat tire bike. There's a lot of cool things on here. There's even something that looks like an old Big Wheels. It looks like a grown-up Big Wheels. The Drift One electric bike. This is pretty cool. So, yeah, lots of really cool products on here. And those people who like deals and like shopping around and filling their cart with all sorts of stuff you can check out all these cool latest products and uh the world's longest range e-bikes holy

crap lots of cool stuff here um and uh people can do it they can test other stuff and it sounds like it doesn't cost them a fortune to do it. Certainly, if you launch on Kickstarter now, I think there's a lot of background that has to go on. Don't they have to hand-approve everything now or something like that? They have to make sure you have a product that works and stuff? Yeah, you need to have a pretty ready product already. When you go to Kickstarter, it's a kind of pre-production stage, I'd say.

Sometimes even a production stage. So you need to already, you have invested in the molding, in the prototypes, et cetera. So that's, you know, you go to Kickstarter and then if you see things are not working, even if you see so, you still have to deliver, you know, all those bakers, the products, et cetera. So there's no way to kind of bake off from there. But with the pre-launch, you get the data and then you decide how

you want to proceed. There you go. And then you guys help them build the landing page. Tell us how that works. Yeah, so again, we have some AI tools as well on the platform. So you basically just describe what your idea is about,

the product is about, and then your page is created. And then if you want to change something, you go and it's very flexible and you can customize a lot of stuff until you see that it's really something that you want. And you can test different prices as well. That's kind of interesting. How does that work? How do you offer people different prices? Do you do A-B style testing or do you ask people, you know, what would you be willing to pay for this and then we see how people's reaction changes

based on that. An interesting thing is that so when you are reserving a product and then the price kind of increases, the creator has this promise to still deliver you at a lower price, right? So you kind of you're not damaged because of these price changes. If the price goes lower than you reserved, then he still has to give you a lower price. So in any way, you win as a customer. I love that.

Yeah, so we thought that the community shouldn't be affected in all these fluctuations. But with this way, creators get a really, really good data because we had a couple of cases where we kind of were begging the creator to increase the price in the market because the market was really ready to pay, you know, at least 50% more. And then if you don't kind of put it that way, you're putting the money on the table. Then they launched it with a 50% higher price and then then it was a super success, and they got a really big margin. So especially in the hardware, where margins are very tiny, you need to be really, really kind of sensitive on the best price you need to price your product. Now, they can use this for e-commerce sites as well.

And I guess when they do run ads, people outside of your community can see it as well. So they can just basically run an ad for people on the website and outside and people can take advantage of it. So they could go buy Facebook ads or something like that and promote it. Yeah. That's typically how we are getting traffic on the site. So we promote it on Facebook, on Google,

and then we bring some targeted audience and then we see how they behave basically right so we see uh how they're behaving you know who reserves who subscribes we take a lot of metrics analyze a lot of data so basically anything that's related on the purchase intent we take that data and then as we are doing this for quite some time we already have a really good grasp on you know what everything means uh well this is awesome i mean getting that pre-sales feedback because there's nothing worse than you know i've launched products or companies and i'm like this this is going to be the next big thing this is going to work and this is going to be awesome

and then and then it bombs and you're like well okay uh we gotta do some adjusting here we either gotta find a market for this product because clearly the one we thought is the right market isn't or we've got to find uh i don't know some some way to make this thing work or that or sometimes you just gotta ditch it i mean that's just sometimes that's how it goes it's a rough life and so i love this where you can suss out a idea or concept or product and then get feedback and then you can dial in if you will to the audience target that is best served for you and might not even be the one you're originally thinking of and uh you know there's a lot of products that come to market i'm thinking of gaming as one

uh sometimes social media in its early days would get product feedback from its community and the community would help shape it and so this kind of gives you that same sort of format where the community and your audience of potential buyers or buyers can help shape your product to improve it the way they want there's a lot of times where i tell people hey you should do this with your product they're just like yeah whatever and you're just like dude you're missing you're missing a whole lot of money so there you go yeah yeah sometimes it's just about you know uh tiny details and then small stuff but you need to listen them listen to them and then get get this data so oh definitely because then then you have the potential to open up other markets what haven't we talked about about your company, Prelaunch.com, that we haven't touched on?

So, an interesting thing is that we started to see interest from bigger companies as well, so it's apparently a problem everywhere. So, you know, just developing

and launching the product is really hard, and you might think that bigger companies have all these resources, trends, et cetera. They do have, but nobody can really, really forecast on what's going to work and what doesn't. And they're also spending literally millions of dollars into the products that are failing. So we started to work with a couple of big brands already

and then started to help them on validating their concepts. So, yeah. This is awesome. Well, I'm going to have fun going through the site just as a buyer looking for cool stuff to put down and validate. And being an entrepreneur, I kind of have a brain that I like looking at stuff and go, that's brilliant, that's innovative, or here's maybe a way that can be better.

And I guess you can feedback to them that sort of information, can you? Can you say, hey, you should do it this way, or hey, I think you'd be better if you did this or something. I don't know. Can you provide that feedback? Yeah, we call it the co-creation. So you become a co-creator alongside with the creator. So you kind of get on calls, you provide more feedback. Of course, you're getting some more discounts, some more perks because of that. But if you really want to get this product and you're the customer, there are a lot of ways on how you can shape it and customize it according to your requirements. So you're benefiting as well as a buyer.

Well, this is awesome. Give me your final thoughts as we go out on how you guys do it and what you do. We think this should become a standard of launching the products because we have seen so much successes into the companies where just nobody was believing in them, nobody was believing in their ideas that they're going to find. And they did the pre-launch, they got the data, and we have all these stories, so we're pretty excited

that this can really work for many companies, despite of their size, small and big. They can get to their customers at an early stage, at the earliest possible stage, understand how well they are doing, understand get to their customers at an early stage at the earliest possible stage uh understand how well they are doing understand who are their customers why they are buying their products and then move forward confidently like you know this this increases the chances of success so much that you were really excited about it yeah i mean anytime you can you can pre-plan out these things and hit the mark better and launch right.

I mean, you know, between energy and time funds wasted, you know, when you start a company, you've got a burn rate. And then plus you can kind of suss out ideas and say, hey, do we think it's a good idea? Or maybe this is not a great idea. Let's see how it works. So give me your dot coms as we go out so we can find you guys on the interwebs. It's prelaunch.com, basically. That's the place you can find us.

I have my own newsletter. It's narekvardanyan.com where I share some of the stuff that I find on validation, on marketing, on agency type of stuff, etc. So, yeah. There you go. Well, folks, it out uh at the website so you can order up the products i'm taking a look at them right now and i'm going to spend some time after

the show looking at one i'm kidding you there's a lot of fun stuff that's over here thank you very much nark for coming on the show we really appreciate it yeah thank you there you go and thanks so much for tuning in go to goodreese.com or for the show to your family friends and relatives it gives a five-star review over there on the iTunes. We certainly appreciate it. Thanks for tuning in. Be good to each other, and we'll see you guys next time. And that should have.