Don't tie your pre-launch timeline to your product's price. The key factor is your audience's current state of readiness. Authors pre-launch a $20 book for six months because they need to build significant audience readiness from a cold state.
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To prime an audience, your pre-launch content must build three beliefs. They must trust you as the expert, believe your unique method is the solution, and, crucially, believe in their own capability to get results using it.
For products with a short shelf life, building a pre-launch audience on social media is crucial. This ensures you have immediate demand for your first batch, preventing waste from unsold inventory and validating the product before it's even made.
Shift your pre-launch focus from simple warm-up activities to ensuring your audience is ready to solve their problem and believes you are the one to help them. This 'recipe for readiness' makes the final sale feel effortless.
Legacy publishers focus marketing on a short 2-3 week launch window. This model is flawed, as external events can kill momentum. A better approach is continuous, automated marketing that treats books as long-term assets, ensuring they find their audience over time regardless of launch timing.
During the pre-launch, your content shouldn't mention the product. Instead, focus entirely on building belief in your unique methodology. If customers buy into your *process* as the solution, they will be ready to buy the product that delivers it.
Don't build a perfect, feature-complete product for the mass market from day one. It's too expensive and risky. Instead, deliver a beta to innovator customers who are willing to go on the journey with you. Their feedback provides crucial signals for a more strategic, measured rollout.
Instead of a single public launch, validate demand with content to build a waitlist. Launch a limited, discounted lifetime deal to this list. Use feedback from these first users to iterate, then launch a second, slightly more expensive beta cohort before the full public release.
Instead of a simple book launch, Ramli John hosted a virtual summit on the book's topic. This attracted attendees interested in learning, not just buying. The book was bundled into a $47 VIP pass for event recordings, making the purchase feel like a high-value deal and driving thousands in launch-day sales from a new audience.
Despite his team's eagerness to enter comic book stores, Vaynerchuk is intentionally patient, waiting until the market "feels right." This protects long-term brand health by ensuring organic demand outpaces supply before expanding.
Founders often obsess over a single launch day event. Livestorm's CEO argues that a launch is a 6-to-12-month timeline focused on building a sales or PLG engine and acquiring the first 10-15 key customers to trigger word-of-mouth. The initial event is just one point on that longer journey, not the ultimate make-or-break moment.
