⚖️ Pre-sales vs launches [SAF #165]

PreS.: I’ve been talking a lot about The Council recently but I never told you exactly how I see it and why it exists. I wrote this to answer the most frequently asked questions I get.

Hey Reader,

Thinking about launching something soon? Many of my clients are, so I’ve been talking a lot about the right way to announce that new awesome thing you’re building.

Traditionally, there are two popular ways to put a new offer into the world.

Option one sounds like this: “I’m thinking about building this. If enough people buy it before it exists, I’ll make it. If not, I’ll refund everyone.”
Option two sounds like this: “I built this. Here’s what it does. Here’s who it’s for. Doors are open.”

Same goal. Very different energy → safer vs bolder; lean vs traditional; smart vs outdated.

The trouble is that, despite what gurus may tell you, there is no single right way to do this that applies to everyone, every time.

Underneath, this choice says a lot about how you see your role, your authority, and your responsibility in the market.

We’ll talk about it in a second, after a quick message from today’s partner, who makes selling much easier and launches of any kind much more predictable. I know this because many of you who used Jana’s approach told me how it completely changed things for them:

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“If you’ve ever spent months building something no one bought, do this instead” is how pre-sales are usually promoted by their advocates. And if you’ve ever been there (tons of work, zero sales) or know someone who has, you’ll probably do it.

However, I’ve seen people do pre-sales when they shouldn’t have.

Pre-sales are fantastic when you genuinely don’t know if anyone will buy from you

If any of these sound like you:

Early stage
New niche
No receipts
Tiny audience
Testing a brand-new offer (i.e. moving from services to courses)

Pre-selling is responsible. You are testing demand instead of role-playing as a confident founder with zero data.

But pre-sales come with a cost people like to ignore: they externalize conviction.

You are asking the market to decide whether your idea deserves to exist. You’re borrowing certainty from other people’s wallets.

That’s fine once, twice, maybe three times. After that, it starts to smell like hesitation.

Over time, your audience learns your patterns. If every new idea is framed as “I’m not sure, you tell me,” they stop seeing you as someone with a point of view.

Why do people hate launches?

Launches get a bad rap because people fixate on the outcome.

Did it hit the number?
Did it flop?
Did anyone buy?

But we forget that most launches don’t fail publicly. They fail inside dashboards, behind closed tabs, in the part of your brain that keeps score even when nobody else does.

But what about the hours I’m putting in without knowing if anyone will buy?

Fair question.

But no one says that you have to build a 26-module course before knowing if anyone wants it.

Candidly, I’ve never done a pre-sale. My first product, the launch email templates, sold even when I had a minuscule audience because:

It was VERY affordable (ideal for an impulse purchase)
It was something that people needed
It over-delivered, so I collected social proof very quickly.

It took me 8 hours to put it together. That was my risk: one day of work because I chose to build a product that was easy for me to put together (writing comes easy to me) and I was OK with either outcome.

There are now 3 courses in my product stack but I never launched a single one as an on-demand product first. My approach to demand validation was running them as live workshops first. Here’s a deep dive into one of these launches.

To me, this sounds like a more decisive way to put something new into the world — while still validating demand. Here’s why:

I always launched with a waitlist, so I could validate interest early on.
I maximized revenue by adding different pricing tiers.
I did NOT invest a lot of time into building the actual product until I had a few sales.

Let’s dwell on this last part a bit: since I had an engaged audience when I launched all my workshops-cum-courses, my bet that at least a few people would buy them paid off.

If it hadn’t, I would have gone through the embarrassment of running a workshop with 1-2 attendees only. But hey, it would have made for a good post-mortem analysis.

This is why what you launch should be context-based, not hype-based. If anyone and their dog has a course, you shouldn’t build one unless you’re confident that you have both the audience size and the demand for it.

[A quick primer on what to build next.]

So, should you do a pre-sale or a launch?

TL;DR: do a pre-sale ONLY if you have a small audience or if you’re testing a brand-new format/container.

If not, do a regular launch, spread over multiple weeks, which will give you the time to gauge demand and adjust as you go.

Or, choose the middle ground

If your email list is small (less than 1,000 people), my recommendation is to skip most of the automations you see in launches. Instead, here’s a radical concept: talk to people 1:1.

Revolutionary, I know!

Hear me out: if you only have fewer than 10-15 people on your waitlist, you can (and should!) have individual conversations with each of them. You’ll learn much more from those than you would from any survey/poll/automated campaign.

So here’s the middle ground you can test:

Validate privately. Have conversations. Sell privately to a small group. Keep uncertainty off the main stage.
Launch publicly. Once you decide to build, act like your product deserves to exist. This means no conditional language and no hedging.
Shrink the launch instead of softening it. What if, instead of selling 100 courses, you sold 10 workshop tickets and validated that approach with a small group who will give you in-depth feedback.
Do the big launch once you have proof. Run a small cohort or sell privately to a few clients you already know. Collect feedback and launch with social proof.

This middle ground allows you to avoid working in secret, like a monk, for months only to have your product flop. But it does NOT help you avoid work entirely.

Frankly, I don’t think you should avoid work entirely. There’s a distinct type of clarity that comes when you start actually building something, when you move from a rough idea in your head to a client-facing product.

And this clarity will help you create better offers in the future.

I used a similar approach to launch The Council

When the idea of a community caught root in my head, I believed that people needed it. But personal beliefs tend to shatter on contact with reality, so I needed to validate.

My launch was as minimal as possible (I followed Jay Clouse’s advice) — a quick blurb buried at the end of a newsletter, where I knew only my best readers would read. Then a social media post.

My hypothesis: if I could get at least 10 people to join this way, I had something there and I could move on. If not, I’d swallow the loss (Circle subscriptions are not cheap) and move on.

It worked better than expected. BUT it’s only because I spent years building trust. Also, I did take a risk, because there’s no such thing as completely de-risking a new product.

If you’re curious, here’s my current vision for The Council again. It’s something I put together because I needed a forcing function to help me track its evolution. So this is a living document; I expect it to change some more before it becomes a proper landing page.

I want to leave you with this question:

Am I validating demand, or am I avoiding responsibility?

Answer this before you decide on pre-sales vs launches. It’s the kind of honesty that might hurt in the moment but will pay off in the long run.

Lastly, if you don't see some demand for your product idea before you talk about it publicly, it's often better to regroup than to force a pre-sale or a launch.

Still not sure what the best solution for you is? Reply and we can chat about it!

That's it from me today!

See you next week in your inbox.

Here to make you think,

Adriana