Hey guys,
I have been working on a project for quite some time now and the things have become clear after a lot of research that I can go in and start my company. However, manufacturing the material in smaller quantities is not being entertained by my manufacturers and the ones with low MOQs don't have the desired quality.
Therefore I was thinking of bringing a couple of samples and test the market before i go full fledged. So is it advisable to have a pre-sale marketing and spreading the word about my product and then evaluate the demand and manufacture accordingly?
Check out this thread i started a few days ago which covers my experience with a presale campaign: EXECUTION - Journey through Presale hell
In short, we have done about 1.7M in pre-orders and counting. It’s a great way to test the market and generate capital, but there are negatives that you should be aware of. If you’re going to do it, make sure that you can actually meet the committments that you advertise to your customer (ship dates, product quality, customer service, etc).
Also, i would recommend that you really drive home to your manufacturers why you believe your company will succeed. We sent out RFQ’s to a large number of manufacturing companies and many of the quotes we got back were 3-5x more than our targets (and what we ended up paying). The reason is because we were new, and had no money or sales. It’s human nature to avoid taking a risk on an unknown. It wasn’t until we started aggressively persuading these suppliers to buy into our vision and take a risk on us, that we got pricing that was favorable.
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