Put up landing page and start marketing BEFORE or AFTER finding suppliers?

[ALSL]

The title says it all.

We are still in the process of securing reliable suppliers for our store. We plan to have a full launch by February 1st at the latest.

My question is, should we wait til we can secure appropriate suppliers before marketing our landing page and spreading our name, or should we wait until we have all our suppliers secured?

Thanks,

Alfred

 

Dislike ads? Remove them and support the forum: Subscribe to Fastlane Insiders.

[AndrewNC]

Unless it takes time away from doing more important things - I think it is best to start marketing your business as soon as possible.

 

[Vigilante]

Web presence can't hurt you, even if it is a classy "coming soon" site.

 

[Vic]

Have you tested conversion rates yet? If not, put up a soft lander (fake lander) and test. This will help you tweak and optimize once you start.

 

Dislike ads? Remove them and support the forum: Subscribe to Fastlane Insiders.

[ALSL]

Thank you guys for replying to the thread!

We haven't done the soft landing yet. We were thinking of putting up a pre-order landing page that starts to sell pre-orders of our subscription.

Can we please get some validation of whether or not this idea is wise:

Put up pre-order landing page.
All info will explain to potential customers the benefits of pre-ordering.
Find suppliers in the meantime.
Only go through with the business if we get the amount of required pre-orders to cover all the costs of the initial investment.

The question here is, if we do not reach the required pre-order amount, would it be UNWISE to scrap it all? Should we just stick to our guns and try to market as much as possible to get the customer base that we need, even if that means not being able to cover all our initial investment?

Also, how would we go about doing the pre-order? Is there a way to have the pre-orderers put in their credit card information but just not charge them until we actually go through with the business? I would rather not charge them all and then refund them if we do not go through with the business.

Any advice from those experienced with this type of thing would be VERY much appreciated!

 

[Vigilante]

Almost nobody ever preorders anything. It's not a valid measure of success. Other than an iPhone, I have never preordered anything in my life. People generally don't respond to that type of marketing.

And... you better believe in the direction you are heading in WAY MORE than being willing to scrap it in the early phases. You are going to have some rough early waters to navigate, and if you use a metric like preorders to determine viability, I question whether your idea or your resolve is enough to be successful.

It's gut check time for you.

 

[Vic]

Thank you guys for replying to the thread!

We haven't done the soft landing yet. We were thinking of putting up a pre-order landing page that starts to sell pre-orders of our subscription.

Can we please get some validation of whether or not this idea is wise:

Put up pre-order landing page.
All info will explain to potential customers the benefits of pre-ordering.
Find suppliers in the meantime.
Only go through with the business if we get the amount of required pre-orders to cover all the costs of the initial investment.

The question here is, if we do not reach the required pre-order amount, would it be UNWISE to scrap it all? Should we just stick to our guns and try to market as much as possible to get the customer base that we need, even if that means not being able to cover all our initial investment?

Also, how would we go about doing the pre-order? Is there a way to have the pre-orderers put in their credit card information but just not charge them until we actually go through with the business? I would rather not charge them all and then refund them if we do not go through with the business.

Any advice from those experienced with this type of thing would be VERY much appreciated!

Also, how would we go about doing the pre-order? Is there a way to have the pre-orderers put in their credit card information but just not charge them until we actually go through with the business? I would rather not charge them all and then refund them if we do not go through with the business.

Any advice from those experienced with this type of thing would be VERY much appreciated!

Setup the landing page as if it were complete and ready to go. Setup a buy now button, next, put a form that takes their info...from here you have two choices, you can disregard the info and consider that someone who has put in their info "is a conversion" or you can keep that info for future remarketing. Th final page you can say...we are all out of stock right now, but thanks for your order...blah,blah,blah.

 

Dislike ads? Remove them and support the forum: Subscribe to Fastlane Insiders.

[MNentre]

Landing pages could take less than 10 minutes to put up (even with no programming knowledge) and cant hurt, so I dont see why you wouldn't atleast put up something!

I had a domain that I was thinking about doing something with but didn't have any time to commit to it yet, but I put up a simple landing page. A few months later I got an email from someone who wanted to buy it and I sold it for $600, less than 3 months after I paid $10 for it. If nothing else, it gives someone an outlet for someone to contact you.

 

[ALSL]

Almost nobody ever preorders anything. It's not a valid measure of success. Other than an iPhone, I have never preordered anything in my life. People generally don't respond to that type of marketing.

And... you better believe in the direction you are heading in WAY MORE than being willing to scrap it in the early phases. You are going to have some rough early waters to navigate, and if you use a metric like preorders to determine viability, I question whether your idea or your resolve is enough to be successful.

It's gut check time for you.

Thanks for that.

It's not really about a gut check. I just wanted some validation from some more experienced people of whether or not we would be right in continuing with this venture and trying to acquire customer AFTER we've invested in something or if we should acquire customers BEFORE doing this thing.

For example, I don't know if you've heard of Dane Maxwell, but if you haven't, look him up. He mainly does software as a service type business for B2B but he is of the school of thought to not build anything until you've actually acquired paying customers. He has been extremely successful doing so with his businesses, never investing in building ANYTHING until he's secured enough pre-qualified PAYING customers that would justify the business venture. Anything that does not yield the appropriate amount of minimum paying customers, he doesn't follow through with.

The conventional method of business building: build product, find customers.
The maxwell version is: find customers, build product.

So my question to you, Vigilante, is this: Have you always built your businesses the conventional way? If not, how did you do it?