POWER LEADER: How Prelaunch's Narek Vardanyan Helps Companies Validate Market Entry

Welcome back to the Power Leaders series -- interviews with tech leaders who are leading change, innovation and disrupting their respective industries.

The past few days have been, to put it lightly, a tumultuous time for the startup world with the collapse of SVB and all of the fallout related to that. Over the weekend I reflected heavily on the culture of “startup” and the risk that is inherent in everything founders do. What was once the “thought” of risk in a time where it seemed everyone was closing $100M+ Series A rounds, is now front and center and forcing everyone in the industry to be mindful of every successful moment.

It is important to me to continue to recognize leaders who persevere through tough times, remain focused on their goals and, for some, achieve levels of success despite all of the risk all around.

Up next isproduct concept and validation platform Prelaunch.com co-founder and CEO Narek Vardanyan.

Let’s jump in.

SE: Thanks so much for sharing with the community, Narek. What innovations are you bringing to your industry? What sets you apart from your competitors?

NV: Prelaunch.com is a product validation platform. Unlike surveys and focus groups, which are based on peoples’ opinions, Prelaunch is based on actual purchase intent. Potential customers are screened by placing $10-20 to reserve a discount if product launches into the market. But more importantly, it confirms their actual buying intent. As the model is based on real buying behavior, there has never been a better indicator for launch success. This changes everything.

SE: What is a recent win or announcement your company just celebrated? Why does it matter? (e.g. funding, new product, new hire, new feature, etc...)

NV: Funding: We raised $1.5m seed funding from Big Story VC, Formula VC, Grantaus Ventures and notable angles like Vahe Kuzoyan, co-founder of Service Titan (10B+ company). Notable Campaigns: ex-Harley Davidson design legend Erik Buell decided to prelaunch his much anticipated electric motorcycle — Fuell Fllow — exclusively on Prelaunch.com. Other notable campaigns were Dragonfly Hyperscooter and Kara Pure Air-to-Water Dispenser. Both launched and generated more than $1M in sales. Kara Water was recognized as Times Best Inventions of 2022.  CES 2023: As a creative concept for CES 2023 we developed a fun concept of the Gallery of Flops, and featured some of the biggest product failures in consumer electronics of the last 25 years from Apple, Amazon, Nike etc. It got covered over 200 times from top media such as Daily Mail, Fast Company, Wired, and many more.

SE: What pain point(s) does your company solve?

NV: Hardware companies are spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on various research and focus group companies. It’s taking a lot of time and the results are not trustworthy as it’s based on peoples’ opinions, which can be biased.

Prelaunch takes away the bias by relying on customers actual buying behavior. It’s also 10x cheaper and faster.

SE: What are your company’s industry major challenges right now?

NV: Product development is a long process. The "lean methodology" is considered a religion in software, but hardware companies still work in isolation without incorporating actionable customers' feedback into the production process. As a result, large amounts of money are invested in products that fail. One third of the entire stock in the fashion and hardware industries is unused stock, which is returned and is not recyclable.

SE: What stories aren’t currently being told about your industry that your audience should know?

NV: In order to understand the market demand, companies and founders create surveys and promote them in social media. It’s not only can result in wrong answers from wrong people, but is also very dangerous. It can rlead to the false-positive perception whereas there’s not a strong demand in the market, but the signals are positive. As well as false-negative, whereas the product actually has a not bad potential but the audience is wrong and doesn’t engage with it. When somebody pays actual money, it’s when their opinion starts to matter.

SE: How do you envision your business changing in the next 3-5 years?

NV: In 3-5 years these practices should become a standard for any new innovative product development. Companies across various verticals of ecommerce will prelaunch their early stage concepts, assess the data, meet their customers and confidently co-create meaningful innovations together.

SE: What changes do you think are necessary for your industry to stay competitive in current economic times?

NV: Don’t work in isolation, don’t assume that the market remains the same and will consume the exact products that were popular last year. But rather, actively engage with your potential customers at a very early stage, get feedback and assess te data. It will help you to not waste precious resources on products that don’t have a demand.

SE: What measures has your organization taken to ensure you're driving towards the most important goals?

NV: We are implementing what we advocate others to implement. We have a closed group composed from our creators who constantly participate in product creation and actively engage with the testing of new features and in defining the priorities. It helps us not spend resources on developing features that are not the most important ones.

SE: Anything else we should know?

NV: Prelaunch for Consumers: From a Consumer perspective, Prelaunch provides with an access to the coming soon products of their favorite brands. They can put down $10-20 and reserve a very significant discount if those products are released in the markets. The best part is that there’s no risk and if they change their minds or Creator decides to stop the production, Consumers get a full refund. We don’t give these reservations to Creators (unlike crowdfunding platforms) but keep them on our escrow accounts until they start the shipping.