Prelaunch.com Raises $1.5M Seed Round to Revolutionize Outdated Product Validation Systems

Product validation platform Prelaunch.com is thrilled to announce that it has successfully closed a $1.5M Seed Round. The investment round was led by Big Story VC with participation from Formula VC, Granatus Ventures, BANA (Business Angel Network of Armenia), and Vahe Kuzoyan, co-founder of Service Titan.

For the visuals of Prelaunch.com, follow the link.

According to Common Objective, 35% of all materials in the supply chain end up as waste. Excess inventory is the biggest culprit that fails to sell on the retail market due to ineffective demand forecasting systems and practices. 

Prelaunch.com is on a mission to change this. By enhancing product launches with an important phase called pre-launching,  the platform helps brands and innovators showcase their product concepts, test customers’ willingness to buy them, and get early supporters. The in-depth data provided by Prelaunch.com helps these product builders decide if they should launch their products as is, how they can be improved, or if they should abandon the idea entirely.

“I was running a successful marketing agency. Despite our many achievements, we kept spending months working on products that held great promise, only to end up as failures,” says Narek Vardanyan, founder and CEO of Prelaunch.com. “So, I started to research ways companies understand market interest. And I found that every current method was tied to discovering peoples’ opinions. The drawback here is that people don’t always do what they say. And this planted the seeds for a new concept — reservation funnels — which, unlike traditional alternatives like surveys or focus groups, is a system where customers place an actual monetary reservation providing tangible proof of their genuine purchase intent.” 

This new reservation funnel that Prelaunch.com is pioneering has potential customers place $10-20 to prove their real purchase intent and earn a discount. Using its proprietary analytics, Prelaunch.com then determines whether the product will succeed in the market and identifies its actual customers.

"When potential customers place a reservation — that’s when their opinions matter!" adds Vardanyan. "This reservation confirms their actual buying intent and shows whether they really desire to buy the product. And unlike focus groups which pay random sample populations to share potentially irrelevant opinions, the insights and opinions gathered through Prelaunch.com’s surveys, and discussions are highly-qualified and relevant as the buying intent has already been confirmed. It changes everything."

The market addressed by Prelaunch.com is huge, with 10 million active e-commerce brands worldwide, and retail e-commerce sales almost doubled in the past five years, reaching $4.9 trillion in 2021, according to Statista. By 2025, sales are projected to reach $7.3 trillion.

Only a year after its official launch, Prelaunch.com already counts 2,000 registered brands and access to nearly 1 million community members and potential buyers. Renowned industry names like e-bike and e-motorcycle producer Fuell, co-founded by former Harely-Davidson legendary engineer Erik Buell have already put their trust in Prelaunch.com and validated their upcoming product concepts to ensure ultimate success in the wider market.

And now, we are happy to announce the successful completion of our in-seed funding round. The funding will enable Prelaunch.com to expand its reach, making the solution accessible to wider audiences and helping brands all over the world to validate their product concepts and launch confidently. It will be used to advance the product’s current capabilities, improve the sales and marketing processes, and establish a strong presence in the US.

Contact
Name: Lusine Manukyan
Email: lusinem@prelaunch.com

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