The Gallery of Flops, a new exhibit at CES 2023 in Las Vegas this week, collects massive, unexpected flops from brands like Apple, Harley Davidson, BIC, Sony, Nike, and Nintendo.
Those disastrous failures cost their brands millions of dollars, yet all of them were 100% avoidable, had their creators run proper market/price validation before launching. Each exhibit is accompanied by a lesson from Prelaunch.com on what the brand should have done differently, and what others can do when they find themselves in a similar situation.
The company says CES 2023 was the ideal location to debut this gallery, as it has become synonymous with huge product launches and offers a good representation of the larger global consumer electronics ecosystem. Every year, thousands of start-ups are launched in that ecosystem and almost 90% of them fail in the long run. This means that only 1 in 10 businesses in the startup category ultimately survive.
The Gallery of Flops was a fun byproduct of analyzing the reason why some product launches are successful and why others fail. It’s just one result of building the world’s first product validation platform based on real customers’ buying intent.
While developing their product validation platform, the team at Prelaunch.com spent the past 4 years helping product creators validate their concepts. They gathered significant current and historic data that provides creators with insights and predicts their future successes or failures. And one thing was clear: ideas need to be validated before resources are wasted developing them and trying to force them into a market that isn’t interested. When you consider that these brands that are “too big to fail” can launch flops, smaller brands are similarly likely to suffer from a high probability of failure.
“Based on my decades-long experience with thousands of startups, I’ve noticed one clear pattern that accompanies the majority of those that failed — no data-driven decisions during the prelaunch stage,” says CEO Narek Vardanyan. “Our team at Prelauch.com decided to address this issue by developing an all-in-one platform to help founders identify the real potential of their product before making investments.”
Prelaunch.com allows creators to predict whether customers would buy their product, claiming over 80% accuracy. It evaluates market demand and defines the pricing strategy by analysing conversion metrics and comparing them with a growing dataset of industry averages. It uses this data to show products’ real potential, credibly predicting any product’s launch success and helping creators to avoid wasting time and resources on unexpected failures.
Prelaunch.com provided the following list of core benefits for product creators:
- Market Interest Validation — Whether the product is an early-stage concept or a late-stage production-ready prototype, creators can easily measure market interest. They can then run variations with different feature sets, colors, add-ons, and more, to see how interest changes
- Price Testing & Validation — Pricing is one of the hardest steps in a product launch, with many creators leaving money on the table. Prelaunch.com has counterintuitively helped creators launch at higher prices and bring in more profits
- Seamless Landing Page Builder — At the heart of Prelaunch.com is a glass door validation strategy brought to life through landing pages. Creators just choose from over 50 popular design blocks and can easily and instantly build a responsive mobile-first page
- Prelaunch AI Copywriter — Prelaunch.com has built a proprietary GPT-3-based Generative AI copywriting tool that helps creators write their entire landing page in under 5 minutes
- In-Depth Analytics—To help creators understand their customers, Prelaunch.com is built on top of a suite of powerful analytics that provides real-time insights into their customers
- Customer Insights — Creators receive early feedback from real customers, and can engage with them to help develop better products together