$400 MRR in a week by using the power of the prelaunch

So I recently started working on a service that is able to find and validate 200+ founder leads every week from recently funded startups. The report includes verified emails, LinkedIn profiles, company information, and funding data which makes it a very valuable tool to a variety of businesses and consultants for sending personalized email and LinkedIn outreach.

Normally for a project like this I would just blast the link all over the internet(ProductHunt, Hackernews, Facebook, IH, etc) and hope for the best but this time I was set on getting at least a few customers first. Having customers before launch lets you add good reviews, case studies, and other forms of "social proof" to your landing page which can greatly increase conversions when you get that big bump in traffic from the actual launch which I wanted to get the maximum advantage from.

So instead of doing a big open launch my website link became a closely guarded secret. I made posts on Facebook and LinkedIn in groups that I know would be interested but instead of posting the link I required them to message me with the details of what they would be pitching to the list as well as their experience with email outreach. The idea was that our perfect customer would be someone with a great offer for the list(something that matches perfectly with the needs of a growing startup) as well as the email outreach experience to get amazing results. We could then use those results as a case study for the list's effectiveness. But now after getting 5 customers in a single week I've found that this method can be seen as a sales technique in its own right and I'd like to share with you some things I noticed.

Firstly, by requiring the potential customers to qualify themselves before being able to sign up it flips the sales experience on its head. The customer becomes the one trying to sell YOU on whether or not they can buy your product and this creates a sense of genuine scarcity in their mind that wouldn't otherwise be there if you had just posted the link to everyone at once.

Secondly, by getting the potential customer to message you before the link is sent they are now much more open to asking questions and engaging in a dialogue that can alleviate their doubts which raises their chances of buying significantly. From the experience of running multiple online businesses I can tell you that 95% of people don't read much of what is on a website. I get asked every "frequently asked question" from my website's FAQ section on a regular basis so being in chat conversation already while the potential customer skims through the site lets you catch their doubts and answer their questions quickly. Meanwhile if they had followed the link on their own they most likely would have just bounced with the question in their mind and never returned.

So obviously $400 MRR is nothing to brag about on here but I just wanted to share this technique as I kind of stumbled into it and have seen very interesting results with it. I definitely think its worth a shot if you have a compelling hook for your product that can get people interested enough to reach out to you for access.

TLDR: Exclusive, invite-only prelaunch can flip the script on the normal sales dynamic and be a super effective sales tool that gets you your first qualified customers

If any of you have similar tricks for prelaunch or launch I'd love to hear them as I'm planning on a full launch of this business fully in another week or two!