Presell it, then build it: how to price something still unfinished

There is a thing on your hard drive that is about 40 per cent finished. You know it is good. You also know that the remaining 60 per cent will take three weekends you do not currently have, and that it has been at 40 per cent since March. Meanwhile you have no idea whether anyone would pay for it, and you will not find out until you finish it, which is the exact reason you cannot make yourself finish it.

The reason unfinished work stays unfinished

Work expands to fill the absence of a deadline. With no buyer waiting, the standard for "ready" keeps rising, because there is no cost to raising it. Every week you find one more thing that should be in there before you could possibly charge money for it.

The second reason is fear of the answer. While the thing is unfinished it might be brilliant. Once it is on sale it is either bought or not bought, and not bought is information nobody enjoys receiving. Perfectionism is often just deferral of that moment.

Preselling reverses both. There is now a person who has paid and is waiting, which sets the deadline, and there is a number on your dashboard that answers the question you have been avoiding. What makes this bearable rather than terrifying is that the delivery mechanism forgives revision: you are not sending files by hand and hoping the right person gets the right version, you are updating one product that every buyer reads from.

An early version is only a broken promise if the buyer was told it was finished.

Finishing first versus shipping in versions

The default path is to build the whole thing, launch once, and hope. The alternative is not lower quality — the finished product is the same. What changes is when the money arrives and how much you know while you work.

The presell sequence

Seven steps, all of them in the dashboard except the writing.

1. 1Decide what version 0.5 contains. It must be genuinely useful on its own — one complete section, not six half-sections.
2. 2Write the product description in two parts: what is in it today, and what will be added, with a month named for the final version.
3. 3Set the early price at roughly half of what you intend to charge when it is complete, and say on the page that the price will rise as it does.
4. 4Publish it as a digital download. Delivery is instant to a private order page the buyer can return to, which is where every future version will also appear.
5. 5Add an order-form question asking early buyers what they most want covered. Their answers become your contents page.
6. 6Ship the next version by replacing the file. Everyone who has already bought sees the update on their order page without you contacting anyone.
7. 7Raise the price on the announced schedule. This is what makes the early price fair — the people who took the risk paid less, and everyone was told.

A worked example, version by version

Take a guide you expect to sell at £39 when it is done. You publish version 0.5 — two of six sections, both complete — at £19, with the finished version promised for a named month. Say fourteen people buy in the first fortnight. That is £266, three weekends of motivation, and fourteen people who have told you in the order form what section three should be about.

At version 0.8 you replace the file, and all fourteen get the new one automatically. You raise the price to £29 as announced. At version 1.0 you replace it again, move to £39, and the fourteen early buyers own the complete guide for less than half the current price — which is exactly what you promised them, and precisely why they will buy the next thing early too. Track views, buyers and revenue per version period in your analytics to see whether each price rise slowed sales or made no difference. The numbers here are made up; the sequence is the part to copy.

The mistake most people make

The mistake is preselling nothing. "Buy now, delivered in October" with no version 0.5 attached asks a buyer to pay for a description, and it puts every ounce of the risk on them. It also removes your best source of direction, because a buyer who has read two real sections gives you useful feedback while a buyer holding a receipt gives you anxious emails. Always ship something on the day of purchase, even if it is small. The second mistake is a quieter one: forgetting to actually raise the price. If the early price never rises, the early buyers were not rewarded for anything, and the next time you presell, nobody will bother being early. If you have an audience elsewhere and want to bring them with you, moving your existing catalogue over is worth doing before the presell, not during it.

The thing on your hard drive is not waiting for more work. It is waiting for a reason to be finished, and a paying buyer is the most reliable reason there is. Cut it into versions, name the dates, charge less at the start, and let the file replacement handle the rest. You can read the rest of the guides here while the first version uploads.