Question 1

Does pre-selling work if I have no audience?

Accepted Answer

No. Every one of the five documented pre-sale cases in this table had an audience before the pre-sale opened. The smallest had roughly fifty buyers drawn from the email list of a product they had already shipped. The largest had 31,000 Twitter followers and 28,000 email subscribers accumulated over seven months of free publishing. Pre-selling is not a way to acquire an audience — it is a way to monetize one you already have. If your audience number is zero, the honest answer from this tool is that pre-sale is not applicable yet, and the prerequisite is building a list or buying distribution rights, not building the product.

Question 2

What conversion rate should I assume for a pre-sale?

Accepted Answer

Only one of the five cases published both audience size and order count, so only one conversion rate is actually computable: 4,773 orders from roughly 59,000 audience members, which is 8.09 percent. That case had seven months of free content, a free 70-page book, and a topic with pent-up demand, so 8.09 percent is a ceiling, not a median. This tool shows four scenarios — 0.5, 1, 2, and 8.09 percent — and tells you which verdict holds in each, because a plan that only works at the ceiling is not a plan.

Question 3

How much should I discount a pre-sale?

Accepted Answer

Three independent sources converge on the same band: 30 to 50 percent of full price, or equivalently 40 to 60 percent off. The largest documented case priced early access at 129 dollars against a planned 349 dollars full price, which is 36.9 percent of full. The default in this calculator is 40 percent of full price, which sits inside all three ranges.

Question 4

How many pre-orders count as validation?

Accepted Answer

Sources disagree at the low end and agree at the high end. One says two or three paying customers means the wedge is real. Two others say three sales tells you more than three hundred survey responses. One says ten paying customers means validated. This tool uses ten as the conservative pass line and three as the absolute floor, and shows both.

Question 5

Is the biggest pre-sale case a fair benchmark?

Accepted Answer

No, and this page says so explicitly. The 577,000 dollar case is a former staff engineer with a large following who had been publishing free material for seven months. Treating it as a typical outcome is how solo founders end up with plans that only work in the best decile. It is included here as the ceiling scenario with a sample size of one, not as the number to plan against.

Question 6

Does this tool send my numbers anywhere?

Accepted Answer

No. All arithmetic runs in your browser. No request is made to any server, no cookie is written, and nothing leaves the page.

Case	Pre-sale result	Audience before the pre-sale	Source
LinkDrip (companion to FeedHive)	$75,000 $40K in week 1	3,000 paying users of an existing product + 15,000 total users + ~250,000 cross-platform followers	Indie Hackers
CSS for JavaScript Developers (Josh Comeau)	$577,000 4,773 orders	~31,000 Twitter + ~28,000 email across 3 lists, after 7 months of free publishing and a free 70-page book	secondary writeup cites his own IH post
My AskAI	~$5,000 50+ buyers @ $99	Buyers of an already-shipped fine-tuning product, worked by email list	Indie Hackers
Subscribr (Gil Hildebrand)	$20,000 pre-sale later ~$83K MRR	Sold a specific pain (YouTube scripting), not a vague "AI writing tool"	secondary unverified
Nomad List (Pieter Levels)	$5 entry fee → ~$400K/yr	1,000 people already in a free Slack community before any price existed	secondary cites his own IH interview

Pre-Sell Gate

① Your numbers

② Four conversion scenarios

③ The five documented cases

④ What to do when the verdict is "no"