Sell before you record — what four top creators actually do
A breakdown of how Daniel Priestley, Nathan Barry, Stu McLaren, and Justin Welsh order selling and building — all from primary sources published in the last twelve months.
Most online courses get built in the same order. Pick the topic. Record the content. Build the funnel. Then go find buyers. The pattern is so common it's almost invisible. It's also the pattern that produces most of the launches that end with a closed cart and almost no sales.
The four people below — selling at very different price points, to very different audiences — flip that order. They sell before they record. They validate demand before producing the content. The specific tactics differ. The sequence is identical.
Each source is a primary source — the expert's own newsletter, podcast appearance, or company report — published in the last twelve months. Every quote is verbatim, linked to the original.
Five lines
- Daniel Priestley ran two waitlist tests before building. One idea got 750 signups, the other 4,500. He built the second. The launch hit $300,000 in three days.
- Nathan Barry, founder of Kit, says the most common pattern in failed creator products is hours spent building something nobody bought. His validation hierarchy: a form reply is worth one, a Zoom call ten, an in-person conversation fifty.
- Stu McLaren says creators are now launching memberships with audiences of "just a few hundred people" using a founding-member structure — selling access before the product fully exists.
- Justin Welsh, after $10M in cumulative course revenue, summarizes it as "build the audience first, monetize second" and "test quickly and cheaply."
- The pattern across all four: the recording is the last step, not the first. The product follows the demand, not the other way around.
Daniel Priestley — the waitlist is the decision, not the launch tactic
Of the four sources here, Priestley gives the most concrete example of pre-selling in action — using his own most recent launch.
The story he tells on Diary of a CEO is about a moment most creators skip entirely. He had two product ideas. He could have picked the one he was more excited about and started building. Instead, he ran both ideas through a waitlist test before producing anything.
What I did is I set up a waiting list campaign and I basically invited people to join the waiting list for idea number one and about 750 people joined that waiting list. And then the second idea, I invited people to join that waiting list and 4,500 people joined that waiting list. So even though this wasn't my favorite idea, it was way more exciting for people. — Daniel Priestley, March 2026
He built the second one. The product, Vidonary, then went through a structured pre-launch. The numbers, from the ScoreApp case study:
Before the launch itself, the waitlist did one more job. Two weeks ahead of opening the cart, Priestley raised the full angel investor round at a multimillion-dollar valuation — using the waitlist size as the demand signal for investors.
It's that little dance with the market. We've got strong ideas, but then we validate those ideas with the data. — Daniel Priestley, ScoreApp case study, April 2026
The key point in his own framing: he didn't pick what he liked. He picked what the market told him it wanted. The validation came before any of the building. The waitlist wasn't a launch tactic — it was the decision-making mechanism for which idea got produced at all.
Nathan Barry — the expensive signals are the truthful ones
Barry sees the same pattern from the platform side. Kit processes the email lists and product launches of hundreds of thousands of creators. The single most common reason creator products fail, in his framing, is this:
They spend hours and hours creating this product, and then they go to sell it and they have no one to sell it to. — Nathan Barry, September 2025
What he proposes in the same Q&A isn't a particular launch framework. It's a hierarchy of validation signals, ranked by how much effort it takes the prospective buyer to give you one. The harder it is to give the signal, the more it tells you.
The logic is simple. Anyone clicks a form. Almost nobody shows up to a Zoom call to talk about a product that doesn't exist. Even fewer travel to meet in person. The expensive signals are the truthful ones — the ones that confirm someone actually has the problem and is actively looking for the solution.
Barry puts a related point bluntly in the same Q&A. If you're convincing prospects that they need the product, or that the problem exists, you're already in the wrong market. The signal you want is people who already feel the problem, asking for the solution before it's built.
You shouldn't be convincing them that they need your product. — Nathan Barry, September 2025
The implication for the order of selling and building is direct. The conversations come before the recording. You don't validate a course by asking people if they would buy it. You validate by seeing what they will do — show up to a call, pay a deposit, join a waitlist — before the product exists.
Stu McLaren — selling access before the product exists
McLaren's contribution here is the founding-member structure. It is a specific way to pre-sell that does not require a large audience.
There is evidence of people who are launching, not with audiences of tens of thousands, not even with thousands, but with just a few hundred people. This is what the founding-member strategy is all about. — Stu McLaren, May 2025
The mechanic is straightforward. Open access to a product that does not fully exist yet, at founding-member pricing, to people who are willing to pay before there is a finished thing to consume. The early members get the price discount and shape what gets built. The creator gets capital and live feedback at the same time.
The economic argument McLaren makes about why this matters now: recurring-revenue businesses are valued at "8X more" than one-time-sale businesses. The founding-member structure is not just a launch tactic — it is the entry point into a recurring model. The product being sold is not a course. It is membership in a thing that will keep developing.
McLaren's claim that this works with "just a few hundred people" cuts against one of the most common reasons creators delay launching. Most are waiting for the audience to be bigger. His framing reverses it: audience size matters less than structure. Pre-selling a founding-member offer to 200 people who actually care produces revenue. Selling a finished course to 20,000 people who don't care does not.
Justin Welsh — the audience is the research mechanism
Welsh is the most stripped-down of the four. He hit $10M in cumulative course revenue and then wrote down what mattered most along the way. The piece reads as a checklist. Four of his lines are direct statements about the order of selling and building.
Build the audience first, monetize second. The sponsorship money follows the attention. — Justin Welsh, June 2025
Don't overthink your first product. Test quickly and cheaply. — Justin Welsh, June 2025
Big launches require big preparation. The work happens before the launch, not during. — Justin Welsh, June 2025
Your existing audience will tell you what they want to learn next. Pay attention! — Justin Welsh, June 2025
Read together, these are statements about sequence. The audience comes before the product. The first version of the product is a test, not the finished thing. The pricing starts low and rises as the product proves itself. The launch is the result of months of preparation, not the moment things start happening.
The deeper point is in the last line. Welsh's product roadmap is built by the audience itself. He does not sit down to design a course in isolation. He pays attention to what the existing audience is asking for, builds a minimal version of it, prices it low, and adjusts. The audience-first sequence is not just about distribution. It is the research mechanism. Without the audience, there is no signal about what to build.
Four different methods, one shared order
The four sources come at this from completely different angles. The sequence is the same in all four cases.
Priestley is an entrepreneur running pre-launches at multimillion-dollar valuations. Barry is a platform CEO looking at patterns across hundreds of thousands of creators. McLaren is inside membership launches built around smaller audiences. Welsh is a single-person business at exceptionally high margins.
None of them is talking about marketing tactics or "running a better launch." They are talking about reversing the order in which creators do the work.
The shared pattern is that the product follows the demand, not the other way around. In every case, money or a hard signal of commitment changes hands before the content is fully produced. The recording is the last step, not the first.
Direct links to each source
Each link below goes to the original primary source. All four are still actively publishing.
- Daniel Priestley — Diary of a CEO interview (Mar 16, 2026) and the ScoreApp case study (Apr 21, 2026) with the full waitlist mechanics.
- Nathan Barry — Nathan Barry's Q&A (Sep 4, 2025) with the validation hierarchy.
- Stu McLaren — Stu McLaren on The Amy Porterfield Show (May 15, 2025) on founding-member launches with small audiences.
- Justin Welsh — "My complete $10M journey (all 23 steps)" (Jun 7, 2025) — full 23-step retrospective.
Prepared by the Kinescope team
Kinescope is a video hosting platform built for course creators, online schools, and businesses running educational content. The team focuses on three things:
- Host your course videos. Fast adaptive streaming worldwide, on a global CDN tuned for long-form educational content.
- Protect them from piracy. DRM, dynamic watermarking, and download prevention — so your content doesn't end up on pirate sites the day after launch.
- Integrate into any platform. Embed your videos into Teachable, Thinkific, Kajabi, Moodle, Open edX, or your own custom site — through a single embed code or API. No migration required.
If you're pre-selling a cohort or a founding-member offer and need somewhere reliable to host the videos when the product is finally produced, Kinescope is the layer underneath that handles the video so you can focus on the human work.