Grow With Soul: Ep. 88 What Worked In A Small Launch That Went Well
Today I want to talk about launching, whether it’s a new service, digital product, or physical product. I know there are many podcast episodes and resources out there about launching with all the tips and tricks about how to have a massively successful launch. But I know that they can feel a little out of reach or out of touch. I’ve listened to podcasts where someone talks through the step by step of their launch by laying out what each member of their team did or bringing in multiple six figures from one launch, which was miles away from my own goals just not to feel applicable. Today, I wanted to share my lessons of what worked from a small launch that went well.
Here's what I talk about in this episode:
All course sales have followed the same pattern: a few small sales in the beginning and middle and a very large influx right at the end
The Trail sold out and relatively easily so – the structure of the program was very different from anything else I had done before creating different buying behavior in addition to launch methods
What I didn’t do during the launch
What I did do
What worked
Links I mention:
The Customer Kit
Episode 86
Check out more through my Medium post!
Read the full episode transcript:
Hello and welcome to episode 86 of Grow With Soul. Today I want to talk about launching; whether it’s a new service, digital product or physical product. I know there are a lot of podcast episodes and resources out there about launching with all the tips and tricks about how to have a massively successful launch. But, I know that they can feel a little out of reach, or out of touch. I’ve listened to podcasts where someone talks through the step by step of their launch by laying out what each member of their team did, or who were bringing in multiple six figures from one launch, which was so far from my own goals that it just didn’t feel applicable. So today, I wanted to share my lessons from a small launch of mine that went well.
HISTORICALLY, MY LAUNCHES HAVE FOLLOWED THE SAME PATTERN.
There would be a small to medium flurry at the beginning of the launch, perhaps one or two sales in the middle, and then a huge influx at the end. Most of my launches to date were about four weeks long, and I’d say generally I’d get 10-20% of sales at the start, 1% in the middle weeks, and 80-90% in the final weeks and days. The most extreme version was an online workshop I ran last year – two days before, I had 6 people signed up, and by the time of the workshop there were 60. Although less dramatic, all of my course sales so far have followed the same pattern too, and I have traditionally ramped up activity towards the end of a launch window because I know that’s when the sales typically come in.
There are a few reasons for this. Most of us want time to think about something, perhaps compare it to another product we’re considering, wrestle with whether we think we deserve it. Some of us also tend to leave things to the last minute; it’s easy to see something that you’re interested in and think “that sounds good” and then something distracts you and you get on with your life and then realise “oh crap the deadline for that thing is coming up”. Also, it just takes time to know whether something is right for you – particularly with a considered purchase you may need to read all the launch content in order to know whether this is the right option for you.
So it was reasonable for me to expect my launch of The Trail to go the same way. Only, it didn’t. A third of the sales came in the first week, with the rest evenly coming through every couple of days until I sold out the available places a week before the doors were due to close. I want to clarify here, because I know it can be depressing to hear these stories, that this has NEVER happened to me before. I have never sold out a programme ever, nor have I ever sold anything with time to spare. I’m saying this because these results are notable because they’re rare.
So, in the end The Trail sold out and that launch was worth around £12k, albeit spread out over several months in payment plans. More than these results, is that the launch felt super easy. I didn’t feel like I was pushing a rock up a hill, I didn’t feel I had to do things that made me uncomfortable, I didn’t bombard people, I didn’t lie awake at night panicking. When I say “went well” I don’t just mean in terms of finances, I also mean in terms of how I experienced it and what my life was like during the process.
I am going to come onto what I did differently in a moment, but one thing that is different between The Trail and a regular course is the structure. The Trail is more of an ongoing immersive experience, a journey to a more centred you, with a community, accountability, and small bitesize tasks a month – plus access to other Kits and courses, so it offers value for money on that front. Whereas the individual courses are a more focused and intensive learning environment that you have to feel geared up to really make the most of.
I say this because we’re not comparing apples with apples here – there are differences in the product that may have produced different buying behaviour, although I do feel that the launch methods also played a big role too.
I’M GOING TO START OUT BY TALKING ABOUT WHAT I DIDN’T DO, THE THINGS THAT YOU OFTEN SEE RECOMMENDED AS LAUNCH TIPS OR THAT FEEL LIKE THE OBVIOUS THINGS TO DO IN A LAUNCH.
First of all, I was completely disinterested in churn (I spoke more about this in a blog post about reach which I’ll link in the show notes). A lot of large launches rely on churn to work – i.e., getting a huge influx of people onto a mailing list and then bombarding them with emails, even if only a small percentage are opening them. You’ve probably been in a launch like this; maybe signed up for a freebie and then got a million emails about the course they were selling. If you unsubscribed or stopped opening the emails, you were part of the churn. The course provider would have got enough people onto the list in the first place that even if only 1% of people kept opening the emails they would still get a six figure launch.
I don’t want to sound judgemental here because it’s obviously something that works, and the customers who buy are obviously happy. However, it’s not something I’m interested in doing because, frankly, I can’t be bothered. I don’t want to have to care about the things you have to care about (namely, opt in rates and open rates) in order to do churn well, and I’m also not interested in driving people who neither know or care what I do onto a list. I’d rather have a small number of people who get it and just talk to them. So that’s what I do.
Along these lines, I also didn’t create a new freebie linked to this launch. I actually released my Slow Marketing Workbook freebie (link in show notes to get it!) a month or so before, but this was more a coincidence than anything tactical. The Slow Marketing Workbook isn’t linked to The Trail in the same way a resource on planning your ecourse is linked to a course about launching your ecourse. I didn’t create a freebie for The Trail because I knew that the people who would buy would already be on my email list. It isn’t an introductory course but a way to go deeper into my work and get input and advice from me – a stranger who signed up for a freebie isn’t necessarily going to care about that in the same way someone who’s been following me for years does.
Another thing I didn’t do was adverts, again because I didn’t want to reach people who had no idea about me or my work. I have never, to date, run any ads, but I’m not averse to doing it in future. My background professionally was always in organic (ie, unpaid) marketing, and so I was always a bit judgey about adverts, and refused to spend money as a point of honour. However I think that now online advertising has matured and it can be really valuable. I know that I have found products and online events through social ads that I would never have known about without being served the ad – I don’t think they have to be as disruptive as they have been. So, while advertising might not ever be something I use for The Trail, it may be something I look at for the Kits and other courses in the future. My course platform Podia also has an affiliate option, so I’m going to experiment with giving previous students an affiliate link so they get a small cut if they recommend a friend – because if they are going to talk about it, it feels good to give them a little thank you.
Finally, I also wasn’t hugely visible on social media during the launch. This is what was most surprising to me, especially because it wasn’t part of the plan. My intention had been to be posting lots and remaining visible on Instagram during the launch period through July, but that didn’t happen. It’s difficult to pinpoint exactly why. There is, for sure, a pattern for me of withdrawing during launches, perhaps due to worrying about looking salesy, perhaps the pressure of taking up space, but I do tend to recoil from visibility during launches which, isn’t ideal. I also think that as The Trail sold very strongly early in the launch, I didn’t feel the same need to be visible because things were happening without it. Whatever the reasons, in the end, I posted to my grid once during the launch period, and to my Stories maybe a couple times a week, and only a few times total about The Trail itself.
This was interesting to me, as I’ve always believed that Instagram is my most important channel, that it’s where people find me – and I haven’t really challenged that to myself. While a few years ago that was the case, this podcast is actually more where people find me now, and most people who are really invested in what I do are signed up to get the behind the scenes and extra insights on my email list. So, while I don’t discount the importance of social and visibility in a launch, I now no longer think that it’s quite the number one factor that I used to think it was.
OK, SO WHAT DID YOU ACTUALLY DO?! I HEAR YOU CRY!
First of all, the thing I think did the most in terms of moving sales to the start rather than the end of the launch, was having a long pre-launch period. The Trail went on sale at the beginning of July, and throughout June I was publishing pre-launch content on the blog. These posts shared the ideas and motivation behind The Trail, shared the story of how I was putting it together and shared the why behind it – all without mentioning exactly what The Trail was. I talked about “something new” and “this new project” but never got into the detail of what it was going to be.
This all happened on the blog, and in my emails. Obviously I shared the blog posts themselves on Stories, but I didn’t get into any details there – all the meat of the content lived in the blog posts and the emails, in which I shared the posts as well as some extra insights about what I was doing and why with the pre-launch. I mention this because I know there’s a whole bunch of rhetoric out there about how blogging is dead and it doesn’t work – well I just sold out a launch that revolved around blog posts. Again, the appeal of The Trail is for people who are invested in my work, and therefore are likely to read my blog posts and emails, so whether this would work for a very general product I’m unsure. Really, I was picking the channel based on the person I wanted to speak to, rather than the one that had the biggest reach (case in point: I think I mentioned The Trail maybe once here on the podcast, even though it has my highest reach – I’ve found that when I mention things I have for sale here it doesn’t really translate into sales, perhaps because while you’re listening you’re busy doing something else, or you’re not quite ready in your journey with me. All of which is fine! But I know that this isn’t a place to really sell).
I think the pre-launch worked to build anticipation. For three weeks, people had been reading content that was building to a crescendo – there were layers building upon layers, and light reveals that was all working towards a big reveal. From a basic brain science point of view, we have the need to finish the story, to close the information gap and make something whole, but also, on a more conscious level, people were excited to see what this thing was going to be because they’d bought into the concept. In fact, after I sent the reveal email to my list, one very lovely person replied saying they’d never opened a newsletter so quickly and had been looking forward to seeing the launch.
The pre-launch is, I think, the reason why the sales were front-ended. Whereas in my previous launches the decision-making had to happen during the launch period, in this case it happened before the launch period. Through the pre-launch content people were able to identify that it was their problem that was going to be solved, their dreams that it would help them make reality, see their situations in the examples I shared, and see their beliefs and values mirrored back to them. This is the plane on which decisions are made, so when I released the details of the product that was virtually just the rubber stamp on an already-made decision. At the time of the launch they were 80-90% sure, rather than finding out about it for the first time.
I think this is also why not being so visible on social media wasn’t a big deal. Because I was visible in that pre-launch phase, I was sharing all the content and putting lots of effort into the emails. That’s where they were getting the value; when they were already 90% decided me posting on Instagram was never going to be the thing that would make the difference for them. I think I found it easier to be visible during the pre-launch because I wasn’t asking for anything yet, I was simply sharing content that I was really proud of and knew was valuable – so, this is something I’m going to see if I can replicate as a cheat code around visibility in future launches.
So, to sum up, what worked in my small launch that went well. I focused on the channels where the right people for the product were most likely to be (blog and email list), I created content that didn’t talk about the product but around it, holding up a mirror to the ideal customer to help them make the decision before they knew what it really was. I shared behind the scenes not only of the concept but of the nuts and bolts by posting snippets of the materials I was creating for The Trail. It was not about driving volume in order to get sales by the law of averages but instead about focusing on who this product was for and giving them what they needed, where they needed it, to empower them to make the decision.
