Grow With Soul: Episode 134 - Reflections From A Launch
Today I thought I’d share with you a bit of a review of the Mapping launch - what happened, how it went and my insights and feeling about it in general. I feel like launching is one of those things that can consume us if we let it. We can drown ourselves in all the launching advice there is out there and we can build these huge walls of expectation that we can’t ever scale. Launching so often can feel like a make or break moment in our businesses. So today I wanted to talk about my launch just to break down some of the power around it.
What I talk about in this episode:
The walls of expectation around my launch
The expectation VS reality nature of the Mapping launch
The downside of being a chronic daydreamer
Read the episode transcript:
Today I thought I’d share with you a bit of a review of the Mapping launch - what happened, how it went and my insights and feeling about it in general. I feel like launching is one of those things that can consume us if we let it. We can drown ourselves in all the launching advice there is out there and we can build these huge walls of expectation that we can’t ever scale. Launching, so often, can feel like a make or break moment in our businesses. So today I wanted to talk about my launch just to break down some of the power around it.
Talking of huge walls of expectation… I had extremely high hopes for this launch. For some time, I’ve been enamoured with the idea of making all of the income I need from one launch or product, playing with the idea of whether that would be a small number of people at a high price or large numbers of people at a lower price. I feel like I should know better than to put all my eggs in one basket, but something about this felt very simple and very freeing - one shot, make all the money I need to make, and then the rest of the year could be open for creativity and fun and whatever I felt like.
So for the Mapping launch I wanted to make 20k, at least. At 20k, I’d have to find around 7 or 8k more in the year to pay all my bills and be comfortable. 20k meant I’d need to sell 100 places at £200 - which felt stretchy but quite doable. I was confident in the idea and confident in the product, and thought it was more likely to happen than not.
The other thing that contributed to my confidence ahead of the launch was the Mapping waitlist. I had mentioned it a few times here on the podcast, on Instagram and in my newsletters, and it had quickly filled with more people than I needed to hit my financial goal. I knew that a waitlist sign up was not the same as a sale, but it was still encouraging that there was a lot of interest for it. And, of course, I hoped that everyone who signed up would, in fact, buy.
So I approached the launch with a sense of most of the work already being done. I recorded a launch day podcast, made a few graphics to share on Instagram and drafted some emails to send if I had to, but honestly I thought that I wouldn’t need to use these things. I thought that if only 50% of the waitlist signed up that would be a great start, and the rest of the sales would be mopped up from other places. I scheduled the “doors open” email, went off for a weekend away with my friends and expected to wake up in the morning with the majority of the money I needed for the year having been made.
I’m sure, from the tone here, that you can tell where this is going.
I did not wake up the next morning to 50 sales, I woke up to 9. It edged upwards over the weekend, but it did not break 15. I am trying to choose my words here to not sound like I’m an ungrateful spoilt brat, but maybe that is what I was that first weekend. I couldn’t be happy that people had taken a shot on a brand new offering, that they were digging into it and finding benefit; I could only feel gutted that my expectations had not been matched.
It took me a few days to regroup, to have my pity party, before looking at what I might do. I didn’t want to let go of my dream of 100 sales, so I extended the launch window to give myself a little bit of time to make a new plan and properly go for it. I had a word with myself about expecting to make all theses sales without doing any work, and started to think about what people needed to hear and know, whether they wanted to buy Mapping or not.
I made my first Reels with extracts from Mapping, I wrote some personal emails, I shared behind the scenes in Stories, I gave away the Time & Space section to my email list so they could have a taster of the content. Little by little people joined, but I quickly revised my goal of 100 sales as it was definitely not going to happen. I have found the pattern of sales to be extremely interesting. I would always guarantee that the majority of sales, in any launch, would come on the final day - that has always been my experience and the experience of friends and clients. However, in this launch the majority of sales came in the first week, and the final day came and went without a single sale.
What would I have done differently?
Well firstly, I didn’t do a proper pre-launch for Mapping. I had mentioned it here and there but there wasn’t a systematic build up of material to help people understand what was coming and how it would help them. The most successful launch I’ve ever done had a four week pre-launch of blog posts and emails that did exactly that, so there wasn’t enough groundwork laid going into the launch. This would have been especially useful because the last time I launched anything was November 2020, and that was a business membership - a wildly, wildly different product. I have changed a lot in the last year, as has my focus, and I think I fell into the trap of forgetting that because it was so present in my own mind that I had made it more clear publicly than I actually had. While I kept up with podcasts and newsletters during the tumult of 2021 I hadn’t kept up with much else, and it was a big ask to have people trust me with their money again.
As well as not having a proper pre-launch, I also didn’t have a proper launch plan. I was rusty, technology and content has moved on, and a few graphics in Stories isn’t exactly enough anymore. I hadn’t put enough effort into thinking about what people would need to understand, thinking it was “enough” that I could share snippets of my life and that would be all the inspiration anyone could need (cringe). I also, in the background, was in the middle of having my heart broken in a drawn out and laborious way, so while big picture my life is fulfilling, it was hard to talk exuberantly about joy during that period and I just ran out of steam. Ultimately, though, on all these counts, the waitlist made me cocky and greedy, and I was on the back foot before I even started.
Now that the launch is over I have a more realistic view of the launch. I wonder whatever possessed me to think that 100 sales was a realistic goal; it was something that I wanted, rather than something based in any sort of logic. I know that industry standard conversion from a waitlist is 1-3%, and I also know that my best ever launch generated 35 sales. By these measures, the Mapping launch has done exceptionally well, and most happily of all, people are working through Mapping at their own pace and finding what they need from it.
I think of this as an Expectations vs Reality launch.
I have always been a bit like this, always been a chronic daydreamer. If I had ten spots on a group programme I’d dream about what I’d do if thirty people wanted to join. I’d dream about the object of my affections arriving at my door just in time for midnight on New Year’s Eve. I’d dream that an unmarked envelope on the doormat was from a solicitor informing me of an unexpected inheritance. None of these things has ever happened. Nothing I’ve sold has ever been over-subscribed, no one has made a cinematic declaration of love, no long lost relatives have surfaced. And yet I still dream – still assume – these things will happen.
It’s like I’m in a near-constant Expectations vs Reality split screen. My dreams and assumptions play out in one pane while I look longingly at them from where the opposite is happening over in reality. Most of the time, the life you create in your head is better than the one you’re really living so you spend most of your time there, convince yourself that it might happen, even is happening. Then, at a pivotal moment, you are confronted with the fact that those expectations aren’t happening after all and the impact makes you stagger and fall back onto the sofa from where you never want to get up again.
With this launch I started with expectations I could never attain, and so reality was always doomed to not live up to it. It blighted the whole launch because I couldn’t treat it with playfulness and possibility, couldn’t feel pleased. It is such a difficult line, to manage dreams with probability and this time I failed spectacularly at any kind of management - I egged myself on to aim for what I wanted and never stopped to take a glance at reality.
I’m not sure what conclusions to draw here. I have a not-insignificant fear that you might think I’m a horrendous person after hearing my inner thoughts around this, but I share them in the hope that you may in some way relate. I don’t want to tell you not to dream or to hope, but I suppose I want to warn us, warn myself, not to live there - remember to not live in the world of expectation but to ground into what is good in reality.