8 things you need to know before you launch a brand new offer

What you need to know when you're launching a brand new offer for the first time.

I'm going to share a couple of the things that you must know before you launch a brand new offer. Now, usually when I'm talking about launching, I'm referring to a live launch, which isn't something that you only do the very first time that you launch a brand new offer.

I am talking about launching a brand new offer specifically using the live launch process. So now when I talk about a live launch, what it really is, is a limited time campaign, limited time push to sell a particular offer. Usually with free content that is designed to grow your audience with the right people for that offer, nurture them across what I call the Magician's Gap.

Give them everything that they need to decide whether it's the right fit for them or not, and address any hesitations that they might have about whether it will work for them. And then it's also going to give them a clear deadline for them to decide by. Those are the three key ingredients of a live launch.

It's limited time, there's free content, and there is a deadline. The framework that I love to wrap around live launching, and this will make a little bit more sense as I share the eight things that you need to know before you launch something for the first time, but the framework that I love to use is starting with running the launch.

So when it's the first time you are launching something, you are starting at this point, where you have nothing to build on. You have nothing to go on. You are running the launch for the first time. Then after you've run the launch, you've closed doors, then you can go back and review your launch.
You can find out what worked, what didn't work, what hesitations your audience had that you maybe didn't address. Then you can refine it. You can make those tweaks. ─ And then you can rinse it and repeat it. You do it again, and you might repeat it twice a year. Like we do with Launch Magic, you might repeat it five or six times back to back with the view of getting that whole process perfect.
So then you can then automate it and stop live launching it. And I've done this with two of my offers as well. So you've got a few different options when it comes to the longer term goal. So even if you want your offer to go evergreen eventually to be on an automated funnel and you're not live launching it all the time.
I generally still do recommend live launching it. I will do a future blog on this as well. But if you go back to this post, I talked about how to use repeatable live launches to make more sales of your online course program or membership.

Let's dive into eight things you need to know before you launch something for the very first time.

Your first launch probably won't be your biggest launch.

And that is a good thing, right? The first time you are launching your new offer, you are still figuring it all out. Especially if this is the first time you are launching anything at all, you are now learning how to create a sales page, how to write cart open emails, how to deliver a webinar, how to set up a course, how to deliver your program, how to do all of the different things.
And you're probably also still in the process of growing your audience, starting to nurture them, building your email list, all of these things at the same time. You don't need to wait until you have a big audience to launch. I really don't want you to wait until you have a big audience to launch. I think that a small audience can be the perfect training ground.
It's lower stakes. It gives you a little bit more and wiggle room where if something goes wrong, you're not embarrassing yourself in front of thousands of people. I like to think that most audiences are pretty understanding when things inevitably do go wrong because there are always going to be little tech mishaps and that is absolutely fine.
It's a lot less stressful when you have a smaller audience and when you have a smaller number of people signing up, you can give them a little bit more personal attention. You can figure out what they need and as a result, they will get a better outcome and it's going to be easier for you to deliver as well. For example, some of my most successful Launch Magic students who smashed their launch goals. One of my case studies from a previous round of Launch Magic, Alex Morgan, she mentors Pilates studios owners. And over the 12 weeks, she built her audience from scratch. She launched with 180 followers and 16 people on her email list. And she still had over a S10,000 launch.
So it's absolutely possible to smash those launch goals with a smaller audience. I also am a big believer that you end up with exactly the number of people you need in your first launch. For example, the very first time I launched the podcast launch plan, I launched it as a group program and I ended up with two people. ─
This is a couple of years ago, but two people for a group program. And I told myself I would need a minimum of five for it to be worthwhile going ahead because I had those two people that meant that I had to go and find out why these people didn't buy and tweak it. And as a result, I completely pivoted direction with that product.
And that ended up being the one that scaled and that grew my revenue massively. Very, very quickly. So you end up with the number of people that you need. And if you end up with not very many people, that's great because we can still learn from that. Once you have done that first launch, then you can go through the process again.
You can refine it, you can review it, you can tweak it, and then you can launch again. And it's so much easier because you've already done it once before. The assets are created, your sales page is created, your cart open emails, the skeleton is there, you've written most of them, now we just need to tweak them.
The course is created or the program is created, you know how to teach it. All of the difficult part is done and now you know what didn't work so you can fix it and you know what did work so you can repeat it and double down on it. The second thing you need to know is please try to place less pressure on your first launch, especially if it's the first time you are launching something.
I really would love it if you think of your first launch as your training wheels for launching. It's like learning how to drive a car in your driveway or in a parking lot, rather than learning how to drive a car on the freeway. ── So try to keep it as simple and as low pressure as possible. And remember that you can't compare your first launch to somebody else's six figure launch when they've been launching things for years.

The first launch is an experiment.

It gets to be fun and you get to use it as a way to test whether this specific combination of your offer, your messaging, your audience and your free content, whether that combination works to sell it. And one great way to place less pressure is to launch it before you create it.
So sell it to your audience and then create it and release it module by module or teach it live. Or you can launch it while you create it. If you don't love the idea of having to create it after you've sold it. That's because the whole launch process. ─ Generally should take about 60 to 90 days. I would recommend 90 if you haven't already been showing up and sharing free content about the particular problem that you are solving for your audience with this offer.
And when I say 60 to 90 days, that's not 60 to 90 days of buy my course or I have an exciting course coming, join the wait list. That's not 60 to 90 days of that. It's not 60 to 90 days of teasing the offer, but instead it's 60 to 90 days of content. Free content that is bridging the magician's gap.

You can never truly know what people want until you ask them to pay for it.

You can spend all of the time thinking, planning, designing the perfect offer, but you don't know if your audience wants it until you actually ask them to pay for it. And you won't know if it's the perfect offer until you get it out there and you actually deliver it to your clients or your students.

This is why I love launching it before you create it. It removes all of that pressure and it makes launching more of a research exercise than a, it has to be perfect at all costs kind of exercise. And yes, audience research is great. Do some surveys, interview your ideal clients, but I've also launched things where I've done so much research and I've been like, this is exactly what they need. The messaging is perfect. Everything is so well aligned. But it didn't land because maybe I had overlooked something. For example, when I first launched that podcast launch plan as a group program, I had overlooked the fact that some people wanted to launch their podcast in four weeks. Others wanted to do it in six months. I had overlooked the fact that it was school holidays. So people were at home with their kids and couldn't commit to showing up to live calls consistently for eight weeks. There were a few things that I hadn't really even thought about. And because I hadn't wasted time creating anything more than just an outline of what I was going to teach, ─ I could then pivot it really easily, make it a self paced course and launch it again, which is what I did.

If people don't buy, it doesn't necessarily mean they don't want your offer.

It doesn't mean that they don't see the value in it, but it does mean that they don't see why they should prioritize spending money on it right now, or it means that they don't believe it's the right fit for them to solve the problem they are experiencing, or Or get the outcome that they are desiring.
So if you are at this point where people are not buying, you've launched it and nobody has bought it, you now have two choices. You can give up. And sadly, this is what way too many people do. It makes me really sad because they've put all of this time into creating all of the launch assets. A lot of the time they've even created the course or the program first and then nobody buys it.
And then they're like, well, that was a waste of time. I give up. I don't want to ever look at it ever again. I'm going to move on. Courses don't work for me. My audience doesn't want that.

That's your first choice. Your other option is you can put your detective hat on and you can figure out why did nobody buy that and make the tweaks.

You will learn so much more from doing this. And even if you don't decide to relaunch the same offer, you can still learn from that failed quote unquote failed launch and use that to inform the things that you sell in the future.

 

Your messaging matters as much as the offer itself.

How you position and communicate your offer can be more important than what is actually inside the offer in terms of how it's. Sales. It can be the difference between a launch that succeeds and a launch that flops. And when it comes to messaging specifics really do sell. So what I see quite a lot with coaches, especially is they might come up with a promise that's like, Oh, this is a coaching program to improve your life.
That's pretty broad. It's pretty vague. It's raising a lot more questions than it's answering because suddenly I'm like, well, what do you mean by improve? What areas of my life? How are you going to improve it? What's involved? I don't get it. It's probably not a super urgent pain point either, like improving my life.
Yeah, that's great, but I'll do that when I have more time next year. So then your ideal client isn't going to prioritize spending money on it because they don't really see the urgency in it. They don't feel that need to spend money on it right now. Versus let's say you were doing a coaching program to get over heartbreak.
That is painful. Somebody wants that pain to go away. So they're going to prioritize spending money on it. And as soon as I say this, get specific, the first hesitation that always pops up with my students is, well, I don't want to limit my sales.

Limiting the number of people your offer will help is better than not making any sales at all because it's too broad or too vague ─ and you know, there are going to be still so many more people than you can ever help just by getting specific.
So even from, you know, a coaching program to improve your life versus a coaching program to get over heartbreak, of course, there's more than enough people that you can help in the specific version of that. And also another thing to make sure with your messaging is make sure that your ideal client has everything that they need to make the decision of whether this is right for them or not. And that means preempting any questions and hesitations they are going to have. This is tricky in the first launch because you have no feedback to go on. You don't have any non buyer survey results to use. It's a lot easier in your second launch because we can ask the people who didn't buy, what made you decide not to buy?
And then we can find out, Oh, they didn't buy because they didn't think it was for them. And actually it was for them. So obviously there was a bit of a mismatch between my messaging and what I thought I was communicating. And we can also make sure that we are bridging that magicians gap with our free content.
That's going to be super, super powerful for selling your offers.

 

You need to know exactly who the offer you are launching is for.

Otherwise, even the right people will think that it isn't right for them. And I have made this mistake. Many times, even as recently as a year ago when I launched a new offer and I read through the non buyer survey after the launch and it had somebody who would have been the perfect fit for that offer saying, Oh, I think this is too advanced for me.
And it had another person who also would have been a good fit saying, Oh, I think this is too basic for me. So that straight away tells me, Oh, I was a little bit too vague, maybe a little bit too broad in who my ideal client for this offer was. So it really helps to have one ideal client defined. And when I say one, I mean a specific person, give them a name.
It's not a group of people. It's not a range of people. It's not a target audience, one person. And when you are writing any content, any sales copy, creating your webinars, anything in your launch. Thinking about it as if you are writing specifically to this one person. It makes life so much easier. It also makes it easier for you to design your offer because now you have a clear path from A to B, from what they are struggling with right now, to the transformation, the result that they have.
And you can start to avoid those rabbit holes of, oh, but I'm going to add this module because just in case they are in this situation on, they might be struggling with this as well. So I'm going to add this extra rabbit hole and suddenly you've built out this mammoth course or this mammoth program or mammoth membership because you're trying to help too many different ideal clients.
One clear, ideal client and talk to them, have conversations with them, please. This is like the best research you can do is to have those conversations and find out what language they are using, listen to the words that they are using and reflect those words back to them in the copy that you are writing rather than trying to impress them as the expert instead, show them, I understand you, I get what you are struggling with.
And this is my solution to what you are struggling with.

 

Most decisions aren't set in stone.

So make them quickly and take action. Things like the platform that you use to host your online course, the name you give your membership, the headline you put on your sales page, the ideal client you choose for this launch, the number of modules you have inside your program. These things can be changed really easily. So make these decisions quickly rather than wasting time deciding between options on these things that are pretty inconsequential. Use that time to pick one. Test it, put it out there, and then go back to the drawing board if you need to, rather than sitting there spinning around in your head trying to pick the right option the first time around.
For example, rather than spending hours deciding what to teach in your free webinar, pick a topic, teach it, and if it doesn't convert, now you have some real feedback that you can work with, and you can try again. You can create a different webinar and launch again. Which then leads me beautifully to number eight.

If it flops, you now have feedback and that is so much better than wasting your time in indecision.

And when I say this, I mean literally any part of your launch or your entire launch as a whole. So for example, I've had launches where the webinar converted really well, but the cart open email sequence, the sales emails that somebody gets after the live webinar, those emails didn't convert well.
And great. Now I have feedback. Now I know this part of my launch worked well. So next time I will repeat that and this part of my launch didn't work well. And next time I will not repeat that. I will change it. I have had more failed launches than most people have had of launches in total. And I am so glad that I've had those because it's taught me so much more than anything else could have.
It's taught me more about my audience, about my offers, my messaging, my business, myself. And even recently, so at the end of 2023, I launched a group 2024 planning strategy intensive with four live calls and we didn't have enough people sign up for it to go ahead. But you know what this made me realize was, Oh, I had this conversation with my audience.
I made me realize December maybe wasn't the best time to launch something because everyone was. Too busy and too overwhelmed. They couldn't commit to calls. People were saying, I'm just getting through the end of the year. I can't even think about 2024 yet. This gave me feedback. This gave me options. I knew, well, option one, I can launch it again in early 2024. ─
Option two, I can keep this in mind for next time and launch it in November, 2024 for 2025. I could also potentially put it together as a self-paced course and launch that. There are different things that I can do to overcome the reasons why people didn't sign up. So, launching is really something that you can do over and over and over again.

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