There’s no such thing as a failed launch. Here’s how to learn and grow from failed launches

So many people launch their offer the first time, are underwhelmed by the response, and then declare that it's a failed launch and give up. Sound familiar? In today's episode, I'm sharing how you can learn so much from any launch that you do, regardless of the outcome.

– How launching your offer as a “once-off” probably means you're missing out.
– Why taking time to slightly tweak or pivot your launch can set you up for a better launch next time.
– How using a repeatable launch framework will help you to launch more effectively and efficiently.
– What to do when a launch “flops” and does not go to plan.

 

Today we're talking about launches and why there's actually no such thing as a failed launch. Now, there's a big misconception about launching that launching is something you do when you have created your offer, and you want to get it out there into the world that it just happens this one time.

And that you need to do a lot of teasing and hyping up your offer to get people excited for it so that when you release it, they buy it and that's not what a launch is. 

And I believe that there is no such thing as a truly failed launch because we can take those lessons and we can apply them to the next launch of the same offer again and again, and that might mean tweaking the messaging. It might mean pivoting the offer. It might mean launching a slightly different way, but we are making those tweaks and we are improving it each time, and by launching it over and over again, that is how you sell your course membership group, program, whatever it is.

 

How I use the repeatable launch framework to scale my launch

So how did I personally use the repeatable launch framework to scale from a flopped launch to $800,000 from one online course in the space of 12 months? Let me tell you how this worked out.

So my audience was asking me to teach them how to launch a podcast, so I thought, great. I'm going to create this group program and launch it to my email list. I said, if I can get 10 people in this group, I will go ahead with it. And only two people signed up. So on the one hand I was like, Ugh, I want to give up on this launch altogether. I don't want to proceed with this, nobody wants this. This was embarrassing for me, and I had to go back to these people and I had to refund them. But on the other hand, I knew that this was something my audience wanted from me because they had been asking me for it. I was relying on this launch to bring in enough cash to keep the lights on for a little while longer in my business, and I'd been so sure that this would work.

 

The scary thing I did after getting only two people to sign up:

So I was feeling pretty defeated about the entire situation, and all I wanted was to just sell these 10 spots, 10 spots. That's all I wanted. After the doors closed, I ended up refunding those two people who signed up, and I did the really scary thing. I reached out to my email subscribers and I asked them, Hey, why didn't you buy this?

Their answers told me everything that I needed to know. It's school holidays, so I can't commit to live calls. I want to launch my podcast in four weeks, not eight weeks. I want to launch my podcast in six months, not eight weeks. The big, resounding takeaway from that research was that they wanted to launch their podcasts in a self-paced format, not in a small group where they needed to show up for calls.

So a week or two later, I launched again to the same email list only this time, I launched a self-paced version of the program that I'd previously tried launching, and I had, I think around 22 people sign up. So I created it, and then I launched it again a few weeks later this time with a live webinar to sell it.

More people signed up. I launched it again and again. I was so confident that it was converting. That's when I automated the entire sales process and stopped live launching it. I plugged in some Facebook ads and within 12 months I had sold $800,000 worth of a $250 course.

 

Launching is not just a one-time launch

Launching is a repeatable sales process. You can do it again and again and again to bring in more sales each time, and each launch is like an experiment. You learn so much from each launch by launching and failing rather than sitting there and planning and hoping that if you leave it long enough and can plan enough, it won't fail.

If I had been sitting there waiting until I was so confident that this group program launch was going to succeed, I would never have got that intel that, oh, they wanted it in a self-paced format. I would never have launched it and then created the version of it that then scaled to $800,000 in the space of 12 months from one offer.

 

What do I do when a launch doesn’t go to plan?

Firstly, I would send out a non-buyer survey. I know it's terrifying, but this will give you so much insight into whether it was the wrong offer, the wrong messaging, or what went wrong. I would then run the numbers. 

So not just the number of sales and the dollar value of the sales, but what percentage of your launch list converted. And it might just be that you didn't have enough people on your launch list. 

I would look at what percentage of people signed up for your webinar, what percentage showed up live? Where were the leakages in each little step of that whole entire launch? Where did people drop off? Then I would look at, okay, how can I reach out to people who potentially were interested, people who'd shown some signs of interest and didn't sign up and have a deeper conversation with them about why they didn't sign up.

And then I would tighten up my messaging and offer webinars, wherever the weak points were. I would make sure I can tighten those up so that I'm addressing all of the things that held people back from buying. 

Because there's still so much potential in your launch. You just need to go and find out where it went wrong. Most of the time, it's not that people don't want what you are selling, most of the time, it's that there's some kind of mismatch between the way you are communicating it or the people you are communicating it to.

 

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