About two weeks ago I woke up with a crazy idea for launching a new membership site.
Starting from scratch, from start to finish I completed the product launch in just 11 days.
In this post I want to share some of the things I learned during this 11 day launch process.
(1) Trust Your Intuition
The idea I came up with two weeks ago was to start a group mentoring site where I teach people how to make money online, with a twist.
The twist is that unlike all the other courses which teach how to make money online techniques and strategies, I wanted to create a course/membership club where I would cover not just the strategies of making money online but also the mindset of making money online.
More specifically, when referring to the “Mindset” side of things the intuitive idea that came to me was to include a “Spiritual” component to the training.
I have to admit that when the idea first came to me I was a bit scared of it. The reason for this is that I have always kept the “making money online” and the “spiritual development” sides of my Blog somewhat separate.
My thoughts on this is that those people who are looking for the more strategy / technique / technical sides of making money online, are probably not interested in spiritual topics and vice versa.
So when I got the idea to combine the two, I wasn’t sure if it was going to fly.
However, I decided to act on the intuitive idea and it FLEW!
When a new member joins my Club, I ask them to fill out a questionnaire which helps me to identify where they’re at in their online money making journey, and where they want to get to.
I have now begun receiving completed questionnaires from my members and so far all I am seeing is people praising me for putting together a mentorship site that will combine strategy + mindset and include the spiritual side of things in it as well.
The very thing I was worried might turn people OFF from considering the course has become my biggest selling point.
Lesson Learned: Trust your intuition, especially if it takes you out of your comfort zone a little bit.
(2) Follow a Formula
After deciding to do the launch, I decided to follow a proven formula for doing a launch, because frankly I had no clue what I was doing.
Luckily, two years ago I bought into Frank Kern’s “Mass Control” course and when it came time to do the launch I dusted it off and started to follow it.
The funny thing is that at the same time as I was doing my launch, Jeff Walker was doing his launch for “Product Launch Formula 3.0″, LOL.
If PLF3.0 came out a few weeks ago, I might have bought into the program and used it for my launch but it wasn’t even available for purchase until March 1st which was my launch date as well.
Honestly though I didn’t really feel like I needed PLF3.0 as I already had Frank Kern’s “Mass Control” and that was already “overkill” for what I was doing with my small launch.
What I did do though is I combined the absolute most basic steps from Mass Control, and the stuff I saw in other launches, and my intuition to come up with my launch plan.
What made it a lot easier to organize everything is Kajabi.
I’m not sure if I have said this before – but I just love Kajabi. It makes everything so much easier.
It’s not perfect. Now that I’ve done the launch I have found a few little glitches and details here and there that I think they can improve on, but overall it’s the best product of it’s kind that I have seen.
Lesson Learned: No need to re-invent the wheel. Follow a proven formula and system.
(3) Expect Doubts to Creep In
Doubts, doubts, doubts.
Those damn little buggers.
Right from the start I had doubts about launching this product / course. Here are some of my favorites that crept up along the way and how I squashed them.
“What if nobody joins?!”
This was probably the first one that popped up. What if nobody joins? I’ll look like a fool, with no students and feel like a failure. That would suck right?
Well, I squashed this one with a few logic loops to shut the Ego up. It went a little something like this…
“What if nobody joins? Well, if we don’t do the launch how many group mentoring students will we have? 0. OK, and if we do the launch and nobody joins how many group mentoring students will we have? 0. OK, so how much worse off will we be? Uhhh, no worse off? Right, so shut up and let me do the launch!”
As soon as my mind paused for a second to try to compute that logic I also hit it with “What if people do join though? “
Then this one crept in…
“OMG, what if like 1,000 people join and I’m totally overwhelmed!?”
First my silly mind was worried about nobody joining, and then it jumped straight into worrying about what will happen if a gazillion people join and it’s so overwhelming that we can’t handle it.
This one I attacked from two sides… I thought to myself…
“If 1,000 people join, the amount of work to produce the content will be on different than if just 1 person joins. It’s just like on my Blog, whether I have 1 subscriber or 10,000 subscribers, it’s still the same amount of work to produce the content. That’s the beauty of leveraging digital content. The ONLY possible challenge with having thousands of people joining is perhaps handling some customer support issues. It will not be a content production issue.”
So then, to make sure that is not an issue I thought to myself…
“If I get so many students that it gets overwhelming, I give myself permission to hire an assistant to help me with the workload. Since I’ll be able to afford an assistant with the money I’ll be making from subscription fees, this is a non-issue. Right? So shut up and let me do the launch.”
That shut my mind up about that one. 🙂
A while later it popped up this one…
“Wait, what if we only get 1 person joining and then we have to produce all this content for just ONE person.”
I have to admit, that one kind of stumped me for a bit because essentially this would mean that this ONE person in my mentoring course would be getting one-on-one coaching from me for a tiny fraction of the cost of hiring me one-on-one and it may not make business sense for me to keep the “group” mentoring going with just one student.
After thinking about this one for a bit I came up with this solution…
“Well, if only ONE person decides to take the course then he or she is going to be getting AWESOME value for their money, basically getting one-on-one coaching at a fraction of the cost. This “worst case” scenario can be converted to a beneficial situation for everyone involved by (1) realizing that I’m still ‘on purpose’ with my goal to help people, (2) lighting a fire under my butt to market/sell my course to more than just one student, and (3) expose some kind of limiting beliefs I must have about doing group mentoring which must be creating such circumstances which I can then squash with PSYCH-K or other tools at my disposal.”
So in a way, I realized that there is no way for me to lose here. Regardless what happens, I will produce some kind of result. Whatever that result, I can learn from it.
And of course there is always this possibility “What if the product launch goes well and everything works out fine!” 🙂
Of course our silly little minds don’t want us to admit that possibility, even though it’s the most likely scenario. Turns out that is exactly what happened, BUT I just wanted to share that I – like every one else – have doubts that creep into my mind.
The trick is to move past your doubts, not let them stop you. Expect them to show up. Be OK with doubts. They’re normal. Just don’t let them stop you from achieving your goals. 🙂
Lesson Learned: Every inspired idea comes pre-packaged with some doubts. Don’t let them stop you from online success.
(4) Don’t Try to Be Perfect
If I had 6 months to properly plan this launch I probably would have made it “perfect”. Instead though I wanted to get it done fast… as in launching in just 11 days from initial concept to launch date.
To accomplish such a thing in such a short period of time, I had to lower my expectations for perfection.
I goofed up on a lot of things…
I encoded my first few videos at too high of a resolution so I had complaints from some people that the videos were taking too long for them to download. They worked fine for me, but I realize not everyone has the same speed Internet connection as I do.
Each of my videos has “mistakes” in them. None of them were perfect. I can point out half a dozen “goof-ups” in each video that 95% of people probably can’t see, but I totally see them.
My final sales video has a blatant typo in it that I only discovered after the program launched.
The day before launch I realized I wasn’t going to be able to move the course content in my other Kajabi Project into my project as Kajabi doesn’t yet have a way to transfer content between projects. So last minute I had to re-upload about 30 videos into my new project content area which takes a LONG time – as anyone who has ever uploaded HD video will understand.
My first video in the course has parts of me “cut” from the frame because I zoomed in too much on the camera, the cat starts MEOWing halfway through my video, and one of my light softeners came off and started dangling in the shot.
NOTHING I did in the product launch went perfectly. There were glitches, goof-ups and bumps along the way.
But you know what? My intention was genuine and that is all that people wanted from me.
Every step of the way I was emailing everyone who signed up for notifications during the launch and kept them up to date with everything that was going on – mistakes and everything. Most of them just laughed at my goof-ups and told me not to worry about them. ALL they want is good content. They don’t care if they hear my cat meowing once in a while.
And come launch day – they signed up.
Perhaps even more so because they saw that I’m not perfect either… nobody is… 😉
Lesson Learned: Don’t try to be perfect. Focus on what matters. If you did it perfectly, it means you waited way too long to do it.
(5) Product Launches Work
Prior to this I have never done a “product launch” before. Any products (eBooks etc.) that I have created in the past have always just been put up for sale with no product launch. Even in other businesses that I have ran, I have never used a product launch to launch a product.
The concept made sense to me, but I didn’t realize just how effective they are until now.
Even with this “little” product launch that I more or less whipped together as quickly as I possibly could, and even with all the mistakes and goof-ups I made along the way, by the weekend prior to launch I already had people emailing me saying stuff like “I’m dying to join the membership site!” and “I can’t wait to get started!” and “Will you release it already!?”
That kind of energy has a double benefit. Firstly it ignites peoples interest in your products/services and helps them to understand what they are going to be buying before buying the product.
Secondly though, it lights a huge fire under your butt to get the launch done and to produce content. It’s very exciting to see people excited about your product – as they should be – especially when you’ve put in so much effort and energy into it. It’s a very rewarding experience and it’s a lot of fun as well.
Now that I’ve actually done my first product launch and I realize the benefits of doing one for the time/energy investment required to do one – I will definitely be doing more in the future.
Although I’m no product launch guru by any means, I do also plan on teaching the exact specific strategy I used for the launch to my students as well – if they’re interested.
Lesson Learned: Small scale product launches work just as well as large scale ones. If done right, they can provide a lot of value to your members, and motivation for you to get the product completed on time.