You build the structure for your next launch during your current launch
Most entrepreneurs expect sales the minute they get started, but there's a huge flaw in their logic. Once somebody joins your ecosystem, they're still a long way from giving you money.
Hi,
When people come to me after a poor launch, often even after gathering a big audience, I always ask this question:
How many people were around during your last launch?
Usually, the answer is “not many”. Often somebody has added hundreds, if not thousands of new subscribers since they last launched, which means they haven’t had time to get excited about it.
So, when you hit that launch button, of course all you’re going to get is crickets.
Don’t worry. You’re not bad and you’re not dumb. You just fell victim to one of the biggest misunderstandings in the game.
The people on your list between launches will see your current launch and usually get excited for your next launch. The people you convert from this current launch have probably been with you for at least two previous launches.
The people who can launch effortlessly have spent years building and supporting their audience. If you’re just starting your journey, you literally can’t rely on that because you haven’t build up that cache with the people on your list. They just don’t know you enough to buy from you on autopilot yet.
Most of my best customers have been on my list for 1-2 years before they start to buy frequently from me.
The word frequently is doing a lot of work there. What I mean is that even though people often buy something from me during their second launch, that is just a tryout.
After buying something from me, they usually sit on it for months, and use the third or fourth launch as an incentive to try the thing they bought from me and decide whether they are in for the long haul.
The buying cycle often looks like this once a subscriber joins my list.
Launch 1: Build excitement. Somebody probably isn’t going to buy from you this first time. They are just trying to get the vibes of your launch, whether you’re cool, if they want to hang out with you, and if you’ve got something they want to buy eventually.
Launch 2: Try the goods. By now they’ve known you 3-6 months and know your style. They’ve probably read some of your posts, maybe a sample of your work, and are ready to get excited for what you have to sell. If it’s something they are into then it’s a good bet they’ll at least put it on their to do list for later.
Launch 3: Reminder they need to get on it. Once you deliver, it goes to the bottom of their pile, so the next launch is a great way to get your work bumped up higher in the queue. Honestly, every touch point is a little reminder. When I did shows full-time people would come up and apologize that they hadn’t taken action yet…even a year after buying it. Getting people form an opinion after buying from me is easily the hardest part of the game fo rme.
Launch 4: Try the thing, finally. By this point, you are probably near the top of their to-do pile, and the fact you are launching again will probably guilt them into action. Once they check out my work, they’ll make an opinion to either become a big fan or put you on the scrap heap. However, I’ve known people 5+ years who still haven’t started smething they bought from me a dozen launches ago.
If you launch every three months, like I do, then best case scenario is that a subscriber is literally one year from getting on your list to buying everything.
In my opinion, one of the best reasons to launch things often is so that you can audition yourself to potential customers more often and win them quicker. You don’t have to launch the same product. You could launch your membership, or a set of pins, or a map, or a calendar. It just has to be something where people can get a sense of your vibes.
Even with that it could take a year or more, and that’s somebody who’s on the ball. It could take even longer, which is why you have to take a longitudinal view of your career.
This is also why you need a good content marketing strategy that warms people up for your launch, and why you need to be constantly building your fandom
You’re always 1-2 years behind monetizing your audience.
If you want money now, you should have build the structures 1-2 years ago, but if you want to avoid that mistake in the future, you need to make audience building a part of your practice all the time.
In my sales manager days we used to say that what you do today is predictive of your sales in six weeks, but you are really working on a much longer time horizon if you want to have any stability in your career. It wasn’t until I was doing sales for over a year and had repeat buyers that I started to feel stable in my job.
The biggest habit I had to break in my salespeople was their constantly working on a boom/bust cycle.
Somebody on my team would have a bad month and have to scramble to close deals so they could hit their numbers. In doing so, they would scrape by that month, but they would have performed a ton of actions that paid off six weeks later.
All that effort while they were stuggling brought them a windfall the next month, which would cause them to take their foot off the gas. Since they were still living off all the work they did, they would equate laziness with success and struggle with work. even though it’s exactly the opposite. If they could just keep their foot on the gas all the time, they would be unstoppable, but it’s a very hard habit to break.
Even the best salespeople dealt with this all the time. I’m not the best salesperson, but I can just show up longer than anyone else without taking my foot off the gas.
The single best predictor of success was whether a salesperson could break that cycle in themselves, and the same is true for creators.
If you use your launch wisely, you can use your current launch to build the structure you need to succeed better next time, whether that means hiring people, building our partnerships, creating new material, building your mailing list, or something else that will help the lift become easier each time.
I spent 5 years funneling all my money back into projects so that I could prove to people I was serious and wasn’t going anywhere. These are the two biggest fears people have when they assess a creator, and there’s very little you can do about that except let time happen and keep showing up.
If you’re not using your current launch to build some buffer for your next launch, then it will be a lot harder to build once that launch is over and everything crashes to the ground.
LSS: The people you bring onto your list today probably won’t pay off for 6 months and won’t become consistent buyers for 1-2 years.
That’s even true with Substack.
My last pay-what-you-can-afford pledge drive was 2.5x better than my last one, and wouldn’t you know it, most of the people who bought got on my list around September last year.
Yes, some people became paid members before then, but not many. That said, it was still only a small fraction of my list that chose to buy, and I still have fewer than 2% of my list converting to paid membership, but it keeps growing over time. Two percent of 40,000 is a lot bigger than 10% of 4,000.
