The only failed launch is when you launch and then nobody buys and you give
up on it altogether and you don't do any research and you don't learn anything
from it. That is for me, that is a failed launch. If
you launch, nobody buys, and you go out there and you do some
research and you find out why nobody bought, and you find out that maybe
there was something that you missed in your messaging, or maybe you were selling
it to the wrong people, or maybe the way that you communicated it to
your particular audience didn't resonate with them. Whatever it is, if you learned
from it, then that is still a successful launch, and you can use
that to guide the next launch. Welcome to Imperfect Action. I'm Steph Taylor.
For years, I read all the books, downloaded all the freebies,
and did all the courses, but it wasn't until I started taking imperfect action
that my business had its first million dollar year. Imperfect action is about doing
things before you're ready, prioritizing consistent action over perfect action, and moving forward
even when you're not sure you're doing it right. On this show, you
can expect mindset advice, actionable marketing tips and strategies, to build a business
that brings you more profit, more freedom, and even more joy. Are
you on the list to get my daily businesses? Every day I'll send you
a bite sized prompt designed to help you grow your business in a more intentional
way. Sign up at Stephtaylor dot co, forward slash DBB, or at
the link in the show notes. Hey, welcome back to in Perfect Action.
This is episode eight hundred and two. Today I'm sharing four mindset habits
to adopt before your next launch for bigger profit. When I'm talking about launching,
I'm usually talking about launching a new offer or relaunching an existing offer,
and particularly when it comes to launching things like your courses, programs or memberships.
Now, when I'm talking about launching, it doesn't have to be that
very first time that you're putting it out there, although tiply, the mindset
challenges can pop up the worst in that first launch because you're doing something that's
completely unknown, You're entering unknown territory, you don't know whether anyone's going to
buy it, and all of the fears and mindset things can pop up and
derail you. And unfortunately, I can give you the best strategy anybody can
give you the best strategy for a launch, and if you don't take the
action, if your mindset gets in the way of you taking the action,
either stopping you from taking action altogether or getting you into habits like perfectionism and
procrastination that slow down your action, then unfortunately, your launch isn't going to
be as successful as if you just take the Imperfect action is the reason why
this show is called imperfect Action. So today I'm going to share four big
habits that can have a huge, huge shift for your next launch, whether
that's your first launch or your tenth launch. Habit number one is adopting a
growth mindset. So rather than thinking of your launch as it has to succeed
or else it is a failure. And if my launch has failed, then
it could never ever possibly improve. We need to think about how can we
embrace learning from every launch. Because here's the thing. I really want you
to think of launching as a repeatable process. It's not something that you just
do once for each offer and then you move on to launching the next one.
And if that launch was successful, great, If it wasn't successful,
then it was a failure and we never look at it ever again. It's
an experiment. Your first launch is always going to be an experiment. We
don't know. There's so little that we know about whether your audience is gonna
buy it, whether it's gonna work, whether the messaging you're using is the
one that's going to align, or whether you need to test different messaging.
It's all an experiment, and we only get to test the hypothesis right by
doing the actual launch. We want to get to find out if it's gonna
work by doing the launch, and then the next time you launch it,
you can build on what you learned, and then the next time you build
on it again. So there's no such thing as a failed launch. There
are no truly failed launches. The only failed launch is when you launch and
then nobody buys and you give up on it all together, and you don't
do any research and you don't learn anything from it. That is for me,
that is a failed launch. If you launch, nobody buys, and
you go out there and you do some research and you find out why nobody
bought, and you find out that maybe there was something you missed in your
messaging, or maybe you were selling it to the wrong people, or maybe
the way that you communicated it to your particular audience, didn't resonate with them.
Whatever it is, if you learned from it, then that is still
a successful launch, and you can use that to guide the next launch.
And that requires being open to feedback, which is really hard. It's like
when you've had a launch and people haven't bought, going and asking those people
why they didn't buy. It probably feels pretty similar to going to somebody and
being somebody who broke up with you and being like, hey, why did
you dump me? Like, tell me all of the things that are wrong
with me, Tell me all of the things that are wrong with my launch.
But that is how we learn and how we improve the next launch.
So you need to do those non buyer survey reviews. That's going to give
you the best insights into growing your launch and improving it each time, into
learning and scaling those launches over time. We also want to analyze those numbers,
so we don't want to just look at, oh, well, five
people bought, therefore it must be a failure because I really wanted ten people
to buy. We need to actually look at all of the numbers. So
five people bought, but oh I only had fifty people on my email list
coming into this, So that was a ten percent conversion rate, which is
actually great. So now I can go out there and for my next launch,
I can put some time and maybe even a little bit of budget into
paid ads, into growing my email list, and if I can add another
one hundred people onto my email list, then maybe that's another ten people who
will buy next time. So we don't want to just look at that final
number. We want to look at what that actually means in context. What
story did with the numbers tell us that we can then leverage to grow the
launch the next time we launch, and the next time we launch, and
the next time we launch. Launching is a repeatable process. If you only
ever take away one thing from eight hundred and two episodes of this show,
let it be that launching is a repeatable process and you can improve on it
over time. And I teach the strategy and the framework for a repeatable launch
inside my program Launch Magic. I'm starting it again. I'm running it again
in June for like the ninth round. We've had eight rounds of Launch Magic
so far, which is wild. And if you are on the waitlist,
you will get an invite to a bonus free workshop that I'm running in June
where I teach you all of Module one of Launch Magic for free. But
you have to be there live and you have to be on the waitlist to
get an invite. So jump on the waitlist at stephtaylor dot co, slash
LM, or you can DM me on Instagram send me just the letters LM,
just one word LM on Instagram at stephtaylor dot co and I will send
you the link to join the wait list. Okay. The second habit is
building confidence through taking action. The biggest misconception is that you are confident or
you are not confident, and that is the way it's going to be forever.
Confident is something Confidence is something that you build by doing. It's something
that grows by taking action, not by waiting to feel more confident or waiting
to feel more ready. It's not something you build by planning more and thinking
about it more and preparing all of the things. Doing more of that can
actually make you feel less confident, because when you start to see how many
things are on your plan and how little action you've taken, then you start
to question, oh can I do all of these things? Is it going
to be possible? For me, when in actual fact, yeah you can.
You absolutely can do it, but it's going to require stepping out of
your comfort zone. And that is how you build confidence. You don't build
confidence from being within your comfort zone. Like you're confident in the things that
you are currently comfortable doing, and the things that are outside your comfort zone,
you're not confident in them. But if you start to tiptoe out of
your comfort zone, that's when you start to be a little bit more confident
in them. For example, public speaking, I used to be terrified of
speaking, like even at school every year when we had to do a little
speech for English class, I would be anxious four weeks before that. And
now I can stand on a stage and I can talk to a couple one
hundred people fairly comfortably if it's a subject matter that I'm confident talking about,
right, And that is because I started getting more comfortable talking into a podcast
microphone. I started then doing smaller events where I would speak to people groups
of ten, twenty fifty people, and then I started to get onto bigger
stages, and through doing those things, it all felt a little bit more
scary. Now I can speak to twenty people and I feel absolutely fine doing
that. So you have to start taking that action, doing the scary things,
and then that's how your comfort zone starts to expand. Now, the
other thing with building confidence is I want you to remember that perfect action is
better than no action. So sitting there and planning and waiting for your action
to be perfect, that's not going to lead you anywhere near as far as
taking imperfect action, even if you don't feel ready, even if you don't
feel confident enough, because taking that imperfect action that is creating feedback for you,
and you can then pivot, you can change course, you can improve
based on that feedback. And the other thing to note is also like audience
growth is another one. I know this is slightly unrelated, but I know
audience growth is something that can hold people back from launching. You might be
like, well, I will launch once my audience is big enough. But
just like your confidence, your audience also grows through taking action, not by
sitting there waiting for your audience to grow by you just doing the same thing
over and over and over again. You have to actually do something differently.
If what you're doing is not already working to grow your audience, that it's
not working quickly enough, then you need to do something different and launch.
I think the whole process of launching is what grows your audience. Going through
what I teach in launch Magic, so many of my students say like,
oh, this is what's actually got my audience to grow finally, after years
of the slow game, or months and months of the slow game, this
is what has caused it to grow. The other thing I want to note
is that small audiences can still lead to successful launches. So I have one
student of mine from a few rounds of launch Magic ago. When she joined,
she had like sixteen people on her email list and through the process ended
up having a ten thousand dollars launch. So you can still have a super
profitable launch with a small audience. And then once you've had that first launch,
then you can go and reinvest more time and more energy and maybe some
money into growing your audience faster, and then you can have another launch,
and then you do that again, and you rinse it and you repeat it,
rather than saving up your audience and waiting until they're big enough to have
one big launch when you don't even know if that launch is going to convert
yet. Okay, the habit is to start avoiding perfectionist tendencies and to get
out of this state of overwhelm. Now, how do you do that?
Easy to say like avoid perfectionism, avoid overwhelmed. How do you actually do
that? Firstly, don't try to do it all, okay, Your first
launch is an experiment, and trying to include every single bell and whistle that
you can into that first launch is going to lead you to feel overwhelmed because
when everyone online is telling you like, oh, you've got to do all
of the up cells and down cells, and you have to have three different
kinds of lead magnets and two master classes, and you've got to make sure
they're in all of the different time zones, and you've got to charge three
different currencies and five different payment plans. That ah, oh my god,
I feel overwhelmed. You don't need to do everything in that first launch.
The first launch is how can we get this out there? How can we
get how can we bridge the magician's gap with our audience. And that's something
that I teach in Module one of Launch Magic. So if you're not on
the weight lift and you want to learn it, jump on the waitlist.
That's stephtailor dot Co, Slash LM, send me a DM on Instagram LM
and you can jump on the waitlist. You'll get an invite to module one,
the where I'm teaching it for free in early June, but you have
to be on the waitlist to get that invite. Okay. So in that
first launch, we're focusing on bridging the magician's gap, and we're focusing on
creating assets that we can reuse and refine in future launches. Things like your
sales page, your car, open emails, a lead magnet, a webinar,
all of these things. Those are the essentials. And then once we
have all of the essentials and we've refined them and they're converting really well,
then we can start to add other bells and whistles. But we want to
make sure that the essentials are strategic and converting really well first, rather than
trying to do all of the things in that first launch or even the second
launch and spreading our energy really thinly and then not getting a great result from
anything. The other thing, too, to avoid overwhelm is to stick to
one framework. So pick one framework and one mentor and follow that. That
could be me, it could be launch Magic or it could be somebody else
completely, but pick one and follow that one. Only when you start to
follow five different frameworks, or you're listening to five different people and you're listening
to all of their free podcast episodes, but you haven't actually invested in one
framework, and you don't have anybody that's telling you the step by step but
you have five different people who are telling you all of the different things that
you need to do to have a successful launch. That's overwhelming because now you
have a huge laundry list of things that need to be done, but you
have no step by step framework to get any of them done. And if
you pick just one framework, any framework, and you follow it through,
you're much more likely to see a successful launch than if you're collecting all of
the things that all of the different people are telling you to do and trying
to duct tape them together into your own launch. The final thing to avoid
perfectionism and overwhelm is to take the pressure off. Okay, so remove some
of that pressure. Your first launch is not going to be your biggest launch.
Most of the time, it's never going to be your biggest launch.
That's great. I always say you want your first launch to be like a
trial and error learning experience. It's like learning to ride a bike. You
want to learn how to ride your bike with training wheels in your driveway before
you go and take the training wheels off and ride your bike down a main
road. If your first launch is a huge launch, a lot more is
at stake, and there's a lot more pressure around. Oh, this needs
to be perfect and I have to have it all all these bits and pieces
figured out. Whereas if you just say, well, the first launch is
a learning experience, it's not going to be my biggest launch. What can
I learn from this? What can I take from this to then improve my
next launch and then my next launch, and I can grow it over time
and it's going to be better and bigger over time. All right. Habit
number four is starting to reframe fear and doubt. Fear is very, very,
very normal in a launch, because it's actually normal in anything where you're
doing something brand new outside of your comfort zone. You're a little bit like,
Oh, I don't know what's going to happen. This could go really
badly, so I'm scared of the worst case scenario. Even the most experienced
launchers and the most experienced business owners still experience self doubt and fear of failure
in all of that. From time to time. It's normal. Anything worth
having, anything worth doing, is going to bring up a little bit of
fear. And if it were guaranteed to succeed, if your launch were one
hundred percent guaranteed to succeed, then everyone would be launching things. If your
business were one hundred percent guaranteed to succeed, everybody would be running businesses.
But they're not. Okay, there's no guarantee, and that is part of
why when it works, the reward can be so high because there is a
risk that it's not going to work. But the thing is that if it
doesn't work, that's not a bad thing. It's only a bad thing if
we don't learn from it and then grow from it. I also want you
to remember that it's not so much about what other people think of you.
It's more about how you can help them, the impact that you can deliver
by showing up, rather than what people might say or how they might judge
you by showing up. This can this can particularly come up in a launch
if you are starting to show up online in a way that you haven't shown
up before. If you are starting to podcast, if you're starting to email
your list more frequently, or if you're starting to post on social media a
little bit more, position yourself as a bit more of an expert. The
fear that can come up around that is what will people say? What will
people think of me? Are they going to judge me? It's not about
the people who are going to judge you. It's about the people that you
can impact by you showing up that way. And if you start to focus
on them rather than on yourself and what other people are going to think of
you, that's how you can start to shift that fear. And then I
also want you to think of you know, the what ifs can actually be
a really big opportunity. So what if it goes wrong can also easily be
or what if it goes right right? Or what if it goes wrong?
But I also learn something great from this My first the first launch of my
podcast launch plan. I first launched that as a group program and two people
signed up. I needed ten for it to be worth my time to go
ahead. And two people signed up. That was, you know, and
that was objectively a failure. But I went back and I talked to the
people who had told me they were interested and hadn't bought, and the key
takeaways from that enabled me to pivot and turn it into what is now the
Podcast Launch Plan, which is a standalone a stand alone course to launch a
podcast. And that course sold eight hundred thousand dollars in one year and sold
more than a million dollars to date. And that wouldn't have happened if I
hadn't had that first failed launch and learned from it. So what if something
goes wrong? And also you might learn from it and that could become a
great opportunity that you didn't even know existed. Okay, So there we have
it for key habits to adopt into your next launch. Adopt a growth mindset,
Start building confidence by taking action, Start to avoid perfectionism and overwhelm by
not trying to do everything and by just following one framework. And then start
to reframe fear and doubt. Realize that everyone struggles with it and that just
because something can go wrong, it could also go right. So I am
running Launch Magic again in early June. We'll be kicking off the free workshop
for everyone on the waitlist, as well as my usual master classes that everyone
gets invited to. But if you're not already on the waitlist and you want
to come along to Module one where I teach it live for free. I
only teach it live. There's no recording of it, so you need to
be there live and you need to be on the waitlist to get an invite
for it when I send that invite out in a couple of weeks time.
So to jump on the waitlist, pop on over to Steph Taylor dot Co
slash LM or send me a DM on Instagram. Send me LM and you'll
get onto the waitlist so you can get an invite to join me live on
Zoom for that workshop. Now, if you're not already subscribed to the show
or following it, hit the little plus button or the follow button in Spotify
and you'll just get each new episode straight to your podcast app every Monday,
Wednesday and Friday. Thanks so much for listening. Catch you next time.