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 for 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. Welcome to Imperfect Action. I'm Steph Taylor. For years, I read all the books, downloaded all the freebees, and did all the courses, but it wasn't until I started taking imperfect action that my business had its first million dollars 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 busines Boosters? 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 Steph Taylor dot com, forward slash DBB, or at the link in the show notes, Hey, welcome back to Imperfect Action. This is episode six hundred and sixty three. 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. Sure, you can do a launch the first time that you release it into the world, but that's likely not going to be your biggest launch. And if you stop after only that first launch, you're missing out on a lot of potential sales. Too many people launch their offer just that first time, they're underwhelmed by the response, they declare it to be a failed launch, and then they give up. And every launch, whether it's good or whether it's bad, has massive lessons in it. 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, and 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're making those tweaks and we're 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. It's not just something you launch once, because then you are leaving a lot of potential sales on the table. So how did I personally use the repeatable launch framework to scale from a flopped launch to eight hundred thousand dollars from one line course in the space of twelve months. Let me tell you. 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 ten people in this group, I will go ahead with it. And only two people signed up. So on the one hand, I was like, oh, I want to give up on this launch altogether. I don't want to 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. So I was feeling pretty defeated about the entire situation, and all I wanted was to just sell these ten spots. Ten spots, That's all I wanted. After 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 holiday, 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 twenty two people sign up, so I created it. 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 and again, and only when I was so confident that it was converting. That's when I automated the entire sales process and stopped live launching it. I've plugged in some Facebook ads and within twelve months I had sold eight hundred thousand dollars worth of this one two hundred and fifty dollars course. Okay, 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 eight hundred thousand dollars in the space of twelve months from one offer. Right, eight hundred thousand dollars from one offer. That was a lot of people buying it. So when a launch doesn't go to plan, this is what I would do to recover and get the most out of it. 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, 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 you know, it might just be that you didn't have enough people on your launch list. Okay, I would look at what percentage of people sign 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 number four, I would tighten up my messaging, copy, offer, webinar wherever, 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. Okay, so that's what I would do. I wouldn't say, oh, nobody wants it and give up, 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 too. There is some mismatch there, just like how with my group program, I was so confident people wanted this, and I actually found out no, they didn't want to show up to calls. They wanted it to be self paced. Okay. So honestly, if you've had a failed launch, it doesn't mean that it's time to give up. Follow this process and do the launch again. We get a lot of people coming into Launch Magic who have launched before and they're like, oh, that was a bit underwhelming, and then they follow the whole process and they can see straight away where they went wrong with the messaging or with the offer or their copy or their webinar, and they make those tweaks and then the next launch succeeds. Now we're opening up doors to Launch Magic again in August, So if you want to jump on the waitlist for that, pop on over to Instagram. I'm there at Steph Taylor dot co and dm me the word magic just magic by itself, and I'll pop you onto the waitlist so that you can be the first to know when doors are open and you can grab those early bird bonuses when they are available. That is it for today's episode. If you are not already subscribed to this show, make sure you hit the little plus button in Apple Podcasts or follow in Spotify and it'll just mean that you get each new episode straight to your podcast app every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Thank you so much for listening. Catch you next time.