💰$8,650 in 4 days
Whilst working a 9-5
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Solopreneurship is taking over the internet. I started tapping away on Twitter in Novemeber of 2022 and there were some crazy stories of how people were making mega money (I mean mega money) writing.
I couldn’t quite believe it. Surely not? Surely these folks weren’t making this kind of money selling digital products on the internet? I decided there was one way to find out. Launch something myself and see what happened.
Here’s the story of how I made $8,650 in 4 days whilst keeping my 9–5.
It starts with the product
An incredible launch strategy is a waste of time if your product is pants. You’ll end up with refunds coming out of your ears and the whole thing will be a big waste of time.
I spent a good while deciding and practising building before making a penny. Here’s how:
I gave away a digital course so I could practice talking in front of the camera.
I asked for feedback to see if people liked what I was doing (and where I could improve).
After a few months, I decided that I would build a digital course for writers writing alongside their day job. Here’s why.
Onwards to the launch strategy.
The launch timeline
Too early kills momentum.
People forget what they had for dinner yesterday if you post in October that you’re launching a course in Feb, people won’t remember.
The best bet is to tease a maximum of 3 weeks out, you can even talk about the building process a few weeks before that if you want to and take people on the journey of building your course.
But too early = forgotten.
My launch strategy was:
3 weeks out tease the idea (Twitter & Medium)
10-day launch series (Newsletter, Twitter & Medium)
Go simple. Of course, you can optimise, tweak and play with every element of your launch strategy but it’s a distraction from doing the work. If it’s your first go, just emulate the above.
Thinking about the strategy
There are a few objectives of this launch strategy.
Build excitement
Prove authority
Cultivate urgency
You do all of these by hypothesizing the objections of your potential buyer. Here are a few to get you thinking about it:
“I don’t trust you have enough authority.”
“I don’t have the time to watch a course.”
“I’m unsure I’ll get the results.”
Your launch series aims to address all these concerns.
Finally, you need to add some urgency. People often need a reason to buy today instead of tomorrow. That’s where a discount or a deadline (or both) comes in.
My strategy: The course went live for a discounted price for 3 days, then up to full price on the 4th day ($100 to $150).
Content is king
Enough is never enough when it comes to writing about what you’re doing.
Remember: your content goes out in a snapshot. It’s on the timeline for all 3 minutes and then something else takes over. Most don’t see it. Those that do probably don’t remember it.
You need to have oodles of content if you want to build a decent launch strategy. Luckily, I’d been writing about my writing methods for a little while so I had a backlog of content.
I took old articles and reframed, reformatted and rewrote them.
I spent a good while getting the angle right on those articles. It was well worth it. I used those as the basis for my email series too. Here’s the breakdown of my article series:
x4 articles (each describing an element of the course)
x1 article announcing the course was live
x1 post-live announcement
Improvement: I’d release an article the day before the price went back up to encourage people to purchase today.
Emails
The articles formed the basis of my email content but I made the offer clearer and more compelling in the email series.
I was scared of selling to my audience. But here’s the thing, if you want people to buy, you’ve got to sell something to them and don’t dance about it. If you’ve got a great product, sell it.
I ended up with an email stack like this:
x4 launch emails (largely based on the articles above)
x1 to announce the course was live
x3 post-launch discount price
P.s. During this time you are likely to get a bunch of unsubscribers.
If you write to your subscribers once a week and then all of a sudden you’re writing to them every day for 4 days it’s a little overwhelming. It’s the price you pay for the sales.
I did all my automation through ConvertKit and couldn’t work out how to segment my list so I didn’t end up doing segmenting. Huge mistake.
The way to do it (if you’re a pro, unlike me) is to segment so you only email the folks that have an interest in your course. You can work out that by understanding who has clicked on your course links previously or asking your audience whether they’d be interested in hearing more about your upcoming course.
Segment to reduce unnecessary unsubs.
Improvement: I’d segment my list so I wasn’t sending it to everyone, I ended up with quite a few unsubscribes.
Videos
I then made x2 videos that I released in the run-up to the course to give people a taste of what they could expect. It was tonnes more effort but worth it in the end.
There were elements of my course that I thought would be good to showcase. I decided that showing people my review process for Medium would be a good way to get people excited about the course by giving it away for free.
It worked, a bunch of people engaged and although I don’t have the data, I have a suspicion that this made all the difference when it came to people buying. Remember earlier on when we talked about concerns buyers have?
Well, one concern would be ‘Is Eve a good teacher?’ giving people free content so they can risk-free understand if that is a valid concern is a great way to overcome that buyer’s hesitation.
The videos worked incredibly well.
I was able to build a deeper relationship with my audience (I sometimes forget that I only write to my readers and they never actually see my face). Videos will be something I no doubt do again next time.
Improvement: I would have added these people who watched the video to a specific email list so I could target them better.
Twitter
Then on Twitter, I shared posts that talked specifically about my knowledge of Medium and how it’s a great platform to explore
Pulling out the reasons why someone should write on Medium compared to Twitter was an important feature of my launch strategy. Here’s what I think about it:
Put yourself in the shoes of someone scrolling through Twitter
What are they thinking/feeling/seeing?
E.g. They might not have ever heard of Medium.
My content needs to introduce Medium and show why it’s a good option for writers.
Over the launch, the weekend shared screenshots of what was going on so people could follow along. I’ve personally loved content like this in the past and it helped a bunch with driving excitement.
It was pretty cool to provide daily updates and show the numbers going up and up, I suspect this is where some of the sales came from, social proof is a very powerful thing.
Improvement: I’d get more testimonials before launching so I had social proof baked in from the very beginning.
And that’s it
That was my launch strategy. It was tonnes of work and balancing that alongside full-time work wasn’t half a battle of willpower and resilience but it’s been incredible to see.
It shows me the power of the internet and what is possible when you put your mind to it. My next product launch will be in June, so I’ll be building for that now, taking all the lessons I’ve learned from this launch.
Wrap up & further reading
Viral loops on product launch strategies.
Monday.com on soft launch, minimal product launch & hard new product launch.
Neil Patel on launch strategy and what you should be thinking about when you launch.
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Thanks Eve!
Eve--you’re incredibly resilient and rivals the Plan-Do-Check-Act paradigm.
This is “Kick- **s” execution.
You’ve planned your work and worked your plan brilliantly.
What’s the encore-? :-)