#20 - The curse of the second launch (and how to avoid it)

If you're not aware of it, you don't realize why it happens. It can be really discouraging. It can cause you just to pivot prematurely to change up what you're doing when you actually don't need to. So I just wanted to talk about that now. How to know what the curse of the second launch is. How to know if you've been hipstruck by it, how to avoid it and how to sort of come out the other side of it and to keep on launching and keep on growing and keep on making great sales.

This is the Doing it online podcast with your host, serial entrepreneur, 6 and 7 figure funnel strategist and super nerd Kate McKibben. Where every week we're here talking nerdy and sharing the things that actually work to help you do what you do online. But better, easier, and with a ton more profit too. Are you ready? Let's do it.

Hey. Hey guys, it is Kate McKibben here from hello Funnels co and welcome to episode number 20. My gosh, is that right? Time sure does fly when you are having fun and talking to strangers on the Internet in your pajamas every week. I hope you've been loving the podcast so far. I've been loving creating them. It's. I had no idea what I was doing at the start and I have a little bit more of an idea now, but I feel like the best is definitely yet to come. So much goodness coming up these next few weeks. Super excited to share that all with you. But today I am actually joining you coming off the back of a launch and you might be listening to this going, what? I thought you were all about the funnels. And the thing is, yes, I absolutely am. I am, I am all about the funnels. And I'll tell you, I needed to nap for like a week straight after our launch and it just reminded me how much I love funnels and how important they are as a piece of your business. But I think that for a business to grow and, you know, to keep moving forward, it's always about sort of embracing new challenges, adding new revenue streams. And while we've got our funnels pretty dialed in at this point, we hadn't really been, you know, going all in on launches. We've been doing a few sort of just email based things here and there. But we hadn't done a big all singing, all dancing launch in over two years. And a friend of mine, Alex Beaden, she sort of encouraged me to stop being such a chicken with my launches, stop putting them in the too hard basket and give them another go. And I did, and it was great. But my gosh, was it a lot of work. But as part of that, I was able to work with a thousand two hundred, I think in the end, amazing course creators in helping them to set up their, what I call a sold out success offer. We ran this challenge and we will be rerunning it shortly. Shortly, because we got such great feedback and people just loved it so much. But one of the things I noticed in this challenge that people were talking about, because we were talking about, you know, taking an offer that you've previously sold that maybe hasn't been, you know, it wasn't really hitting out of the park. It was selling a few here and there. It was kind of irregular. But you know, it's a great product and you just wanted to make those few tweaks that you needed to make to make it a sold out success. Like that's what the challenge is all about. And we've had some crazy amazing results already. But one question I saw a lot of people were asking, and one thing I saw a lot of people were talking about, they were saying, you know, the first time I launched it, it actually did pretty well. And then I launched it again and it was crickets. And people didn't really understand why. And that's when I realized that not everybody knew about this thing that I call the curse of the second launch. So the thing is, this is a real phenomenon and it is something that if you're not aware of it, you don't realize why it happens. It can be really discouraging. It can cause you just to pivot prematurely to change up what you're doing when you actually don't need to. So I just wanted to talk about that now. How to know what the curse of the second launch is. How to know if you've been hipstruck by it, how to avoid it and how to sort of come out the other side of it and to keep on launching and keep on growing and keep on making great sales. So this just let me paint a little picture for you quickly. So you create an online product, you know, maybe let's backtrack. You've been online for a little while, you've got a little bit of an audience, nothing massive, maybe a few hundred thousand subscribers, you know, same number of followers on social. So and you decide to. You're working one on one, you're maxing out, you hear all these people talking about online courses and you're like, I'm going to give it a go. You finally decide to take that jump and do the scary thing and create your course and you, you know, you create it, you kind of figure it out. You Google everything and you get there and it's, and it's ready to go and you're so excited and you send some emails to your list and you talk about it on social media and you know, maybe if you're savvy and you've been following some of the launches, maybe you do a challenge as well or maybe do a webinar as well or something. But most people generally for their first list it's, sorry, first launch. It's all about the emails and all about the social media posts and just sort of celebrating and you know, being so excited about this new thing that you created. And you get some sales. Maybe, you know, it's a handful or maybe it's a whole bunch, but either way you're like, oh wow, can do this. This is a thing, this works. I'm going to do it again. And you know, and a few months later you do it again. You run, you know, a very similar style of launch to your, you know, to the same group of people and this time less sales. And that is what I call the curse of the second launch. And this, it's really, really common phenomenon. And you know, usually when that happens people go, oh, oh, maybe I just fluked it the first time. Maybe it's not really something people want, maybe it's no good, maybe I should go and completely change it. And this is where people normally go into this tailspin of getting stuck in the cycle of constantly creating new things and not stopping to master anything or you know, pivoting completely changing their product, just having all this self doubt and you know, allowing it to pretty much destroy this thing, which, which it actually I would count as being a proven success.

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So this is the curse of the second launch, guys. I'm going to tell you now why it happens. So first of all, if you have been online for any amount of time, if you've been working one on one with people or, you know, doing any kind, giving value in any way, you're gonna have some fans. You might not realize it. They may be quiet, but they are sitting there, they're on your list, they're following on social. And those people, I call them your diehards, they will literally buy whatever you put out. These are your best people. You should love on them and give them the best experience possible. And I hope you did the first time that you launched and they went through it. Problem is, second time you launch, they've already bought. So this second launch, it has to up the ante a little bit. It has to bring a bit more of the, you know, the marketing goodness. And quite often people, because, you know, they actually just expect when they launch something a second time because maybe the list has grown a little bit in between or, you know, they feel a bit more confident with it. They just expect that it's going to actually do better. But usually it doesn't, not unless you make some tweaks. Another thing to bear in mind is that again, every person on your list, every person who follows you, they are an individual. They have different preferences for how they buy. They have different preferences for how they engage with you and how they receive information and how they want to interact and how long they need to, you know, to know you and have heard of your product. There's a. An old rule that people needed to hear about a product at least like 10, 12, 14 times before they would purchase. And I believe it's actually more now because the world is so busy and things are so crowded. So there are going to be some people on your list who probably will buy, but they just haven't heard of this product enough yet. There was one launch and it was new, so they were never going to jump in on the new thing. And then this, there's this second one and they're like, yeah, maybe next time, you know, they just need a little bit longer or they need a different method of engagement. So maybe that they'd never buy directly from email or just because they saw something on Instagram stories. Maybe they need to, you know, engage with you in a different way. Whether that's with a sales call, with a webinar, with a challenge. You know, everybody has their own buying preferences and the ways of which work best for them and excite them the most and give them the information and the engagement and the trust that they need to take that next step and invest with you. So if you're just coming along and just doing the same thing over and over again, those people are never going to purchase because you, you're not giving them what they need and what they want. And as business owners, I believe that is our job to be able to create as many options as possible for people to be able to meet them where they are, give them what they need so that they feel comfortable and so that they feel ready to take that next step. So just an example of this, of how, you know, different people are and how vastly different people's buying behavior is and things is, with my launch we had, I went through and did the analytics at the end and we had 30% of people purchased were absolutely brand new to my list. So they never, they like we basically got, took the number of days that they were, had been a subscriber and compared them and they were all less than a week, which means, and we did this sort of like five or six days after the cut closed. So they literally saw an Instagram post or saw something else, they weren't on my list and they jumped in and purchased like, how crazy is that? And then there was another person who, who purchased who'd been on my list for 891 days. And the offer, this is my 5K funnel formula program. This has been on a funnel, it's been, you know, not properly launched, but it's been promoted roughly every 60 to 90 days for the last two years. So this person's had plenty of opportunities and either the trust wasn't there yet or they, you know, they didn't feel that they were quite ready yet or the timing wasn't right or whatever it was. Like some people need to see this over and over again. So don't just assume that because people didn't buy people who are already on your list, they didn't buy this second time that they never will. It just means either the timing's not right for them yet or that the way that you've launched hasn't really like, you know, ticked the boxes for them. They need something more from you. So this is what I mean about, you know, to avoid that, that curse of the second launch or if it's already happened, to sort of recover from it and go on to have a really great third, fourth, fifth launch. Now is time to up the ante. Now it's time to. It's not just about those die hards who you pretty much could have sent a three word email and a link and they would have purchased. Now you're going to need to take the time for a little bit of marketing mastery. And for those of you who aren't marketers listening to this and go, oh my gosh, but I'm no good at marketing. Yeah, you are. You've ever sold anything. You are. You're better than you think. You've been able, already been able to, you know, communicate the benefits of something to, you know, to a target market and have them purchase. That's marketing, it's not rocket science. But now it's time to take what you've already done so well and make it better, refine it and add some extra, more heavy lifting kind of style pieces as well to your launches. So here's a few tips around how to avoid the curse or recover from the curse of the second launch. So first of all is don't forget to list build in between your launches. Now this is something that's so easy to do because particularly if you're coming off the back of a first launch where you not only had to create and run your own launch, most likely completely by yourself, you also had to create a product and deliver that product and probably come back and tweak and update some things and set everything up yourself. And man, that's a lot of work and you just sort of want to disappear into a cave or a hole and you don't want to be out there in the world promoting things afterwards. You just want to have a break. And that's fair enough. So give yourself a break, but not too long and make sure that you come back and keep showing up on social, keep promoting any opt ins or opt in bribes that you have, lead magnets, whatever you want to call them, so that you keep adding these new fresh people to your email list because chances are a good proportion of those are going to be the ones who actually purchase next time. The second thing I think a lot of people forget to do is they forget to actually keep talking about their product after the doors have shut. Just because the card is closed doesn't mean you should shut up about your online course. Even if people can't purchase it. You want to make sure that FOMO level is high and particularly if it was one of the first times you've launched something, there can be some people sitting back going, I kind of want to see if it's any good. Because the first time you've launched, you know, there's no testimonials of that product. You don't have results yet. So make sure that as you are running your program, as you're delivering it as people are giving you feedback and you know they're posting your Facebook group, oh my gosh, this is amazing. Make sure you are screenshotting that stuff and you are sharing it. That you are showing up on stories and reels and talking about how great it is to see people moving through the program, how much you're loving delivering it, how great the feedback is. Like make sure that the FOMO doesn't stop just because your launch does. Because this is going to build up a little almost like invisible wait list of people who are like, damn, I wish I'd bought that looks amazing. I'm totally going to buy next time. So don't go radio silence on people. Basically once your launch is over, you'll launch. If you're launching, you're kind of always launching. If this is a model that you're doing. Same actually with the funnel. If you have an online business you are always in some way promoting and you have to be, you always have to be out there like within reason. I don't want people, you know, I believe that, that you should build a business that works for you and that works around your timetable and your timeframe. So don't go, you're over committing. But don't just stop and disappear from the Internet when you don't have something to sell. You've got to keep it up, you've got to keep that consistency. The third thing I would say is when it comes to your next couple of launches, don't just rely on email. So I know that so many people with their very first launch and it's, and it's fine. I would call, I call a first launch a beta launch or a founding members launch and usually just email is fine because as I said, you've got your Die hards there, they're ready, they're waiting, they were got that they're holding their credit card going, give me something to buy. So you know when you finally show up for them, they're going to be super excited to jump on in. So you don't need to do too much heavy lifting as long as you know your market and you've created a product that they want that those Die hards are going to go, yep, yep, sign me up. You know, you will get some sales in that first launch. But as I said, that second launch you need to give some people some different options and you need to sort of start upping your skills and upping your marketing toolbox with things that just convert better. Because a plain old email launch, you Know, especially these days, email rates are at a record low. People get, are on a lot of lists. It's hard to get their attention. You know, it's generally just not. It's not enough for most people to get them over. Mark. It's. For some people it will. And again, to give you example of my last launches, so you know what I'm talking about. We had what I would call four different launch layers. We had a wait list, we had a webinar, we had a challenge, and then we had upsells and downsells. So there are four individual sort of puzzle pieces that you kind of click in to make up an overall launch. And our total sales, it was literally, it was about 25% for each, like evenly spread. So if I had only done one of those, our launch would have been only 25% of the total of our sales. Now, personally, I think trying to create all of that right up front is, it's too much. It's crazy. Particularly if you don't have a team and you also haven't done some of these things before, so you don't know how they work. You don't feel comfortable. You don't have that baseline of going, yeah, I know my webinars convert at 10%. Like, I know my webinars convert at 10%. You know, to, to the percentage point. Pretty much my webinars convert at 10%. They always do. They always have. Doesn't even matter what I do. So that's, you know, I go, yeah, tick. That's a, that's a benchmark for me. I feel really comfortable when I do a webinar that I know what to expect for us this time. The things we added in that were new was a waitlist and a challenge. Hadn't done them this way before, so they were a bit unknown. So I'm going up on a tangent, but basically the what I'm. My point was that I think a lot of people, they, they get discouraged and they think, oh, this launch isn't going to work for me. Or they think, oh, I need this new shiny tactic. And they go out and they try this one shiny tactic and they wrap their whole. They rely entirely on this one thing. And then when they get the sales from it, they're like, oh, that wasn't great. But as I just sort of showed you with mine, I had four tactics in my launch to get our revenue total. And if we'd only had one or two, we would have had 25% or 50%. So my strategy and this is actually something I think I'm going to spend a lot of time, time playing with over the next 12 months because like I said, our, our funnels are pretty dialed in, guys. So I need a new challenge. I need something to dig my teeth into. And I'm kind of giving myself the mission of making launches like funnels, like making them that hands off coming up with systems and, and strategies and steps to be able to do that. And when I do, I'm absolutely going to share it with you guys because after having gone through a launch and like I said, spending like a week and a half just drained and slightly broken, I think that the current way we launch is a bit wrong. I think it's broken. I don't think anyone should have to risk their health and adrenals to make sales at a scalable level. So this is my new project, guys. This is my unofficial announcement of that. So keep, you know, keep your ears out for that. All right? And the final point, now that I've completely gone off on a tangent, the final thing that I would recommend that you do to avoid the curse of the second launch or recover from it, is that if this is a new product for you, if you don't already feel like your launch is something that I would call a reliable scalable launch, like one where you go, yep, I know I convert at this percent and that I'll be able to get this many people into it. And so that, you know, to be out about this amount of money this year from my launches, I need to run it this many times. Like, if you don't have that level of certainty around your launches yet, then I would recommend that you need to step away from what I call the big boy launch schedules, which is the every 90, 120, you know, it's every three, four or six months. People like you see the big boys, that's how often they launch. Those people have big teams, big marketing budgets, and they're constantly testing stuff in the background for a new product with a small audience. The recommended launch schedule that I challenge you to try is actually every 60 days. And if you're sitting there going, oh my gosh, that's. That's way too hard. That's. That's, you know, that's a lot of work. I won't be able to do anything else. The, you know, there's. I want you to look at it slightly differently. I want you to look at your launches as this asset that you're creating. And like I said, it's like a fun, you can look at launches like a funnel. You can look at them as building assets that can be reused and can be systemized and over time. You know, I would encourage you to get a VA who can help you to set up and schedule things. So and you know you're going to be reusing a lot of stuff. There's going to be a whole other episode on this. I think I can feel it. Because you don't need to be creating each every 60 days. You're not creating everything from scratch. You're actually taking what worked last time, redoing it, maybe tweaking some subject lines and headlines, things like that, and then maybe adding one new piece each time if you have the capacity and you have the time. But it just means that every 60 days you are going out to your market. So you're talking about it. You're, you're building this excitement. You get to really rapid fire test things and improve things. So every launch you can be, you know, adding in an extra piece or improving a piece and increasing the conversions each time. And by the end of the 12 months you will have mastered that launch. You'll have that almost funneled hands free style launch. And that I think is the real difference between people who hit this curse of the second launch get discouraged. Go. Okay, well now I'm going to try a challenge. Oh, that didn't work quite well enough. Okay. I'm no good at challenges. Okay, I'm going to try webinar. That didn't work well enough. I'm no good at webinars. Okay, I'm going to try a three part video series. That didn't work well enough. Okay. It's, you know, you get stuck, you can get stuck on that cycle when actually the probably all of those pieces, none of them were bad. The thing that was failing you was that you weren't getting enough people. Either you weren't getting enough people through it or you didn't have enough pieces of your launch to allow the people who did come through to have the option to convert and to engage in the way that suits them. I hope that makes sense, guys. If it doesn't, or even if it does, if you'd like to chat about this more, as I said, we are about, we are going to be shortly kicking off another round of the sold out success challenge because it was so much fun last time and we're going to squeeze in one more before the end of the year. It's all kicking off Tuesday, December 8th. It's just a three day challenge, guys. It's a really great way to end out the year. It's super, super bite size. Every day you get there's a training video. It's about 15 minutes. You, you dive in. We've got live Q&As, we've got critiquing, we've got an amazing community, we've got epic prizes. We have our CEO Staycation prize where one lucky, amazing person who joins us for the challenge. Actually, we're going to treat you to a luxury pampering weekend away in the city near you so that you can go away and recharge and relax and come up with your next million dollar idea. It's so much fun. You're going to love it. As I said, it starts December 8th. That's Aussie time. So we December 7th for most other people and you just need to go to kateschallenge.com or grab the link out of the show notes and jump in and join us now. And yeah, I can't wait to kick it off and to run it all with you guys again. It's as I said, super, super fun. What better way to end out the year than to taking your, you know, your course, your program, you know, so sort of. Okay. And turning it into a sold out success. It's going to be great. I will see you all there. Bye guys.

Thanks so much for listening to the Doing it online podcast. If you love this episode, don't forget to subscribe and leave us a review. And if you're ready to take your online course sales to the next level with your own six or seven figure funnel, let Kate show you exactly how today@stealmyfunnel.com.

Sam.