#242 - Our launch flopped: Here's why I am delighted!

The live launch method, that whole stressful setup, while it can work great for some, it doesn't work for me. I feel like this was like the clearest slap from the universe, like, why you keep doing this to yourself.

Have you ever heard someone say that they were actually excited to have a launch? Totally flop? Well, I just did. And inside this episode, I'm going to tell you why. Hey, hey, everybody, it is Kate here from. Hello, Funnels, and welcome back to the Doing It Online podcast. In today's episode, I am going to peel back the covers and share with you about one of our biggest launch fails for 2024 and exactly why I was actually so pumped that it happened and all of the lessons that we took out of it that are going to make our 2025 so much better and that you can take away and implement and install into your business so you can have a more profitable and less stressful 2025 as well. Are you ready? Let's dive right on it. Okay, so first of all, I need to start with a bit of a backstory, okay? Because as you would know if you've been following this channel, this podcast, my Instagram for any amount of time, you know, I'm not a fan of launches. I mean, hello. My business is literally called hello, Funnels. So what in the world possessed me to do another big launch? Well, for starters, it had been over two years since I'd pretty much sworn off large style launching. And what I mean by large style launching is those launches that are, you know, they're so complex, there's so many elements tied together. So, you know, you might have, you know, like a webinar and a challenge and like six months of lead up copy and all of these pieces in place. And to actually create those, they usually have a pretty big output. Like so your time, your team's time, you usually have to bring in, you know, exterior journal help, which we did. We spent about 8k on getting things created, updated and ready to go for this big launch. And they're kind of just all consuming. They've got such a long Runway into them. Like you're planning them out two, three, four months out. And you're spending so much of that time that when it gets to that actual promotion, the actual open cart, it's terrifying. It's so stressful. Like everything can be riding on it. I mean, luckily for us it wasn't because, you know, we have funnels, we have backup plans, we have all this other stuff. But for that six weeks leading up to it, when it was kind of like the big push, and we're supposedly, like, growing momentum. You know, I turned a lot of that stuff off, so we were actually making less sales in that time than we normally would. And then when it got to the actual open cart sales, we made less again. It was actually our quietest week of the year, which was just so crazy. But after that initial moment of like, what the heck, like, what just happened? I was actually delighted. And there was a couple of reasons for that. The first one being that it kind of showed me pretty clearly and re reminded me of the lesson that I'd learned before. Like, I'd learned, you know, multiple times in the years prior, that the live launch method, that whole stressful setup, while it can work great for some, it doesn't work for me. I feel like, literally, and I'm not a super woo woo person, I'm woo woo adjacent. But I feel like this is the clearest slap from the universe of why you keep doing this to yourself. How you normally show up, how I'm talking about myself in the third person. But what we normally do, our normal structure of evergreen, the fact we had to turn off our evergreen funnels for this killed me. And then it didn't even.

Earn itself back. But, you know, if we hadn't, if we had just done our normal plan, we would have been ahead. And I feel like that was just that. That was that clear, like, download that I needed again. Like, stop trying to distract yourself, Kate. Stay the course. Keep focusing on what you do well, and it works better for you. So that was, you know, why I was so. I was so excited. Anyway, I had a few people come up because I'm very open book. I've done a few posts on Instagram about how the launch was a big flop, and people are like, oh, my gosh, are you okay? I'm like, yeah, I'm actually great. I am so happy that I got this permission from, you know, the universe, the Instagram algorithm, whatever you want to call it, to never have to go through that stress again and just reconfirm with myself that the strategies we're already following are the best strategies for us for how I want to run my business, for my audience size, for how much we're comfortable spending on ads and all of those bits and pieces. And that all just kind of helped me really clarify, you know, what to do in the new year. So besides that big download, that launching isn't for me and I'm never going to do it again. Download. You know, there were a few Other lessons that did come out of this. And actually, sorry, I need to go on one little side quest because I forgot to mention this earlier. The actual real reason why we actually came in and decided to do the big launch, other than, you know, it had been a while and I was getting, I know a little bit of FOMO about other people doing their massive launches was that I had gone through and I decided one of the things I want to get done before the end of this year was to update a bunch of stuff in our evergreen funnels. But it kept getting pushed to the back of the line, back of the to do list, because there was no, like, it has to be done by this date. So. So I decided to make it public. I was like, okay, let's go out there and let's create this stuff to be shared live and say that. So say this is going to happen on this date. Like, we're going to have a webinar on this date. We're going to be sharing, you know, these free resources on this date and then that's going to force us to do them. So pros and cons there, right, guys? So as a cons, we had to turn off our funnels, which meant we were behind in sales. But pro, we got a bunch of stuff which on its own, and looking at the numbers, I'm still pretty happy to go and put in and use in pieces into our updated funnel. So that was, I guess, the second reason why we decided to do the crazy thing of the big launch and why I'm not so super upset. That didn't do well, because I know that I'm going to take this stuff put into my funnel and use it for the next couple of years. The other lessons, probably the lessons that, you know, if you're not someone who is as dedicated and obsessed with funnels as me, but other things that you can go and take away and add into your business in 2025. Number one, and this one was definitely a bit of a like, head slap moment was timings. So when we made this decision that we wanted to get all this stuff done before the end of the year, I wanted to make sure that we picked dates that were going to give it a good chance, but were also going to give us enough space to get these things created. So we kind of landed like, I knew it was going when it was going to happen. I wanted to do it before Black Friday because I knew that was going to get really busy and I completely forgot about the election. So the election in the US and the lead up to that, obviously, was a just thing I hadn't factored in. And I think there was a bunch of people who were probably feeling the same, because that week and literally that day that we ran our webinar, there was four other people in very similar, like, crossover industries who ran this on the exact same day. So what are the chances? But I think it was just one of those things that we know we picked a week, three weeks before Black Friday to give that enough space there, you know, And I think a lot of people kind of obviously had that same rationale. So timings very important. You don't always have control over it, though. Again, another reason why I love funnels, because you don't have to have your choice of day and what happens on that day. Be something that's so, you know, so crucial. Number two is to look and listen to your numbers. So time and time again, I've known that the people who come into our list and buy from us, they usually take a certain amount of time. They usually prefer to be able to do things on their own time frames because, you know, they're busy. So to try and set up a launch, that had to be done. You know, people were coming in from ads, potentially completely cold into our world, expected to know enough about us in a very short period of time, and then have to show up and be somewhere on a certain day at a certain time. That was just breaking all of the rules that I knew previously. And again, not everyone is the same, but it is so important to know your numbers and to know how your audience reacts and how your audience behaves and what they need and to definitely plan things out accordingly. I think I was just being very bullish in that I was like, I want to get this done by this date, so bugger, we're going to. And yeah, we obviously had the repercussions of that. Number three, don't change too many things at once. So, again, because I was using this as an excuse to update everything, we literally updated everything, including new sales page, new offer, new, like, new everything. And so when it then came to being like our open cart week, and I was going, oh, okay, this is interesting. This is like, way less than what we normally would get, even with a live promotion, with our, like, evergreen style of promotions, we normally would have had a lot more activity than we did. So I was like, this is so weird, what's going on? And it became really hard for us to pinpoint which one of these many changes we had made was responsible for this drop in like, activity, like, even. So that was definitely something. And again, I preach this all the time to my amazing clients, but sometimes you just have to relearn the lessons yourself. So particularly if you've got something existing that usually converts at a certain rate, even if you are wanting to update it, I would highly recommend that you only update one thing at a time. Test it, then do the next thing. Don't try and do it all at once. It's just a bit of a nightmare and you're inviting chaos, which is never ideal. And then the final lesson, the number one thing, and I've already kind of mentioned it, but I just wanted to reiterate it again. Is that for us, for how I like to do business, for how my clients seem to like to buy and to be marketed to and to participate with us as a brand, I know what works best is evergreen funnels in combination with our evergreen style launches. So that is launches that feel like funnels, that are rinse and repeat, that are low stress, that don't take up your entire quarter trying to get set up and created. They take a few hours to create. They work better for us because they give us time to be focusing on the other more important parts of our business and they seem to convert better as well. So tick, tick here. So you, if, if you know what works for you, then stick to it. I think particularly coming in to the new year, I think when you're making your plans for the year, I would probably recommend staying within the. This has worked before. Well, particularly if it's worked before. Well, recently, like, if it's, you know, dropped off a cliff in the last six months, then that's not the same thing. But if you're like, this has been my bread and butter, it's still my bread and butter. I would put like 80% of what you're planning to fall under that category and then leaving a little bit of space, like 20% space to play, to experiment, to try new things, because you never know what new thing could be something to, you know, to spark and get you up to that next level. But you don't want to have your entire year being reliant on brand new things. And so this is going to be, that'll be the mix that I would recommend particularly going into, you know, what's looking to be another semi challenging year with the economy, you know, politics, all of that not so fun stuff. So what is our plan going into 2025? Well, number one, I said sticking to what works with for us. Rinse, repeat, Keep the blinders on. That's what we're going to be doing. Number two is we're going to be focusing on optimizing what works for us. So rather than coming up with new stuff, we're going to take what already works for us and we're going to piece by piece, not all at once, be every time we run something to look to optimize or update one thing at a time and hopefully we can stack our wins much, much faster that way. And the third thing, because by doing it this way, keeping it simple, not recreating things every single time, this will actually free up so much of our time, both me and my team. This means that I'm going to be focusing a really huge percentage of my time to audience building in the new year, so to driving people into the machine that we've already built rather than trying to juggle both of those very, you know, time consuming things. And I'm actually going to be breaking this down a bit more in the upcoming episodes. So if you're thinking that sounds great for you, Kate, but I don't have a bunch of things which are reliable. I don't have something which I can, you know, focus my 80% of time on, on next year. I'm still very much in that, you know, what do I do, what works kind of phase. Next three episodes are designed just for you. I'm going to break it down, make it super easy. Of course, if you don't wait till then, you can always jump in and join us inside Ecourse Empire because it's literally what we do for our clients. Otherwise, make sure you come back next week and do that. And if you can't wait until then, I have a gift for you. And that is a gorgeous 47 page, beautifully designed marketing planner designed just for course creators and coaches. It's got everything you need to map out your goals, to map out your, your promotions, to map out your calendar, to, you know, to set and track how you're going on your list, building goals, all of that. It looks great, it's super easy to use, it's value packed and it's totally for free. And if you want to grab it for yourself, all you need to do is head to HelloFunnels Co 2025 or the link will be below in the show notes and you can grab that totally free and that can help you to start putting some of these pieces into place. Ready to come back next week and we're going to help you flesh it out even more. So until then, guys, have an amazing and super nerdy week, and I will see you next time. Bye.