#97 - How to avoid the ’Covid Launch Curse’

With that in mind, being able to do some kind of live something a few times a year is. It is a necessary evil, even if we don't necessarily love it. But how do we do it in a way that is more lifeproof?

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.

Hello. Hello everybody and welcome to episode number 97 of the Doing It Online podcast. I am your host Kate from HelloFunnels code and today I wanted to talk about something that I keep seeing happening. It's a bit of a weird phenomenon that hopefully in a few years time we'll look back on and laugh, but it's something that I'm dubbing the COVID launch curse. And if you were in this world, this online launching world, online course world online, anything world really, you may have noticed it yourself that it seems to be whenever somebody has a big promotion, a big launch, something that's big going on online in their business, that generally, generally, sorry, requires them to turn up, show up, have their A game on.

They seem to get Covid, like almost every time, it's almost become this new rite of passage. The old rite of passage used to be doing a webinar and it completely crashed and burned and your tech failed and your child streaked behind you nude and all these things. Not anymore. Now the new little Yay, I'm an entrepreneur badge that everyone seems to be earning is the Yay, I got Covid during my, during my big launch. And it doesn't just have to be you necessarily specifically getting Covid. It could be your team. It could be the fact that your kids, school or daycare gets shut down because of COVID There goes all of your. You might have had all these calls that were supposed to be live scheduled and now you've got to try and, you know, keep the kids out of the room and whatnot. It just seems to be that more and more.

Just in this last even like three, four months, anytime someone is like, right, I've got to do this. This is important.

Covid comes in and just goes, no, sorry. Haha. Having seen this happen to a lot of friends, having just the feeling like so far, touch wood. I've managed to personally avoid getting Covid, but my kids have had it. My Step kids have had it, my team's all had it. Like it's, you know, it kind of at one point it felt like it was like I could almost like feel it in the air coming for me. When we were planning out not just the last launch which we've just wrapped up, but the one before that, I was like, okay, well what do we do about this? Like it's not really, I've never really sat down and gone what is our contingency plan if, if we are doing something live and it does require me or me to turn up me to have the ability to speak all of those things like what is our backup plan? And I wanted to talk to you guys about that and some of the things that we've been implementing to try and not just Covid proof but it's, it's all kinds of things can happen, right? I had very sadly had a good friend of mine, she had a, you know, a health issue but popped up day of what was supposed to be like this big culmination of her launch, big live webinar. But she couldn't do it. And if she'd not been able didn't have an amazing team who kind of jumped in and basically figured out how to take an old recording of something that was similar and play it live instead. People didn't even really know she would have lost not just the tens of thousands of dollars that she'd spent on ads and whatnot for that launch, plus all the time and energy that her and her team put into it, but also what would have been about like half of her year's revenue. Like all of this is the reasons why I'm personally prefer funnels every day of the week. But I also know that a business and you know, I've seen it my own business, I've seen it in clients, businesses that to go a hundred percent automated is, you know, it. It's not the necessarily how you're going to get the best momentum, the best profit because don't forget people, they can come in, they go through your funnel. Not everyone's going to be ready to buy. Then depending on how long your funnel is, you can't just then just dump them into a bucket and never speak to them again. Maybe they're going to be ready in six months time. We've dug into the stats of our own, you know, people who've purchased our programs and I always, I love looking at these numbers when we do like a post launch roundup. It's like some people were on our list for less than 24 hours. And some people were on our list for six years. There's. You do have to keep showing up. I do find it is, you know, that funnels work best and launches work best when combined with that in mind, being able to do some kind of live something a few times a year is. It is a necessary evil, even if we don't necessarily love it. But how do we do it in a way that is more lifeproof? That does mean that it's less risky to go and as I said, spend all this time, spend all this effort, spend potentially money as well and have you hanging on this thing actually going well, knowing that literally life can happen at any second. So like I said, that's what I wanted to talk about today. Some of the things that we've been doing ourselves behind the scenes to try and quote unquote, lifeproof or what was specifically Covid launch curse proofing that is now going to be rolled out to all of our launches anyway. The first thing, and this is something we always try and do, but I think it's just become more and more important is making sure that you don't leave anything to the last minute, that everything is planned out well in advance, that everything is prepared and ready well in advance. Because if like maybe it's two weeks out from your launch, maybe that's when life happens. You know, you don't want to be leaving yourself with such a small margin of error that if you are wiped out for a week or whatever happens or heaven for the. Do you get sick or a family member gets sick or something? We've had power surges, we've had. There's been floods, there's been. This year has been crazy. That it's not going to like, you need to have that buffer. You need to have that. It's like, okay, well if I can't do anything this week, I can make it up for it next week. Or just making sure you have enough spaciousness in your plans. And that, and a big part of that as well is also whatever you are creating is trying to be smarter as you're creating it and try and reuse as much as you can. Not just creating brand new launches from scratch every time, but instead taking things that have worked and building on them, improving them and reusing and repurposing that. The actual setup time, the creation time is significantly less. That has been really, really big and always has been really, really important for us. That's why in like inside our live launch project, inside ecourse empire, we go through when we map out. And people are always surprised when I show them, like, this is the launch plan. And it's not just start emails here. It's like, okay, this is the plan of when you actually start creating things. This is the plan of when you start planning things. And it's like three months out from when you're your actual launch or two months, depending on the type of launch that you're creating. So it might sound crazy, it might sound a lot, but, but. And particularly if it's just you and you don't have a team yet or you only have maybe one VA or something like that, you need to give yourself that longer Runway, that longer buffer. But again, you're going to do it in a way work in a way that is smarter, not harder, because you don't be spending literally three months every spare second creating a launch. That's not what we want either. But yeah, point number one, absolutely giving yourself the spaciousness in your plan, not leaving everything to the last minute and definitely being smarter about what you're creating, reusing what you can. Second one is, and this is something that again, even if you don't have a team, do this for yourself, is sit down and run the contingency plans. Go. Okay, if I can't say you have a live workshop and you're like, well, what if I can't actually do these live calls? What if, you know, option one, it's because my kids are home during the day, so I'm not going to be able to do it. Okay, well then if that's the case, we can change the calls to this time. We'll do them at night instead. And you. And if that's the case and we just have to send a few emails and some people might be disgruntled, but it's not the end of the world. Or, and then we can post the replays here or something like that. Or what if you can't attend them at all? What are you going to do? Is there something. Can you get people, someone else to jump in on your team, or is there a friend or someone who can answer something for you? Do you have any backups of. If you like, maybe it was a Q and a session or something. You know what the most common questions are? Maybe you need to create some backups. Sitting down and looking at, like, what are those elements? Like, what are those key pieces that if something happens, you're going to need a contingency plan. And then a big part of that is having backups, having stuff on hand, knowing where it is, that if something does happen, you can slot it in or your team can slot it in. So for the example of my friend who was not able to do her webinar, like I said, they went and they found a. The last webinar she'd done. Topics were pretty similar. They downloaded that video, they were able to just to play it inside the email system. Not many people even noticed that it wasn't legitimately live. Although, you know, if you want, you could have someone go jump in and go, this has happened, but we're running this here. But you need to have, you need to think about what those kind of things that could happen that could potentially break your launch and, and go, okay, well, what's, what is our backup plan? What do we do? And making sure that that's documented that those links are on hand so that if the worst does happen, you don't want to be scrambling around going, oh, I can't remember what I decided on that. Where is that? Like, it needs to be like, made stupid simple. I would do this as part of your launch planning. I would sit down and go, okay, this is how we're going to run our launch. And this is what our backup plan is going to be if shit hits the fan. The third thing, and this one we just decided to just try for our next. The launch that we just wrapped up, it's still, as of recording this, it's still well in progress. So we don't have final numbers or stats or anything, unfortunately to share. But what we wanted to test out was, well, what if we did something that wasn't really very live at all? You know, most of the launches that we've done have required me to be able to turn up at certain times for at least an hour, a game on, no kids screaming in the background for like four days, five days, six days kind of thing. And that given the current climate and also given the fact that by the end of that I'm ready to just like fall in a heap, it's actually not ideal. Like, let's try something else. Let's try doing something that's almost totally prerecorded. What does that look like? How does that convert? How do people. Are people still able to get the same benefits and the same outcomes and the same value from. From doing something that has a different format. So testing. And again, I probably wouldn't recommend that you necessarily test this on. Everything's hanging on at launch. I've always done it one way. And like, unless you feel really confident but it is definitely something that maybe on a small scale launch you might want to test out. Like, do I need to do all the live stuff? Or what happens if I have things set up in a bit more of a ready in advance, prerecorded way? It's just an experiment that I would encourage you to try in your own business too, because again, potentially just removing that requirement for you to be showing up live could be one of those things that really does help to life proof your launch. And then the final point, and this is one that I cannot stress enough, is that you don't want to have it, that your launch is a make or break kind of scenario like this. And this is why I think everyone should have a funnel. Because and why our goal for people inside our programs when they're creating their funnels is that the funnel is gonna be set up and scaled up in such a way that the funnel is making enough money every month to cover paying you, cover paying your bills, cover paying your staff. We call that the financial freedom checkpoint. And then it means that any launches that is nice to have revenue on top, and obviously it's revenue you can reinvest, you can use it to grow, you can keep it in your bank account, your shock horror. But when you make that flip, when all of a sudden this launch, like if something does happen, if you have to push it back, if you have to cancel it, if it just doesn't convert as well as you'd hoped, for whatever reason, the world does not come crashing down because that regardless of how this launch goes, everything is going to be fine because you have your funnel and that funnel supports you and your business. That is probably the most important part of lifeproofing your launches, Covid proofing your launches. Just because that will give you the closest thing to solid, reliable foundation as you can have when you have your own business, when you are in this online marketing world, hopefully that has given you some food for thought. Hopefully there's at least one thing in there that you're like, yes, I'm going to go and do that and apply it. And it will hopefully remove a ton of the risk from you and from your next launch. And of course, if you would like help with setting up your funnels, with figuring out how to systemize your launches and all of that good stuff, then come on over to Ecourse Empire. Links are below. Come check it out. That's exactly what we do where we have all the tools, the templates, the planners, we've got the team there to support you advise you. We're here to help you sort this all out and so much more help you to create, grow, Automate, scale your online course to six figures and above and we'd love to have you and help you inside the program. So that's it for this episode guys. Hope you loved it. Make sure you tune in next week. We are kicking off something special. I think you're going to really love it. It's a new four part series around creating an online course and the best way to do it right now in 2020. Really excited to share it with you. Until then guys, have an amazing week. Keep doing what you do and I'll see you online. Bye.

Thanks so much for listening to the Doing It Online podcast. If you love this episode, don't forget to subscribe. 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.