Episode 70: Our Latest Launch Experiment!

Welcome to the Create youe Laptop Life podcast, where entrepreneurs all around the world come to learn how to market and grow their online business right from their laptops, wherever they are. We don't have traditional nine to five jobs and we don't want them because financial and lifestyle security and freedom is too important to us. We know the world is changing for the better and that the freelance and entrepreneur economy is the cleaner, greener, smarter way to work for both families and businesses. My name is Julie, and this podcast will teach you everything you need to know about creating and growing your laptop life. Hey, everyone, this is Julie. Hope you guys are doing amazing. So today I kind of want to take you a little bit behind the scenes of what Kathy and I are doing with our next big launch. On March 9, we opened the doors to Launch Gorgeous. We are in phase four as of the recording of this, but probably by the time you hear this episode, we are in phase five of the first round of Launch Gorgeous. And the program actually has six phases. So wanted to take you behind the scenes of some things that we're trying that we've never done before. So a lot of you guys know that I talk a lot about different funnel types depending on the value ladder. And people are always asking me, you know, you know, how do I know what kind of funnel to use, you know, what kind of offer to create? And I always say to them, you know what, you should, you should purchase Funnel Rx because that answers that question completely and entirely. But typically there is some price differential between the three different levels of your customer journey. From the beginning level when they're getting introduced to you, to the mid level where you're offering them sort of a flagship offer to the premium, which is, you know, only about 5% of your customer base are going to take it. So what Kathy and I are kind of embarking on as an experiment really, is we are working on turning this program, Launch Gorgeous, into one of our premium offers. It's definitely higher ticket than anything else that we sell. For any of you guys listening who've purchased Offercure and FunnelRx, they're very, very affordable. Our templates are affordable. We actually function as a company more like a digital commerce. So think of an E Comm brand, but just digital commerce because we have so many products in our shop and things like that. So we are really focusing our info product line. This particular program launched Gorgeous on the premium market, so it's going to launch at a higher price point than most courses. The second thing we're doing is we are basically killing the course idea. And we are doing this for a couple reasons. Number one, we all know that courses that the education industry is exploding and it's sort of a play on words because yes, of course we have online curriculum for Launch Gorgeous. But what we're trying to teach and what we, I think have succeeded in doing in our lower ticket products is teach in a way that gets people to take action, to get momentum in their business, and to basically clear a hurdle that they couldn't clear before. Because a lot of us think that the problem with our business or whatever solution we're trying to find is that we don't have the right information. And it's almost never about the information. It's almost always about the execution of that information, the implementation of the information in the context of real life, with lots of distractions, personality types, all that kind of stuff. So Launch Gorgeous is going to be a higher ticket program. It's going to be a $3,000 done with you experience. And the reason why we're calling it that is because we are working with the students live day by day to make sure they get what they need to get done in time to launch. So a couple key factors about Launch Gorgeous that are different than other programs. Number one, every program is done live and there is a set date in which you launch, you complete. So much like university where you have a test and you all take a test at the last day or an exam and you pass the exam. Even though there's no pass fail in Launch Gorgeous, we are going to all launch at the same time. So right now we're in the middle of launch launching with this first cohort. And March 23rd is the date. Nobody's going to go to jail or, you know, get a, get an X mark or whatever an F on their report card if they don't launch on March 23rd. But the idea is that the group is moving towards that date and it creates some social pressure, the good kind. Number two, it makes it so that the assignments are very clear. So it's very obvious when somebody is overthinking or falling down a rabbit hole because you basically say, hey, what's the homework assignment for today? And they tell you. And then if they say, well, I'm worrying about something that's not on the homework assignment, then pretty much, you know, that you're either overthinking or, you know, getting off track. And so it's very, very easy to stay on track when you have that kind of what's essentially daily accountability so those two things require a fair amount of effort from Kathy and I because we are in the group on a daily basis. We answer questions once a week. We also do a core training, we also have resources, et cetera, et cetera. So the program, it's been really fun to watch because it is having the intended effect that we hoped it would have, which is that people are really working through a lot of the mindset issues that come up when you try to launch, when you try to build a funnel. And so it's basically proof to us that it's working because falling behind is harder in this program. So we're launching it at $3,000. Now, typically if someone came to me and said, Hey, a $3,000 program or above would be an application and a sales call. It's very unusual to have a $3,000 program that's a simple buy now, especially if you don't have a webinar. But we're getting ready to launch and we are not going to have a we and we're going to open up our cart at $29.97. We will have a payment plan. So this is a little bit of an experiment for us. We have a lot of loyalty, we have a lot of great customers. We're not trying to list a build to sell to a cold audience. So that's important to note from a strategy perspective. We are selling to our existing audience and we're going to see if this works. We're going to see if people trust us, trust our experience, trust our results, trust our testimonials and just trust our process enough to be able to. I'm ready to dive in. And one of the things that we're doing in our messaging is really drilling down what it is and what it isn't. So Launch Gorgeous is not a course. It is way more like a coaching program. But even that sort of falls flat because coaching programs, I mean, some do, but most coaching programs aren't going to give you a day by day assignment. It's more like a weekly check in. And that's where Launch Gorgeous is totally different. We also are adding several features to the program that give you that sense of a total shortcut. So from our templates and actually we're going to be giving, I believe it's $500 of funnel gorgeous dollars to use for templates. And we tell you what to buy, when to buy it, how to use it, how to adjust it. That people who would have said, oh my gosh, like I didn't think I could Ever write sales copy are now writing sales copy. People who don't have any design experience modifying their logos, getting their brand ready to go. And it's just incredible to see how much momentum there is when you really work hard to design a program that meets the person where they're at and helps pull them over to that next hump. So March 9th is the big day. If you are on my email list, you probably are seeing emails go out. We're working on a pre launch series right now. We've got, you know, posts on Facebook and Instagram. You can see there's a lot of buzz being built. And if you've listened or binged on my podcast, you know that I like to build pressure. So you're seeing that happen. There will be a lot of the signature hallmarks of what we do when we launch. But again, this is an experiment because we are basically saying to people, hey, we're launching a coaching program, a premium program, done with you, live experience, but we're actually going to do a buy now. What are our expectations? You know, it's really fun. I use a lot of the spreadsheets that I created for launch. Gorgeous. I built specifically for my high end one on one clients because I kept having the same conversations over and over and I thought, well, gosh, let me just solve this problem here, you know, with a spreadsheet. So I'm actually using the spreadsheet for Kathy and I. We're using our own templates. We're using like we're using our own curriculum, which is super fun. And so we are expecting a smaller group for this. And in fact we both made the call that, you know, we crunched the numbers that we never want more than probably at the very most 200 people in a group, and more importantly, probably closer to 100 would be the most ideal. We're doing the group right now with 171 people and it's working great. We're able to get to everybody's questions without any trouble. We're able to be in the Facebook group every day and see every single post that comes through, which is I think pretty impressive. So we expect to get around 100 students. That's our hope. That's our goal for this next launch. But using the spreadsheets, that's going to take a significant push. Not only that, it's an investment for sure. So for any of you guys who are watching what we do and looking behind the scenes, why are they doing it this way? Why are they doing it that way? One of the things that you've seen sort of exploding in the Funnel Gorgeous brand is this idea of creating momentum. And it's not enough for us to just give you education. It's not enough for us to just tell you the information. We actually want to present it in a way that takes action. And what that ultimately does is it creates sort of a virality almost of our courses. We are approaching 3,200 students in offer Cure. We launched it in October, so November, December, January, so four and four months we have gotten over 3,000 students. And some of our students are really big names in the space who've actually written into us and said this program was amazing. And so that's sort of where we're headed. And that's what Launch Gorgeous is doing on a much grander scale is taking all that we learned about what worked with CenterCure and what worked with Funnelrx and putting that into a Done with youh experience where you're just not going to get the same experience in a regular course where the course creator shows up maybe once a week. It's way more intense, hands on. And it also puts a lot of onus and responsibility on the person to say, yeah, I'm ready, I'm ready to launch. We don't want people in the program who are not ready to launch. We don't want people collecting our curriculum. We want to incentivize people. And one of the really fun things that we're actually going to be rolling out is, you know, Kathy and I have a pretty good email list. It's not huge, but it's very, very engaged. And so we are going to be writing an email to our list of about 20, 25,000 people. And we're going to pick three of our launchers, three people who we think did an amazing job following the experience and launching. And we're actually going to blast out an email highlighting these three people and sending links to their funnels and offers, which is an incredible sort of gift to those three people and hopefully incentivizes everyone who comes through the program to not let it collect dust on the shelf, to work with us live to get, to commit to showing up for yourself, showing up for your offers and your business. So if you guys are watching behind the scenes or you want to get in on the pre launch, you go to launchgorgeous.com the doors are opening March 9th. We will shut the doors if we hit 200 students. We have committed to that. So that is a big, a big gamble on our parts. Obviously we would love to do a million dollar launch someday, but launch Gorgeous. It's more important for us to protect the integrity of the program. So it is by its nature scarce, by its nature urgent. It's going to be an experiment. And I will keep you posted on everything that happens. And thank you guys for listening. Really appreciate you. If you enjoy my podcast, I'll tell you what, Instagram tags juliestoyen reviews on the podcast itself, mentions in Facebook groups really motivate me to keep recording because sometimes it gets hard with the busyness. So if you enjoy this, I would love to hear about it. So I appreciate you all. I'll talk to you soon. If you're ready to create, grow, scale your online business, you can go to create your laptop podcast and get a free plan on how you can get started today.