The #1 Thing To Learn From Jessi Jean's Viral Launch

Welcome to Million Dollar Grit, the podcast that dives deep into the world of entrepreneurship, where tenacity meets strategy and dreams meet reality. My name is Julie Chenell, and I explore the raw, often overlooked truths of what it takes to succeed in business and in life. It's not just about the glossy success stories, it's about the grit it takes to get there.

Hey everyone, this is Julie Chenell. Welcome back to an episode of Million Dollar Grit. In my car. I have an absolutely bonkers week ahead, actually 2 weeks. I'm going to be hosting my first AI and sheep workshop at my home, which I'm so excited about. And it just means that there's a lot of preparation underway and I knew I would not get a podcast out unless I did it while I was in the car. And, you know, I have to give a little hat tip to Russell Brunson, who was the first marketer I heard who did an episode of podcasting in his car and I thought, well, you know what, that's just the example of getting it done. Here I am. What I want to talk about today is the epic launch that Jessie Jean did on Instagram. If you don't know who she is, she is actually a former client of mine. I would actually call her a current client. And I'll try not to say the word actually anymore in this podcast episode. She's a current client. We'll just call her that. I actually met Jessie back in the ClickFunnels days over in the Two Comma Club. I was one of the head coaches for the Two Comma Club, and she was a student and she was running a binge and disordered eating recovery program. And I remember her, I remember her funnels and she always struck me as someone who really cared about detail. When she reached out to me several years later to help her with some funnels, I had been following her on Instagram on her old account, and she had about 150,000 followers or something. And I always remember whenever she would post, I would be sure to watch. I would be sure to listen. There was something about her content that was very, I don't know, it was attractive. Not attractive in the like. Design aesthetic, although she did also do a great job there. But there was some— something attracted me to her energetically, and I was always blown away by her transparency. It was crazy, some of the things that her followers would admit to her in private, and then she would anonymously share them on her story. And it was like the ultimate tea. And I always followed her, always loved her stuff. So when she reached out to ask for help for funnels, I felt like I know— I knew her. You know, we had this like little parasocial relationship going on. I worked with her for several months and we did some funnels. I explained how FG Funnels works. I introduced her to a designer and just everything about what she did was good. It was not, it was not enough for her to just be like, okay. She had an extremely high standard of what good enough was in her mind. And I was working through her program in part because I was helping her with sales copy for that program. And I ended up taking her program by nature of being her copywriter in that and felt that just her content was also very good. Like her teaching content was good. Fast forward, she goes dark for a while and we ended our coaching arrangement and then all of a sudden she pops up on a brand new account. And my first thought was, that is the most ballsy thing I have ever seen. To be able to say, you know what, I've got 150,000 followers on Instagram and I'm just gonna start over. If you are at all like a psychological, like if you're interested in that stuff, there's a psychological mindset called sunk cost fallacy, which is like, I'm already in too deep. I've, I've gone too far. I can't turn around now. Yeah, she doesn't have that, or if she does have that, she was able to override it. I do have a theory that because of the way Instagram works, I think that Instagram knew that her content was good, and when she started a new account, new accounts get extra, I don't know, algorithmic juice or whatever. So she had that advantage of like, by starting a new account, she was getting the like This is a new account from Instagram, which was giving her a little boost and probably Instagram knew, oh, wait a minute, this is Jessie. Like her content does really well. But what struck me about her new Instagram account was its nichelessness. I mean, she was breaking every single rule about niche and content pillars. And she was talking about the career, her career confused era. She was talking about furniture flipping. She was talking money transparency and. Unhinged ways to make money. It was just all over the place. And if you found a reel from her because you loved her furniture, and then all of a sudden she's talking about like how to make money online or social content, you know, maybe you would bounce. But people didn't bounce. Again, I think it was not— it was because people were staying because of her energy, because of, of who she was and how she was projecting herself online, which is actually how she is in real life as someone who has coached and worked with her. And her account grew. And I do want to say, you know, for as, uh, raw and unproduced as she is, she's got some absolute talent when it comes to editing. She just knows what looks good and what works. And if you don't believe me, go look at her furniture flips because they're gorgeous. And if I tried to flip furniture, it would not look like that. So there's some natural talent there for sure in the aesthetics. And I think this is another reason why her account grew so fast. It was authentic, good energy, good presentation energy, fantastic editing. She was brave enough to just go ahead and start a new channel. She understands the art of the hook and her account took off. She reached out to me a couple times in this this time period asking, um, tech questions, you know, a little bit about FG Funnels and content and digital products and things like that. And we just sort of stayed, you know, loosely connected. And I was watching everything and I saw actually in our Slack the day she signed up for FG Funnels again. You know, I think probably her account had gone dormant or whatever in between her last business and this business. And I saw her name and I was like, ooh, what is she up to? You know? And I found out when you guys all found out, because I just, I saw her name and then all of a sudden I saw a discussion about the Yap Challenge and I was excited because I thought, man, this is, this is gonna be good. It's gonna be good for me cuz I'm gonna buy it. It's gonna be good for lots of people. And I know she must be building on FG Funnels. The day that it launched, of course, I immediately checked out the page. Holy gorgeousness. Batman. So beautiful. Turns out she used one of our designers who is in our community. Her name is Mackenzie. She went through the FG Society certification program. She's a designer that lots and lots of people in my world use. I guess Jessie designed that page with Claude, you know, got the aesthetic right, and then handed it off to Mackenzie who just added fire and sparkles and all the things, and she built a beautiful page. And she launched. I was so impressed at how Jessie handled all of the weirdness that happened when she basically went viral. You know, the tech weirdness with like some of her links not firing. She reached to me at one, or she reached out to me at one point and said, you know, my tech guy is saying, you know, that the zap isn't working into Circle and I need emails. You know, just all that stuff that happens behind the scenes. Scenes, and when you're in a launch, you know, you usually aren't like going viral at the same time. So it's, you know, it's impacting 2 people, 3 people, 10 people maybe. But Jessie was on like a freight train to the moon and it was just her and Abby and it wasn't just like 10 sales a day, it was like hundreds. And she handled it with all, all the grace in the world and people, it just started to take off. One of the funniest moments for me during this launch as I watched it was I— Jesse reached out to me in the middle of the launch to talk about some, again, some tech stuff, some marketing stuff around, you know, the funnel and the ending of the launch. And also just, you know, to have a sounding board of, you know, what was happening and going on. So we, we talked for about 3 and a half hours and I gave her all the best advice that I could give her. And I told her, I, you know, she, she was worried that people, you know, she wanted to make sure she delivered value. And, and I told her, I said, listen, you know, with 4, 4, I, we didn't know it at the time. She had like, I don't know, 1,000 customers at that moment in time when we were talking, maybe 1,700. I told her, I said, listen, you're never gonna please everybody. She's like, but, but I want everyone to get value. I said, I, I, I totally understand. I understand you, you have a high standard for yourself and you want to be able to deliver, but not everybody's going to be happy. And you just have to be okay with that, you know, which she didn't love, but she was willing to accept. And I reassured her, I said, it's going to be good, your content is amazing. And then I went into, uh, we got off the call and I went into another group that I coach, completely unrelated to Jessie's world. I mean, they couldn't be more far apart. And I, I just posted in the group and I said, hey, you know, this is my client. Jesse, and she's running this Yap Challenge. It's really good. I think you should, you know, consider joining. Two people from that group with no relation whatsoever said, oh yeah, I already bought that. And I thought, man, okay, this really did go viral. And I think that when you look at people with big followings, It's not always a given that those followings will be monetized. There are a lot of people who have come to me with big followings that don't have anywhere near the financial success that this launch had. So it's not just that a big following matters, but if you have funnel skills and marketing skills and offer creation skills, all those skills that she had been working on in her business back when she was doing the Disordered Eating and Recovery. For all those years. She, she has marketing chops and she was paying for coaching to get more marketing chops. And that is something that she's been investing in for years. When you combine marketing chops with content and traffic, it is explosive, absolutely explosive. And that is the secret sauce here. That's like sort of the point that I'm getting to. Is if you look at all of the people who have big launches, you, you do have these marketer people who have big launches, but maybe they don't have a good content game. You know, they're not, they, they're not great with organic content. When they have big launches, there's usually two levers they're pulling to get the traffic. They're either pulling the paid ad strategy or they're pulling the affiliate strategy. Okay. Like, uh, let's take, I don't know, Amy Porterfield, for example, and she has a big following and she has, she has, you know, a fairly, a fairly decent organic strategy game. Although I would say Jessie's far outperforms, uh, Amy's, but Amy has a lot of marketing chops, right? So she's got all of those skills and she also has affiliates. She has an incredible network of people who will mail for her. And that is how she can get the traffic in. To have these big multi-million dollar launches. And for Jessie, Jessie had the marketing chops and she was, or she was, you know, she was paying to get coached, but her organic traffic, she didn't need ads. She didn't need affiliates. And then I think there was probably just a little bit of luck involved with the way that it went viral. It was the right offer for the right moment. Everyone had just watched her journey to grow her account from 0 to 400,000 followers in 5 months. And the social proof was just sitting right there. And what, what can you learn from this launch? I think content matters, but so does marketing. Both of those things matter. And when you put marketing chops inside of a content creator, the result is insane. And if you are just really focused on content creation and you're not making a ton of money, It means you need marketing chops. It means that you need to get with a marketer. And if you are a marketer who is struggling to get your ads or your affiliates or anything like that, and you are struggling, like the majority of people in my world are marketers that don't have a good traffic game. That is their problem. They just do not have enough eyeballs. They have a 6, 7, 8, 10% conversion rate. But they got 100 people looking. Jessie had a 6-7% conversion rate. It wasn't like her conversion rate was outrageously different than anyone else. The difference is her content drove over 35,000 people to that sales page, and that's the game. Anyway, I am almost home. I have to pass this truck here. I hope this was helpful. You know, I am so, uh, unbelievably proud of her. I am proud that FG ClickFunnels is the system that is backing her. It has been so fun to watch her journey. I was one of her buyers. I'm going to be studying her content. She has just got an amazing content game. And the takeaway for you is this: if you've got marketing chops, you need traffic chops. And if you have traffic chops, you need marketing chops because it's the combination that makes the difference. All right. Talk soon.

And there you have it, folks. Another dose of Million Dollar Grit. I hope today's episode has left you feeling inspired, equipped, and ready to face your own entrepreneurial journey with resolve. Remember, until next time, embrace the struggle, harness your grit, and keep pushing forward. You're stronger than any challenge you face. I'm Julie Chenell, and this has been Million Dollar Grit.