Why Launching Is So Hard: Quicksand, Paper Tigers, and the Dentist

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, 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. Welcome back to Million Dollar Grit. Today I wanna talk about why launching is so hard. And I know that right now on social media, there are a lot of big launches that have happened. People have made amazing money, and it's easy to look at it and think, man, they just popped open an Instagram account, you know, put something up for sale, made $100,000 or $7 million or whatever. But there's actually so many details going on behind the scenes. And today's episode is really to normalize the difficulty of launching. I find launching difficult, and I've done it for 10 years. There are so many details, and not only that, but there are like 3 simultaneous categories of activities that you're doing in order to have a successful launch. The goal is to unpack what those 3 things are and hopefully give you some tools to make launching less overwhelming. Let's start with the three categories of activities that a launch requires, and I think of them kind of like train tracks, except there's three train tracks. And if you wanted to get really granular, there's technically four, but let's just go with three. And these are tracks you have to lay down simultaneously. They're all happening overlapping each other. Now you could do it all separately if you wanted to, and actually one of the pieces of advice I'm going to give at the end here is that by separating out the pieces, you might dial down some of that overwhelm. But for most people in a 3 to 4 month period of planning a launch, they're doing these 3 things: offer creation, funnel building, and audience building and marketing. And I put those 2 kind of in a big, broad sweeping category, which is why I said technically you could separate those out, audience building versus the launch marketing, but we'll just keep them in one big container for right now. Unpacking the offer creation process, I would say this is the most treacherous area unknowingly. What I mean by that is most people who have an idea to launch are pretty confident in their expertise, in their ideas, in their solutions that they have for people, and they're not super overwhelmed by this, and I think that's why It can trip you up because you feel like, oh my goodness, this is actually way harder than I thought. And it's not just about being good at what you do. It's also about how you position it, how you price it, how you name it, you know, whether it's a membership or a mastermind, we call that like, what container are you, are you using? And that's where people get so, so stuck. They love to be the expert. They love to just get deep into building curriculum, but if they don't have a clear marketing position, they start building something that, you know, grows 5 heads and becomes this huge project, and then if perfectionism kicks in, well, God forbid, now the project you started 3 months ago, now you think is lame, and you want to go back to the beginning, and you get stuck in this swirl. Offer creation, I think of like sinking sand. You don't think it's a problem because you're an expert, and then you dive in, and then you start to sink, and you're like, crap. That's thing one. Thing 2 is funnel building, and this is where there is tremendous amounts of frustration because if you're not technical, I'll hear people say, I just want to do the thing I'm good at. I just want to be a coach. I just want to teach people finances or how to get their kid to sleep or whatever. I don't want to have to learn how to be a technician, and that's fair. And tech is easy to blame because it's very tangible, like this thing isn't working, therefore this is why I'm not making money. But tech is honestly the easiest thing of all 3 of these to solve. By far, it is the easiest thing to solve, and most people think it's the hardest part of it. There are 2 options when you find the tech really difficult. The first option is to just hire it out. Just hire it out and don't look at it. That can be expensive though, and that can add pressure to the other 2 things, the offer creation process and then the marketing and audience building. If you don't want to hire it out and you want to learn yourself, I recommend getting a good teacher, recommend people who've been where you've been. I recommend using the right tools and stop trying to jerry-rig it. And I'm staring at a desk full of markers and coloring pages, and I was coloring this weekend because of the nor'easter, and I was getting so frustrated because I was trying to mimic the TikToks that I had saved, and I just couldn't do it. I didn't have the right tools, and finally, in just like a moment of impulsivity, I DoorDashed myself like, you know, $200 worth of markers because I was like, I'm just going to use the right tools so that I can stop being frustrated. And that will eliminate a ton of frustration, is just using the actual tools that are designed for the job. But the second thing is that if you are learning the tool just as you're launching, you are not aware of how much pressure you're under. If I pluck you out of your business, pluck you out of your launch mode, and stick you in a classroom and say, for the next 5 hours, we're going to learn this tool, and we're going to do it on a mock business, that is not your business, where you're not going to have all kinds of mindset gunk, you would learn the tool quickly. And I know this because I've done it. I've taught my daughters. I've taught hundreds of people how to use FG Funnels using a made-up business called Houseplant Hospice. And when I can get people to just unhook from their business for a minute and unhook from their offer and just learn the tool pretending that you are running a hospice for houseplant owners who can't keep their plants alive, it's amazing how much pressure gets reduced and how quickly you're able to learn. That is my advice if that is the track that trips you up the most. And remember, it is the easiest one to solve by far and large. By far and large? Is that the right saying? I hope so. Thing 3 is that big giant category that we call audience building and marketing, which is gearing up to actually sell to the audience you have. There's 2 parts to it. Which is why I said there was 2 tracks technically in there. One is growing an audience, and then one is selling to that audience. This is the track that I think people resist the most. If we have offer creation as quicksand, they think they're fine, and then they start to sink. We have funnel building as like the hardest— people see it as the hardest CrossFit workout ever, right? They're like, okay, I'm gonna do this, you know? But then it turns out it was kind of a paper tiger. It was like really just, you know, a yoga class in disguise. I don't know. Actually, yoga's hard. Don't come for me, please. Just trying to teach something. The marketing audience building is the one that nobody wants to do. Nobody wants to go to the dentist. Nobody wants to get insurance. But this is the one thing that people need to do from the beginning of their business to the end. And what's interesting is that Offer creation is a set-in-time moment. You create an offer and then you sell it. Funnel building, set-in-time moment. You build the tech and you get the tech ready and you launch it. The thing that never goes away is the audience building and the nurturing and the marketing. So if you don't like this part, 2 things. Number one, maybe don't be in business. Or number 2, learn to like it and create a large area in your business, in your bandwidth, in your calendar where you can focus on audience building. Now, audience building as a general rule is varied in its scope because it depends on where you're building the audience. Are you building it on TikTok, on Instagram, on Facebook, on X? You know, are you building it on YouTube, on a podcast, right? You can see how this could become a full-time job, and for many people it is. But audience building is a necessary component of your business that needs to happen starting on day one before you have anything to sell and all the way until day exit. It's worth carving out a good 30% of your business time on audience building, maybe even more. And it's important that you split this category up because when you're not launching, it's just about growing on whatever channels you've decided, but when you are launching, it's very, very specific type of marketing depending on the launch. And as you can see, as I'm untangling these 3 pieces, if you sit down one day and say, oh, well, so-and-so launched this amazing course and she grew her audience for a couple months and then launched it, you are seeing the top of the iceberg. But what's going to happen when you get to do it is that you're going to go in thinking, okay, I have a cool offer. That's fine. No big deal. And then you're going to sink in the sand because you're going to realize there's a lot to it. Mindset gunk. Maybe you're going to head into the tech and you're not going to have the right tools, and then you're going to get frustrated, and then you're going to feel annoyed, like, why can't I learn this when you're trying to learn it in the pressure of a launch? And then you're going to get to the audience side and you're going to say, crap, I don't have a big enough audience. Oh, this is so annoying. I hate audience building. I hate showing up on camera. Blah, blah, blah. Let me get this over with. Let me build the audience so that I can go back to teaching. I can go back. To planning, to building. And that's why people are so burned out and so tired. The reframe here, I hope I've helped make it clear, is that audience building should be a permanent priority in your business. Sometimes of the year, it's just straight-up audience building. Other times of the year, it's targeted launching to that audience. That never goes away. One of the reasons why I recommend the weekly webinar funnel is because it does audience building for you on a week-to-week basis. And it gives you a consistent way to build leads and get leads, which is why I love it so much. Funnel building, tech. If you are stressed and must learn tech, learn outside of the context of your business. Stop trying to figure out your offer and your tech at the same time. Just sit down one Saturday, go through our Funnel Beginners course, go to funnelbeginners.com, just learn tech through the houseplant hospice business idea. It will change the way you see tech, and it will dial down the pressure and noise. And on the offer side, beware of quicksand. Offer quicksand. That can happen because you feel you probably are an expert in your offer, and you think, well, whatever, I'll just build this thing. But Frankenstein courses, trying to figure out the price, The search for endless certainty to make sure that you build something that people will pay for. Offer creation can get really murky really fast, and I would say it's probably one of the most important parts to figure out when you launch your business because you want to make sure that the audience you're building is the audience that's going to buy the offer. And a lot of people say, well, do I build an offer and then build an audience? Do I build an audience and then build an offer? And then I say, oh, do them at the same time. And then they just— their eyes roll back in their head because they're like, How do you do that? There's no one right way to do this. If you look at somebody like Jessie Jane, she just built an audience and then launched to them and she nailed it. But there are a lot of people who build an audience of people that will never buy from them, and then they try to launch and then it doesn't work and they think something's wrong with them. And what they actually did was build an audience of lookie-loos, not buyers. That method to me seems pretty risky. What I recommend is that you ask yourself, what problems in the world can I solve? And who has those problems? And am I happy to wake up every day at 5:00 AM and help those people with that problem? And if the answer is yes, go build that audience, because what you're doing is you're anchoring an audience around a problem that you know you can solve. That feels safer to me. It also allows you to test selling to your audience faster. Because you're building exactly the people who will buy what you have to offer, and that is important to do. Anyway, I hope this was helpful, and as always, if you have questions, DM me on Instagram.

Chat 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, and this has been Million Dollar Grit.