Behind my latest launch – how success isn’t just about the dollars

Transcript

Today, I’ll take you behind the scenes in my latest launch of my course, Million Dollar Money Management. I share the lessons and learnings from this course so that you can take it into your business or your launches moving forward. I love to take you behind the scenes in my business, not from a place of showing off, but to show you what is possible and also to share the things that don’t quite go to plan so that you know that you’re not alone in business if things don’t always go super successfully the first time around.

Hello and welcome to the Clare Wood podcast, where myself and incredible guests share about money mindset, financial successes, and how to manage your money in a fun and practical way to create wealth and abundance in both your business and your life. I’m your host, Clare Wood. I’m a business coach and a money mentor. I strongly believe that money has the power to positively change the world. I can’t wait to help you transform your mindset around money, create a love of numbers, and build the business of your dreams so you can live a life of financial freedom, giving, and global impact.

The reason I wanted to take you behind the scenes of this launch is because I want to share with you guys the amazing things that happen in my business, and also some of the challenges that have happened, so that if these are things that you experience throughout your business journey, you know that you aren’t alone. I am so proud of this last launch of Million Dollar Money Management, even though the numbers weren’t really that high, but there’s a real reason why I’m super proud of it, and I can’t wait to dive into this with you guys today.

So let me start at the start. What is my course Million Dollar Money Management? This course was created by me because I’ve been helping high ticket clients of mine in the private coaching space and in my Mastermind to have transformations in their money mindset and how they think about money. And I wanted to be able to share these lessons and learnings with a wider audience who perhaps weren’t quite at the stage to invest in coaching just yet. So I created this course using all of the same spreadsheets, formulas, and strategies that I use with my high ticket clients and bringing into a course format over a six week time period. I first created and launched this course in October 2020, and so this round was the second launch of the course.

This launch vs last launch – the investments and the outcomes

So first of all, I might share a little bit about the last time that I launched this course. It was the very first time that I’d launched the course, and I felt so excited and aligned to offer this product to the world. I invested money into Facebook ads to grow my list in the lead up to the launch. I invested in a copywriter to write all of the emails for the launch. And I invested a significant amount of money with my virtual assistant to set up all of the behind the scenes, techie stuff.

I was so excited about this launch and I was convinced it was going to be massive. I actually had a number of my seven figure business friends who came and did interviews with me in the lead up to the launch. And I had some really high profile names sharing their stories about how they have built a million dollar business. And I was so excited to be able to show people that this isn’t something that happens to famous people. This happens to people in my circles. And in fact, this year I myself am shooting for my first million dollar year in business. I was so confident that this course was going to be a massive hit and I’d set myself a sales target that I really wanted to achieve for the launch. I’d invested a little over 6,000 US dollars into the launch, and I was so confident I would make back that money and much, much more.

Spoiler alert. I didn’t.

I didn’t have as many people sign up for the course as I had hoped. And truthfully, I was heartbroken. Anyone who has created something that they are so, so proud of and that they don’t quite sell it at the rate that they had hoped to, will know this feeling of disappointment and also confusion. I felt really proud of the way that I had launched the course, and I was really surprised that it hadn’t resonated with my audience. Overall, I had five people join the first round of the course and one person took a VIP upgrade. So I made about 6,000 US dollars, and you don’t need to be a mathematical genius to figure out that that means I didn’t really make a profit at all on this launch.

I look at numbers really differently to the way that a lot of launches do. And I guess this is my accounting brain and why I really love to teach and talk about launches in this kind of way. A lot of people lead with their sales number, without ever providing the context of the investment that they made behind a specific launch. And a lot of times people spend a lot of money on Facebook ads, copy, et cetera, et cetera. So when we hear a sales number, I think it’s always really important to bear in mind the investment that they might’ve made behind it. And I really want to commit to sharing what my investments were as well, so that when I talk about sales numbers, we do have a true profitability context around a specific launch.

So that launch, like I shared, I didn’t really a profit at all on it. And I felt so gutted because firstly, I was really confused and upset why this offer didn’t connect with my audience, especially when I thought that I’d done a really good job selling it in. And secondly, because I had invested money into it, to me, it didn’t feel like a launch was successful if I hadn’t even made a profit on a specific launch.

After this launch, I went into a bit of a hole. I was feeling really down on myself and confused as to why this wasn’t hitting the mark. I seem to sell high ticket products and services so easily, but for some reason I really struggle to sell a lower end offering. But the reason why I’ve wanted to create low ticket products is because I really want to be able to support other people that can’t afford to invest in high ticket coaching just yet. After this launch, I spoke to a good friend of mine, Steph Taylor, who is an expert in launching and shared with her how down and deflated I was feeling about these launch. She quickly pulled me out of it, and reminded me that a launch isn’t a destination, it’s a process. And that often your first launch is going to be a little bit slower, then future launches. She also had created a really cool product called Launch Magic, an entire course all about how to launch your products and services more successfully. So I chose to invest, to do her course, and to learn the skill of launching. She also had a look at a lot of my statistics around the launch and shared that in her opinion, it had actually been a huge success. My conversion rates were really high. The number of people who showed up to my webinar were high, and people upgraded. So she’d actually flipped the thinking and said, even though I didn’t feel like the launch had been a huge success, she shared that it had actually been really successful, and all I needed to do was to keep relaunching it over and over again.

So, if you have a digital product and the first time you share it, it doesn’t go as well as you’d hoped, really critically look at the information and the statistics around the launch and then commit to refine and relaunch and relaunch until it is well received.

Leading into the launch

Through the course Launch Magic, I took a lot of learnings away, but one of the biggest moment that I had was that a lot of the launch happens outside of the launch period. This was something critically different than I did this round. I focused a lot of time in the lead up to the launch, around sharing content that was really, really relevant to my course Million Dollar Money Management. I also spent a lot of time growing my following organically by showing up on Clubhouse, by reaching out to collaboration partners, and by being featured on a lot of podcasts.

The reason that I did this is because I have had so many issues with my Facebook ads that I have decided, at least for now, not to invest any more money into Facebook ads. I really struggle running ads, particularly because I talk a lot about money and the use of the word million dollar means that a lot of my ads get blocked and/or can look a little bit spammy, which anyone who follows me will know that is definitely not what my vibe is about, but Facebook ads don’t quite see things that way. So this launch, I spent a lot of time investing in the lead-up to the launch, growing my audience and sharing content that demonstrates that doing the work around money, both money mindset and money management is really valuable and can be really impactful on your business results.

Taking the pressure off the launch

For this launch, another thing that I wanted to do really differently was that I wanted it to be an easy and flowy launch. When I think about the launches of mine that have been really successful in the past, it’s when I’m always in a fun, playful, and magnetic state and where I’m not showing up from a place of desperation and pushing. So this launch, I decided I’m just going to open the launch up and I’m going to keep living my life. During the launch week, I went out for dinner several times and actually, the weekend of my launch, I went away for the weekend with my hubby and wasn’t working. For me, this is something that I want to bring into all of my launches going forward. I don’t want to get to the end of a launch period and feel like I’m a shell of former me and absolutely exhausted. I want my launches to be fun, playful, and magnetic, and this launch definitely was that.

Usually in a launch, you have a series of email sequences, something like a challenge or a webinar to sell in the course. And even though in Steph’s course, she teaches all of those things and teaches it fabulously, I decided that I wasn’t going to do any of that for this launch. I decided rather than having lots and lots of emails, I’d have a small number of really impactful emails. I decided that I was going to have no webinar and no lean-in content. I was simply going to share my offer and trust that the right people were going to hear the message and choose to join in.

Another thing that I did in the lead up to this launch was that I was sharing success stories from the last round of the course. Now again, this is something really interesting to take away. I think this really helps when selling in a product or service, when you have actual examples of people that have experienced a transformation, having been through your course program or offering in the past. Even though in my mind, I felt like I had that because I could talk about case studies about my private coaching clients and my Mastermind clients, I hadn’t actually shown that this specific course could get the result or the transformation. So I was able to bring on three people who did the last round of the course, and they could share how the investment changed them from a money perspective. I definitely think that sharing success stories is a really powerful way to sell your product and services, especially during launching.

So that’s everything that came in the lead up. And as you can hear, it was almost an anti-launch launch.

The successes of this launch

Where did the numbers land for this launch? I have welcomed in 10 fabulous people into this round of Million Dollar Money Management. Four of them joined on a payment plan, and six of them chose to pay in full up front, and one person who joined the course also opted for the VIP upgrade, which was a private coaching session with me. Overall, this launch delivered revenue of $11,767, and I only spent about 500 US dollars in additional work that my VA did, because all of the Kajabi framework, all of the online tools, everything had been set up for last course launch. And given that I invested nothing into Facebook ads or copy, almost all of this revenue is profit.

I am super proud of this result. And even though it’s not huge numbers, and I know that a lot of people might think at this stage of my business, I’d be having much bigger launches as I have with my high ticket offering, I am so proud of this because I have doubled the number of people that have joined. And most importantly, I did it in a really easy and flowy way. And that for me, feels like success. What’s the point in making lots of money, if you feel like crap in the process of doing it? So this launch for me feels super exciting, super successful, and super abundant. I believe that real success is when you feel amazing. Oh, and another really cool thing that happened was that one of the people that upgraded to a VIP coaching session with me, then signed on to become a private coaching client as well. So that is another massive win that came straight off the back of this course launch.

The other reason why I think this course launch has been so successful is because I have doubled the number of people that come in. I know I’m going to launch this course again and again, so imagine if it keeps doubling every time that I launch it. Success isn’t a destination, it’s a journey. And for me, I would much rather have something that’s green and growing than something that’s ripe and rotting. I know this course is fantastic, so I’m really confident that my launches in the future will continue to get bigger and bigger every time.

To sum up everything that we’ve spoken about today, launching can be a really scary and really emotional process, but it also doesn’t have to be. Something that I’ve taken away from this launch is that I can choose how I’m going to show up, and the intentions that I set around what happens in a launch for me. We can’t control what goes on around us, right? But we can control how we choose to perceive it.

So big launch lessons that I had from this launch. Number one, a lot of the launch happens outside of the launch. Number two, you don’t have to hustle to be successful and to have amazing launches, you can do it in a way that feels really good and aligned for you. Number three, you don’t need to have all of the right things ticked off to have a great launch. Even though I didn’t have a webinar, an email sequence, this launch still worked really well. Number four, sharing success stories of people who have been through a course or program is massive in terms of demonstrating that what you offer delivers the transformation that you promise. And number five, even if at first you don’t succeed, never, ever give up, just keep on learning and improving each time.

I hope you’ve enjoyed the lessons from this launch, and I look forward to continuing to share behind the scenes in my business so that it will help and inspire other people with their business journey too. Have a fantastic week, and look forward to chatting to you again soon.

Thanks so much for listening. If you love this episode, please share it with your audience. And don’t forget to tag me on Instagram at @Clare_Wood_Coach, and also make sure you hit subscribe so you never miss an episode. Have an abundant week, and I look forward to talking to you again next week.