Welcome to the 7th edition of my Launch Community behind-the-scenes newsletter.  Last week I went in-depth into the pricing and packaging of the course.

(I was nervous about sending that email, but the feedback was only positive! What a relief! 😅)

It was really cool to have you guys write back validating the price and offerings:

There’s about 6 weeks to go until I release the Launch Community on August 23rd. I want this small group of people to be able to share and benefit from all the parts of building something new: the highs, the lows, and the messy middle.

So, in the spirit of transparency I thought I’d share a huge failure I had when I first started.

I thought I had it all figured out. I'd read all the launch playbooks. I'd studied the 'gurus'. I was ready to rake in the cash. Instead, I lost $96,000 and almost gave up on digital products altogether. Here's what went wrong, and the three critical lessons that turned everything around…

Ok, here is the full, raw story of my second (& third if we’re being honest here) product launches and why they failed miserably.

First, some background on my 1st launch:

On June 16th, 2021 I publicly launched my first online course. I used a live webinar to sell my product.

I did everything right.

• I beta tested it with a small group of students who loved it and gave me valuable feedback on what needed to change

• I saw my students getting great success and pulled in their testimonials. I even had one student come on the webinar and share a killer win she had <1 month into the program

• I posted about the event every day for 40 days and had >400 registrants and >250 attend live

And it all worked like clockwork. I earned $14K before the event was even over and $96K in the week following the webinar.

It was a dream come true and I was feeling on top of the world.

So, rinse and repeat, right?!

That’s exactly what I did. 6 weeks later on Labor Day Weekend 2021 I did the same thing. Except I threw in a different offer at the end: I added a live retreat upsell to sweeten the deal.

I posted, I invited, I gave the exact same webinar to a similar audience size with a slightly different offer.

You know how much I made that night? $0 

How much I made in the week after $0.

OUCH! It really hurt. This isn’t something I’ve actually shared publicly before in-depth because it was so hard for me to deal with. I had no idea what just happened. I thought I had the perfect sales machine that I could cash in every month like an ATM. It failed miserably.

So, I gave it another go. Round 3.

This time I had to mix it up. I had to do something differently so as not to repeat the same mistake.

This time instead of just me for an hour-long webinar I invited 2 good friends to present with me. They each had their own program that helped our audience (PharmD’s) and so we figured, let’s just do a mini-summit and all present in an hour period. That’ll for sure compound our earnings.

You can probably see where this is going but we didn’t…..

We posted, we invited, I gave the exact same webinar in a shorter format to a similar audience size with yet another slightly different offer.

You know how much I made that night? $0

How much I made in the week after? $12K

What in the world was going on? I had proven that I could create an offer that people wanted. Why wouldn’t it work again!?

Can you spot what I did wrong?

Here are 3 things I learned

I want to make sure you know these, since you’ll be selling your own digital products soon:

1. Don’t change your offer. If you have an offer that you have proven works you stick to it like glue. DO NOT CHANGE A THING! I was so dumb on that Labor Day event because I was doing a live event the next month, and I figured, “Sure! I’ll just toss in admission to my live event as an upsell while I’m at it”. It was completely untested and I should have never changed the most important part of my webinar: a proven offer. It just added unnecessary confusion as to what people should buy.

2. Don’t promote with friends…yet. My summit didn’t go well for our sales (we 3 each earned about $12K). Instead of building momentum and tripling sales we confused customers and made them decide between us. A confused customer never buys. There are times when you can work with friends in a really synergistic way, but not while you are still perfecting your own first offers

3. First launch magic is real. A mentor once told me that first offers are magic. They hit the marketplace is a new, exciting way nobody has seen before and tend to do very well. You can’t always replicate this magic in future iterations of the same thing. I mistook one success for a system I could depend on.

It really burned to feel like I missed out on earning a sweet $96K twice in a row. And spend months of time and thousands of dollars of money to build. But I had to learn that what worked once won’t always work again. I wish I’d earned that money, but it taught my a really important lesson: build systems, Jamie!

I didn’t want to hype up and run live webinars endlessly into the future anyway. I was trying to optimize something I didn’t want to do forever.

The Rest of the Story

That fall I buckled down, hired someone I admired and who had a smooth system for converting customers from evergreen webinars. I did everything he said with pep and swiftness and I’ll tell you what: that system built the $25K-$50K/mo recurring revenue that helped my course ultimately grow to be a 7-figure company and gave me sweet 60%+ profit margins I could take home at the end of each month.

Life is hard. Business is hard. I mess up a lot.

Welcoming a ton of failure in Launch Community

And I’m going to keep messing up in our Launch Community. Get excited. I’m a creator. I’m always building and testing new things. I’m going to be very frank and open about what I’m building with you guys. You’re going to learn what’s working and what is a hot mess with my own business. This is why I love private communities. I don’t want to share this information to the masses online who don’t care. I want to be in the trenches with you.

You’re going to mess up. You’ve probably already failed a lot. Welcome to the club.

I love failure even though it burns in the moment. I’m so excited to fail forward with you.

Live meeting coming up!

One last thing: I really want to meet you and show you a visual of what I’m building before the August 23rd launch. Next week I’ll send out a date for a live meeting and tour of the program. I want to show you what I’m excited about and get your honest feedback about what you think. Stay tuned for that date and calendar invite so you can save it on your busy calendar. Yes, it’ll be recorded if you can’t make it.

Whew. That’s a long one today. Thanks for sticking with me until the end of my messy story.

👋🏻 Jamie

PS- Do you like these failure stories? I have so many more, but only want to share them if you guys like this kind of thing