The Best Launch Strategy? Quitting!
Real talk: launching sucks.
(It’s not just you!)
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The way most people are taught to launch is a death spiral of doom, and we’re not exaggerating — it’s built on this model that requires you to basically always be in debt to your next launch, and means you’re riding this constant wheel of stress and exhaustion.
There’s a better way though. And that’s what we’re talking about today.
There’s some things that it’s good to stick it out on — good relationships, an exercise plan that works for your body, therapy — but sometimes, quitting isn’t only OK. It’s an actively better option.
That’s what led us to make one of the biggest decisions in the history of Hello Funnels last year: we were going to quit launching.
(Cue horror!)
I know, I know, everybody knows you gotta launch because you gotta sell because, because, because…
And it’s absolutely true, you can’t run a businesses on hopes and dreams.
But you know what you also can’t run a business on?
The assumption that you’re always going to be able to be available, energized, and lucky enough to hit it out of the park with every live launch.
Let’s be real: relying on live launches is dumb.
Not to be harsh — just calling it like I see it.
But after seeing what live launching has done to my business (and quite frankly, the industry as a whole) as well as looking at the way the business climate has shifted in the past couple of years, it’s just not worth it.
I’m hearing this from loads of business owners, big and small, that they’re copping to this too. Once you break down the facts of a live launch, the time and money involved, plus the fact that getting new leads from traditional methods is way harder, and conversions are becoming so much more expensive … even if you have the all-singing, all-dancing launch, you might still find yourself in the hole.
(And let’s be honest … does anybody really have the energy and stability to throw everything into a giant launch right now? No. No they do not.
That’s another reason why we’re really excited about this cohort of eCourse Empire, btw — we’re going to be teaching our tried and true strategies for creating and selling courses, minus the launch drama. You should check it out and join us!)
No shade: I totally fell into the live launch pattern too.
It’s addictive, isn’t it? But for all the highs, the great launch days, and the adrenaline of planning a great launch plan, it’s really stressful.
Because once you spend the past couple of months setting yourself up to launch, you’re already in debt to yourself. That launch has to work, if it doesn’t, you’re screwed, right?
That’s not a place you want to be in.
And that’s exactly where we found ourselves AT WHAT TIME.
We had a launch that worked beautifully the first three times.
We ran it, kept optimizing it and tweaking it, and then something happened and it just didn’t work that fourth time.
It was a disaster — and I never wanted to go through that again.
That’s why we went 100% evergreen.
Live launching is predicated on perfection and requires you to bet on the future.
But I’m not OK with my income being dependent on the tech working and my kids not getting sick and me having the energy and credit limit to push a launch over the line.
Now, some people look at that decision and just decide to launch less. Maybe they do one or two launches a year, like the way B-School does. And that’s an option … but talk about exponentially magnifying your risk!
Unless you’re the kind of person who likes doing the business equivalent of jumping out of airplanes, I don’t recommend it.
Other people go to the other extreme and go totally evergreen. This can — and does! — work really well. But it’s a slow burn, and it takes time to create and test and iterate. Plus it takes a chunk of cash and time to create an evergreen system, and most businesses can’t swing that overnight.
So I’m recommending you try out a third option that we call evergreen launching.
We dive in way deeper on this in this week’s posdcast, so be sure to give it a listen. And, if you have a listen and want to learn how to set all that up for your course, we’ve got you!
The next cohort of eCourse Empire is just about to start, so make sure you check it out if you’re even thinking about doing a course this year.
It’s absolutely possible to have a solid, money-generating course that you fill with ongoing evergreen watching — and we’d love to teach you how.
