Today is going to be the craziest thing we’ve ever done at Videofruit.
It’s one of those ideas you have where it sounds brilliant, then the closer your get the scarder you get. Then it’s too late to back out and you have to plow through anyway.
Here is the story…
- Last year we launched an online course for the first time
- We quickly found that planning a launch is a NIGHTMARE
- There are a crap ton of moving parts…
- Webinars
- Video series
- Close carts
- Open carts
- Bonuses
- eBooks
- Affiliates
AHHHHHHHHH!!!!
So I asked myself a few months ago….
“Self…how can we make this easier?“
I thought about it. And came up with a brilliant idea.
What if there was a website you could use where you could pick your launch data. Press a button. And 5 seconds later you were given your exact launch plan.
- The perfectly optimized open and close dates.
- Exactly what emails to send and when to send them.
- Every social media update you needed to send
- As well as a planner to help you prepare everything for launch weeks ahead of time
- All you had to do was follow the plan.
That would be INCREDIBLE! Right!?
I’d buy it in a heartbeat!
So…today, we’re going to build it.
It needs to exist.
- I called the team up and told them about the idea. They loved it.
- Next I called a few programmer friends of mine to see if they’d be up for building it. They said yes.
- Then I called a few designer friends to see if they’f be interested in designing it. They said yes.
- And then I thought it’d be super cool if we live streamed the entire thing on the internet so everyone could watch and see the process.
We’ll also have guests all throughout the day.
People like Pat Flynn, Nathan Barry, Joseph Michael, Jeff Goins, Grant Baldwin and a few other surprises we’re still working on.
They’ll join us on the live cast, share their launch stories, critique the app and help us make it better.
Here is all the equipment the video crew setup last night for the live stream…
This should be a blast!
We’ll be posting blog updated every two hours and streaming the entire thing right here on the blog.
We’ll post the live stream at 7am’ish CST. So refresh to start watching!
Also, if you want to get our official updates every 2 hours and be the first to know when the app goes on sale, click the here and we’ll add you to that list.
…
LIVE STREAM FEED:
10:00 AM Update:
Over the last few hours we have:
- Finished off the admin backend of the app (where we can enter all the data via a website)
- Setup and finalized the database for the app (where all the data is stored)
- Started outlining every task associated with launching a product (with the Videofruit template)
We’re cranking along.
Also, as of right now, we’re taking our first pre-orders for the app.
There will be 10 spots available @ $500 each.
For that you’ll get:
- Lifetime access to Slingshot
- Free access to all future updates of the app
- Unlimited Launch plans
WIth Slingshot you’ll be able to select your launch week, press a button and 5 seconds later have your entire launch plan generated. Every major date, ever tiny task…everything you need to do.
Your job = follow the plan and execute.
This is the launch template we used to do just over $750,000 in sales in 2015 with our online course, Get 10,000 Subscribers.
If you want in, click here to pre-order.
Note: This is pre-order. The app will be available by 7AM CST tomorrow morning (2/27/16).
Also, we’ll release 10 more licenses later today, but the price will be going up each time we release licenses. So if you want a copy, this will be the cheapest it’s ever offered.
Click here to pre-order.
A few behind the scenes pics:
12:00 PM Update:
Over the last few hours we have:
- Developers finished off the user side database
- Front end UI is rocking along. Not 100% done but should be soon (pics below)
- We have 50% of the launch template tasks outlined in Trello and have started inputting those into the SlingShot.
A few behind the scenes pics:
During the last update we released the first 10 license of the app.
They sold out in 18 minutes.
Woot woot!!
Shout out to: Corbet, Cedric, Jonathan, Brent, Ryan, Kevin, Christina, Jill, Daniel and Shawn for being the first ever users and customer.
2:00 PM Update:
Progress since last update.
1. Dev team is plugging away on the main dashboard list view as well as the calendar view. Progress. But the work on that is tedious. Should be fun to see how much progress they make today.
2. Design team has all of the primary screens finished and are now working on the last few secondary screens.
3. Me and the Videofruit team are now auditing all of the tasks that will be inputted into the course and then we’ll start inputting into the apps database
(Our good friend Jonathan from Nimble Labs plugging away on the main list view of the app)
7:00 AM Update:
Phew!
I got bogged down in testing and proofing the app yesterday afternoon and ran out of bandwidth to post the last update of the day to the blog.
Sorry about that!
Here is what happened from 2pm to 8pm last night…
- The designers finished the design of the app. It’s incredible. Can’t wait to show it to you.
- The VF team finished inputting all of the launch template data into the app. This was incredibly tedious.
- The development team…wait for it….SHIPPED THE APP!
You can now login to the app, enter a launch date and get your entire launch plan in 5 seconds.
There is still a lot of polish needed.
For example:
Very few of the design teams work got put on this version of the app. The dev team ran out of time. But that’s the beauty of compacting an initial product build into such a short time frame. You have no choice but to focus on the essentials first.
Here is a video the app in action (and a look at what it will look like):
Click here to download the design mockups
What’s the plan going forward?
- We have to onboard the new customers into the app. We’ll start doing that on Monday (once we’ve officially closed off sales)
- We’ll take all of the profit we made from the app (about $7k so far) and dump it right back into the app
- Over the next 7 days we’ll skin the app in the sexy design I showed you above, clean up several features that are a little wonky right now and start taking feature and build out requests from the beta customers.
If you’d like be a part of the process and start using Slingshot, you can click here to pre-order.
Thank you so much for following along. Your support makes this possible!
Final Update:
It’s been a few days since the main festivities wrapped up and I wanted to post one last update here for you guys:
A few things have happened since Saturday morning:
Thing #1: We sold out of the 3rd batch of licenses (10 @ $1k each)
Thing #2: We decided to try and raise $10,000 more in order to give us a few months of runway on building and improving the app.
Thing #3: So we released 25 more licenses and a few new packages:
Here are the three packages and what they included:
We also back dated all of the bonuses, which means all 30 people that bought before these plans were introduced get all of the bonuses included in the Advanced Package.
Here are the final sales numbers for the day:
Total Sales = $30,000 and some change.
Total Cost = $9,000’ish (still tabulating this)
The plan is to re-invest 100% of the profits back in to the product in order to keep improving it.
..
I reckon that’s about it.
If you have any more questions, leave them in the comments below and I’ll update the post with the answer.
PS: If you want to get updates on our next 24 hour product challenge , click the here and we’ll add you to that list.