Ballpark something for me real quick…
If you had to guess how long it would take to launch a new flagship product for your audience, what would you say?
To clarify, when I say “flagship product,” I’m talking about an online course, membership community, or coaching service that would be THE thing you’re known for going forward.
Something good enough to hang your hat on. The product that could take your business from where it is now to where you want it to be.
Most people estimate around 12 months. Which is an insanely long time when you think about it.
(12 months ago we were all still like ~4 months away from knowing what COVID-19 is. Feels like years ago, right?)
In my experience, most course creators and coaches are actually just 2-3 months away from launching a quality flagship product with the potential to change their business’s trajectory.
They just need the right plan.
In this post, I’m going to show you the 3-stage plan one of our clients recently used to bring in $36,097 in revenue from a new product launch that only took him ~90ish days to execute.
Let’s dive in.
The Client: David Martin
The Product: Christian Creative Academy, a membership site for Christians who want to publish books or create online courses.
David followed a simple, 3-stage plan our coaching team laid out for him that helped him pull this off in a fraction of the time it takes most businesses.
Stage #1: Validate Your Product with a Pre-Launch PDF
Most people spend the majority of those 12 months privately working on their product until it’s ready to be revealed to the world.
Not David.
Instead, he wrote up an extended description of the product he THOUGHT his audience would want, turned it into a PDF, and emailed it to 100 of his most engaged subscribers with a simple request: give me your feedback on this.
This helped him do 3 things:
- Figure out exactly what needed to be included in the product BEFORE he built it.
- Dial-in his pricing. “Initially, it was just going to be a one-time price like $699, but some of the feedback was that amount at such short notice is quite expensive,” he said. This led him to create a payment plan option that went on to make up the majority of his $36k in launch revenue.
- Understand the terminology and wording his ideal customers use to describe their problems and the solutions they’re looking for.
Those 3 steps alone helped David complete the next stage of his launch in a fraction of the time it typically takes people…
Stage #2: Create Your Sales Page and Email Sequence
You would think the most intimidating part of launching a product would be creating the product itself, right?
Eh, not in my experience.
For most course creators and coaches, it’s all the stuff you need to do in order to sell the product that causes the biggest problem:
- Writing all the email copy for the launch sequence
- Writing copy for a sales page
- Debating whether you should incorporate a webinar, Facebook ads,
- Figuring out pricing, bonuses, etc.
This kind of stuff creates 90% of the fear, stress, and procrastination that keeps people stuck in “planning mode” for months.
Nobody gets into teaching / coaching people online because they love writing sales copy. 🙂
That’s what makes the steps David took in Stage #1 so valuable.
How much easier would it be to write a sales page and email sequence if you knew…
- Exactly WHAT your customers want (because they’ve seen a first draft of your offer and given you feedback on it)
- WHY they want it
- The WORDS they use to describe why they want it and the problems it solves for them
This info alone eliminates half the second-guessing that keeps launches from ever happening.
All David had to do was take his customer feedback and plug it into the proven launch structure our coaching team provided.
And because he didn’t have to stress over all the little marketing details, he had extra time to bake teaching and value into every single email that went into his launch sequence.
“The emails I sent out got a great response from the people who did resonate with them,” he said. “I personally am sick of receiving emails that have no substance to them, so in each one of those we tried to bake in as much value into the actual email communications as we possibly could, aside from all of the ‘Get this before it’s gone’ stuff.”
David then took that customer feedback and translated it into the sales page you can see here.
Stage #3: Sell the Product Before It’s 100% Finished
Something magical happens when you validate your product idea with actual subscribers in your audience…
A significant number of them will be ready to buy it before you’re even done creating it.
Which means you can get paid WHILE you work on finishing it instead of spending months in the dark, worrying that the energy you’re putting won’t be worth it.
In David’s case, he was able to generate $36,097 in sales before creating all of the assets for his new membership community—while still delivering massive value by incorporating existing content and live coaching/interaction.
All in the span of around 3 months instead of the usual ~12.
“It is possible to pre-sell something, and you can do so in an ethical way,” he said. “It’s definitely a good idea to validate something before you build out all of the assets, particularly if it’s a bigger project that will demand a good deal of time and money to realize. That was a great learning for me, and I really appreciate Growth Tools leading me through that process.”
Do you want to validate and launch a product using this same framework?
We detailed our entire validation and launch process in this blog post.
But if you’re like basically every other online business owner, you’ve probably had the experience of reading a blog post, believing it will work for you, and then taking zero action. 🙂
That’s where coaching comes in.
Here’s what David said about the difference coaching made during this process:
“Having coaches walk alongside me and push me through my discomfort in things like validating an idea, doing a hard 5-day opening promotion…those are things that I never would have done by myself. Quite honestly, I would have just carried on working away in the background and this project probably would not have seen the light of day for certainly at least another 12 months.
“You guys have helped me really breakthrough into a place where I now have a very clear flagship product and a very clear demographic that I am aiming at to send traffic to and to bring people to and to serve on an ongoing basis, which actually is a huge breakthrough for me.”
Our coaching program puts an on-demand team of experts in your corner to set your strategy, give you feedback, and hold you accountable every single day.
If you’re ready to grow faster (instead of just treading water), click here to book a free Strategy Session and we’ll show you how to make it happen.