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You’ve worked hard. You’re ready. Your product is awesome. You’re geared up. It’s time. You launch.
You check your email. The first order comes in. Then the next. Pretty soon it’s a flood. You beat your single day goal. You beat your strech goal. This is awesome! You’re excited. You go out to dinner, order champagne. Sales roll in overnight.
By the time you wake up the next morning (probably with a hangover), your excitement has truly built to almost an unbearable level. But then the inevitable happens: your sales slow down to a small stream. Then a trickle. Then to almost nothing.
You start to panic. “What did I do wrong?” you think. “And what can I do to fix it?”
There’s nothing wrong with launch events. They’re awesome. I loved launching my book, and my course. I’ll love launching my next product too. Launches are great.
A great launch is validation. It shows you that the hard work you put in was worth it. It tells you that all those fears you had were unfounded. Your customers love your product. They’re willing to pay for it.
But inevitably, launch day ends. Nothing lives forever, after all. And sales start to slow down because the event is over. The newness wears off.
Once launch day is over, you have to go on building a business. Oh right. That pesky task.
Building a business is harder than launching a product. Building a business is the hard work of slogging it out and continuing to show your potential customers how your product will change their lives.
This is where persistence comes in. A persistent product developer will not let the pre-launch excitement turn into the post-launch blues. Instead, you’ll focus on continuing to show the value of your product to people who haven’t seen it yet.
After all, that’s a far bigger audience than your launch day audience!
I was really excited to launch my first book, my first paid product to the rest of the world. I built up buzz about the book for nearly a week, then when launch day came, I opened it up to the masses.
Sales began to pour in. First $500, then $1,000, then $2,000. By the time launch day was over, I had earned $3,000. I was ecstatic.
But I didn’t stop there. Instead, I kept blogging, writing, improving the product, A/B testing the sales page, and I even renamed the product to bring it more in line with what I was trying to teach. The result?
$11,000 in additional sales between my book and my class.
Wrong.
I’m just like you. And a year ago I had no products at all.
That’s right. Zero.
The difference between you and me is nothing more than I have assets (the book, the workshop) and a process. Launching it the right way was the key to continuing to make sales post-launch. And to earning $11,000 in extra revenue.
It wasn’t easy – I felt the fear of a post-launch drop in sales. I wondered why people weren’t buying. But with a process, I knew that I would be successful. And you can too.
I took the lessons I learned in the 30×500 launch class to identify an audience, build a product and launched it to a waiting customer base.
In fact, others have accomplished the same thing. Brennan Dunn earned nearly $22,000 with his fourth product. Chris Hartjes earned $7,000 on his first 30×500 product.
Brennan, Chris and I will be participating in a Launch Roundtable hosted by Amy Hoy and Alex Hillman on April 7th. We’ll be discussing our tips, tricks and techniques for having a successful launch. We’ll talk about how we learned what we know, and how you can improve your launch process to ensure that you have a successful launch and post-launch period.
I’d like to invite you to come and learn how you can have a successful launch. Tickets are only $199, a steal compared to the results a successful launch will offer you. This three-hour, online roundtable will be a no-holds-barred look at the launch process, the product creation process, and the hard-fought lessons of building your own bootstrapped product business. There are less than 30 tickets left, and almost 1,000 of you reading this; if you want in, don’t wait!
See you at the roundtable!
Brandon Savage is the author of Mastering Object Oriented PHP and Practical Design Patterns in PHP
Posted on 3/27/2013 at 7:09 pm
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