You build the structure for your next launch during your current launch
Most creators expect paid members and sales the minute they get started, but there's a huge flaw in their logic. Once somebody joins your ecosystem, they're still a long way from giving you money.
Hi,
Today we’re getting into launches and fandoms. To get the most out of this article, you might want to read these articles as well.
When people come to me after a poor launch, often even after gathering a big audience, I always ask this question:
How many people were around during your last launch?
If you’ve followed my work for any length of time, you have probably heard me talk about the power of the email list and building a fandom. Following that, you’ve probably gathered a lot of people from your last launch who have never seen you launch before to get excited about it.
And yet, when you hit that launch button…all you get is crickets. Then, you start feeling ways about things and me, specifically a combination of rage and shame that you can’t figure this out.
Don’t worry. You’re not bad and you’re not dumb. You just fell victim to one of the biggest misunderstandings in the game.
The people on your list between launches will see your current launch and usually get excited for your next launch.
You aren’t building your audience to monetize them today. You’re building them so you can monetize them 6-12 months from now. I know this is a gut punch, and there are certainly things you can do to move them along their customer journey, but the best thing you can do to convert your subscribers into sales is letting get to know you, which just takes time.
Most of the new people you convert from this current launch have probably been with you for at least 2 launches.
I treat every launch (aside from a way to make money) as a chance to show people how much fun it would be to get behind the pay wall so that next time they are ready for it.
The people who can launch effortlessly have spent years building and supporting their audience. If you’re just starting your journey, you literally can’t rely on that because you haven’t build up that cache with the people on your list. They just don’t know you enough to buy from you on autopilot yet.
I heard from Tyler James once that many people are on his list for 1-2 years before he can rely on them to buy consistently. Alex Hormozi said the same thing a few months later. Then, I looked back on my launches and as much as I hate it, YUUUP, most of my best customers have been on my list for 1-2 years before they start to buy frequently from me.
The word frequently is doing a lot of work there. What I mean is that even though people often buy something from me during their second launch, that is just a tryout.
After the get their new book, they usually sit on it for months, and use the third or fourth launch as an incentive to read the thing they bought from me and decide whether they are in for the long haul.
The buying cycle often looks like this once a subscriber joins my list.
Launch 1: Build excitement. Somebody probably isn’t going to join you the first time. They are just trying to get the vibes of your launch, whether you’re cool, if they want to hang out with you, and if you’ve got something they want to read.
Launch 2: Try the goods. By now they’ve known you 3-6 months and know your style. They've probably read some of your posts, maybe a sample of your books, and are ready to get excited for what you have to sell. If it’s something they are into then it’s a good bet they’ll at least put it on their to read list for later.
Launch 3: Reminder they need to read. Once you deliver the book, it goes to the bottom of the pile, so the next launch is a great way to get your book bumped up higher in the queue. Honestly, every touch point is a little reminder. When I did shows full-time people would come up and apologize that they hadn’t read my book yet…even a year after buying it. Getting people to read my work and form an opinion after buying it is easily the hardest part of the game fo rme.
Launch 4: Read the thing, finally. By this point, you are probably near the top of their to-read pile, and the fact you are launching again will probably guilt them into reading the book. However, it can take a whole year or more for somebody to read one of my books after they get it. Once they do, they’ll make an opinion to either become a big fan, follow a series, or put you on the scrap heap. However, I’ve known people 5+ years who still haven’t read a book they bought from me a dozen launches ago.
If you launch every three months, like I do, then best case scenario is that a subscriber is literally one year from getting on your list to buying everything.
In my opinion, you should launch things more often so you can audition yourself to potential readers more often and win them quicker. You don’t have to launch a book. You could launch your membership, or a set of pins, or a map, or a calendar. It just has to be something where people can get a sense of your vibes.
Even with that it could take a year or more, and that’s somebody who’s on the ball. It could take even longer, which is why you have to take a longitudinal view of your career.
This is also why you need a good content marketing strategy that warms people up for your launch, and why you need to be constantly building your fandom
You’re always 1-2 years behind monetizing your audience.
If you want money now, you should have build the structures 1-2 years ago, but if you want to avoid that mistake in the future, you need to make audience building a part of your practice all the time.
In my sales manager days we used to say that what you do today is predictive of your sales in six weeks, but you are really working on a much longer time horizon if you want to have any stability in your career. It wasn’t until I was doing sales for over a year and had repeat buyers that I started to feel stable in my job.
The biggest habit I had to break in my salespeople was their constantly working on a boom/bust cycle.
Somebody on my team would have a bad month and have to scramble to close deals so they could hit their numbers. In doing so, they would scrape by that month, but they would have performed a ton of actions that paid off six weeks later.
All that effort while they were stuggling brought them a windfall the next month, which would cause them to take their foot off the gas. Since they were still living off all the work they did, they would equate laziness with success and struggle with work. even though it’s exactly the opposite. If they could just keep their foot on the gas all the time, they would be unstoppable, but it’s a very hard habit to break.
Even the best salespeople dealt with this all the time. I’m not the best salesperson, but I can just show up longer than anyone else without taking my foot off the gas.
The single best predictor of success was whether a salesperson could break that cycle in themselves, and the same is true for creators.
If you use your launch wisely, you can use your current launch to build the structure you need to succeed better next time, whether that means hiring people, building our partnerships, creating new material, building your mailing list, or something else that will help the lift become easier each time.
I spent 5 years funneling all my money back into projects so that I could prove to people I was serious and wasn’t going anywhere. These are the two biggest fears people have when they assess a creator, and there’s very little you can do about that except let time happen and keep showing up.
If you’re not using your current launch to build some buffer for your next launch, then it will be a lot harder to build once that launch is over and everything crashes to the ground.
LSS: The people you bring onto your list today probably won’t pay off for 6 months and won’t become consistent buyers for 1-2 years.
That’s even true with Substack.
My last pay-what-you-can-afford pledge drive was 2.5x better than my last one, and wouldn’t you know it, most of the people who bought got on my list around September last year.
Yes, some people became paid members before then, but not many. That said, it was still only a small fraction of my list that chose to buy, and I still have fewer than 2% of my list converting to paid membership, but it keeps growing over time. Two percent of 40,000 is a lot bigger than 10% of 4,000.
So, honest and true, do you have a strategy to get you 1-2 years down the road? Or are you just planning for people to buy quickly? Are you launching enough to audition for your readers? Do you have a 1-2 year launch strategy to pull people through your funnel?
Let us know in the comments.
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Every time I read a marketing post written by you, it expands my brain cells a little more. It's so easy to get caught up in the low or non-existent numbers (sales/paid subscribers etc.) rather than look at writing and publishing from a long-term perspective. Thank you for writing and sharing these posts.