An audience, and the launch sequence

A launch is not a marketing event, it is the day you find out whether you built an audience. Most disappointing launches were decided weeks earlier, by a product being built in private.

The audience comes before the launch

You do not need a large following. You need a small number of people who know the thing is coming and have a reason to care. Twenty people who asked about it beats two thousand who have never heard of you.

• Collect emails from the day you have something to say, not the week before launch. An address is worth more than a follow because you control whether it is seen.
• Build in public if you can stand it. The process is interesting to the people who have the problem, and it produces the list as a side effect.
• Be where they already are rather than asking them to come to you. A community you belong to beats a channel you are starting.
• Tell people what you are making. The fear of being copied is almost always larger than the risk, and silence costs you the audience.

A sequence that works

1. 01Tell them it is coming, with a date. Say who it is for and what it does.
2. 02Show it. One real piece of the product, given away, so the quality is visible rather than claimed.
3. 03Open it. Say it is available, say the price, say what happens when they buy.
4. 04Answer the objection. One message dealing with the reason people are hesitating, which you will know from the replies.
5. 05Close it, if closing is real. A price rise or a deadline works only if it happens. If you say the price goes up and it does not, that is the last time a deadline works on these people.

What those five contain, concretely. The first is four lines: the product, the buyer, the outcome, the date. The second is the giveaway itself with one line of context and no ask at all, which is what makes it work. The third is the shortest of the five: it is available, here is the price, here is the link, here is what arrives when you buy. The fourth is written after the third, from the actual replies, and answers one objection rather than four. The fifth states the deadline and what happens at it.

Five messages over a week or two, not twenty over a month. The people who want it buy early; the sequence exists for the ones who need a second look.

What launch day actually tells you

Separate three numbers, because they fail for different reasons. How many people saw it, how many went to the page, how many bought. A traffic problem, a page problem and an offer problem look identical from a distance and need different fixes.

Worked with illustrative figures, so the diagnosis is visible. Four hundred people on the list, sixty opened the launch message and clicked, two bought. The page converted two in sixty, which is low but not absurd for a cold list, and sixty clicks from four hundred is a reasonable open and click. So the page or the price is the first suspect, not the audience.

Change one figure and the diagnosis changes completely. Four hundred on the list, six clicked, two bought. Now the page converted two in six, which is strong, and almost nobody clicked. The product is fine and the message that announced it is the problem, or the list was built from people who never wanted this.

Same two sales, opposite conclusions, and the only difference is a number most people do not look at. If plenty visited and nobody bought, the page or the price is the problem. If nobody visited, the audience or the announcement is. If people bought and then asked for refunds, the page promised something the product does not do.