Part 2 - Soft Launch
Let’s continue to validate our offer idea with a soft launch.
The more time we spend here in pre-production confirming people want this the better. Believe me - I’ve cumulatively wasted YEARS building stuff people don’t want! Don’t fall into the trap.
Again this method is based on the excellent thread by George Ten I mentioned in the first Part. Link here. It’s well worth reviewing!
Let’s get started:
Soft Launch
- what’s a “good” reaction?
- example of a “mid” reaction
- build in public content for continued clarity
- soft launch with waitlist
- define success before you start
Red light, green light
In the last Part we went through a short loop:
Come up with an idea → Ask your audience if it’s stupid → Gauge reaction
I previously said that if the audience responded poorly kill the idea and try with something new in a few days. And if they respond well go ahead to the next step.
But what’s a good/bad response? And what do we do about "meh” results?
What you are looking for is for people to bite your hand off. You want the idea to be so exciting that people start hounding you for more information.
When I put out my video about licensing my AI teaching material I got:
- 200+ interested on the post itself
- 50+ DMs
- 50 or so emails
It’s been a week since the first “is this a stupid idea?” and people are now emailing for updates.
You want this level of impatience (in a good way❣️ ). It means you are onto something.
If it’s purely people saying “yeah sounds cool” that’s insufficient. We want to find something that people get a bit crazy about.
And guess what….we can! Because we are not yet building anything! We can keep asking about new ideas until we get a big reaction.
Here’s an example. I had the idea of doing a 30 day Audience Accelerator. Basically showing people how I built to 80k Tiktok followers in a few months.
Here’s the announcement video:
Notice the “Is this a stupid idea?” language. Literally George Ten’s language from the last Part!
Now this video did…fine. And the response was pretty good. But go look at the language people use in the comments. It’s much less excited that with the idea about licensing my material.
There’s also just less interest - smaller numbers. And certainly no one tracking down my email and chasing me!
Is it a bad idea? No not really. It’s OK. Still 100+ interested. And I may still do it, with tweaks. But the reaction was not the OHMYGOSHYES that I needed to push ahead.
Same goes for you - don’t push out one idea, get a decent response and think “this is it! All in!”
Feel free to ask more, try more ideas, look for an extreme reaction.
There’s no ego at this point. Just you fishing. And experimenting here means finding an offer that is worth your time working on!
Better to spend a few weeks here than months creating something no-one really wants.
Hold the line
People biting your hand off at the first post? Great.
So you build it all right now as the next step? No! Hold on for a moment.
We’re now going to continue to verify that people want this. By continuing to post about it.
This allows us to:
- confirm interest
- drum up more interest
- refine the idea
Here’s an example:
In this video I quickly showed an outline of what the offer might look like and asked what other things people would want to see in the offer. It’s a follow up video with more detail.
You want to do similar posts, talking about what you are building and asking for feedback.
This is called “build in public” and is a smart way to tailor your product to your customer requirements (with audience feedback) as well as keep it in their minds.
If this goes well and it seems like your first popular “is this stupid?” post isn’t a fluke we’ll lock in and move to soft launch mode.
Soft Launch
Our soft launch is getting people onto a waiting list.
We’re collecting their email to:
- know the numbers who are interested
- be able to contact them later
Importantly: we need to set a target before we start collecting emails.
If we hit the target we push ahead with launching the offer. If we do not hit the target we stop and come up with another idea.
Sounds brutal but we are using these checkpoints to make sure we don’t waste time and money later.
How we set this target depends on our audience size, past track record with launches, the price of the offer, your financial goals etc.
Work backwards from the result you want to the wait list size you need.
For example let’s say the launch is only worth while if you know you can sell $50,000 worth. Anything below just won’t be worth your time building and launching.
If the offer is $3000 we need to sell to 17 people to hit $50,000.
If we assume 25% of the people of our waiting list buy we need 68 people on the waiting list.
68 becomes your target wait list.
Here’s a quick and dirty prompt to do the calculation for you. Just plug your numbers in:
I am launching a waitlist for an upcoming sale. The purpose of the waitlist is to validate before launch. To validate I need to hit a certain number on the waitlist. Help me calculate this number.
This launch is only worth me doing if I can bank [revenue goal]
The price is [price of offer]
I expect to be able to close [x%] of the waitlistPlug in your figures and you’ll get a worked result like this:
The exact accuracy of the calculation is not the important thing here. What’s important is having an objective target before you start collecting emails. Otherwise it’s too easy to engage in hand waving “oh yeah that’s enough” justifications later!
For the practicalities of the waitlist keep it simple. Use a simple Google Form asking for their email address and then plug it at the bottom of your posts talking about what you are working on. The offer idea should be sufficient to secure the waitlist signup without fancy sales pages and copywriting.
In the next Part we’ll get paid and start to build! In that order! We get paid before we build.