Grow With Soul Ep. 25: From A Seed Of An Idea To Planning Your Launch
This is a solo episode talking through a question I’ve had several times over the last few months: how do I go from the seed of an idea into a fully-fledged actual business? I want to clarify too that this isn’t just for people who haven’t yet started their businesses, it’s for those of you who are thinking of launching a new offering or new product collection too. The 3 part process I’m going to talk through is the one I use myself and with clients when you want to introduce something new to the market, no matter how long you’ve already been there.
Here's what I talk about in this episode:
Refining the idea
Thinking about the customer
Doing your market research
Preparing your marketing plan and materials
Pre-launch and launch
Being visible during your launch period
My launch experience
Links and resources I discuss:
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Read the episode transcript:
Hello, and welcome to episode 25 of Grow with Soul. It’s just me today and I’m going to be talking through a question that I’ve had several times over the last few months, which is: how do I go from the seed of an idea into a fully fledged actual business? I want to clarify too that this isn’t just for people who haven’t yet started their businesses, it’s for those of you who are thinking of launching a new offering or a new product collection too. The process that I’m going to talk through is the one that I use myself and with clients, whenever you want to introduce something new to the market, no matter how long you’ve already been there.
I’m also not the most fantastic launcher in all of the world. There are people out there who love the launch process and have lots of different funnels and systems and things to get their 6 figure launches. I don’t know whether it’s a British thing but I do find launching my own products quite awkward, and this is something that is a constant learning process for me really, is trying to find what that right balance is, which we’ll dig into a little bit more. However I do also just generally prefer to keep things simple, and focus more on showing up authentically than having all the right email funnels for example. If you want all of that technical information and the complex funnel system of launching, then you’re probably not going to get it from this episode, so do check out Jenna Kutcher and Amy Porterfield for information around that very big premium 6 figure launch style of marketing.
Instead, this episode is going to look at how you can launch when you’ve never done it before, or without having to get different programmes or software, just using the channels you already have. It’s really about achieving manageable and sustainable growth rather than those huge big launches. So yeah, if that’s for you, come on in.
For me, with building a business or planning a launch, there are three main stages. There’s planning, there’s preparation and there’s presence. So I guess planning kind of speaks for itself, but that’s the very first step, the background of the background work is making sure you know what your idea is, pulling that out into its full potential, thinking about your customer and the market you’re going to be entering.
The preparation is all the marketing stuff, so having a content calendar, your sales copy, thinking about how long that period needs to be based on several factors, all that kind of stuff going into the prep period.
Presence is post launch, making sure that you are visible, you are there, you’re able to be reactive, rather than trying to do all the blog posts and everything in that moment when people need to be able to see you. I’m going to talk through the main facets of each of those three pieces of the process, so you’ll get an idea of what it’s like when I’m launching things here and hopefully you’ll be able to apply it to your own idea that you’re nurturing at the moment.
STEP 1 – PLANNING
Step 1.1 – The idea
I’m going to assume that you’ve got an idea to start with, and I don’t like the idea of trying to push an idea to try and come up with something for the sake of coming up with it, because that’s not the way to have the best ideas. It’s got to serve a genuine need both for you and the people that you’re doing it for. For the sake of this episode, we’re going to assume there’s a little seed, a little inkling of an idea there and we’re going to draw it out.
The first thing to do is to make sure that that idea you have is aligned with your business purpose and what you do and how you want to be helping people in the world.
For example, if I had an idea about how to make a million dollars in ten days, that’s not really aligned with the concept of grow with soul, which is my whole business purpose, so that’s probably not an idea to follow through with. It really needs to follow through on the messaging you’ve been putting out or that you want to stand for in the future, and I guess the thing here is to say not to chase the likes, as we would say; not to chase what’s popular, what seems to be doing well for other people, really stay very blinkered and in your own house with this one.
The second thing is: does your idea serve a genuine need or problem for somebody else?
If it doesn’t do that, nobody’s going to buy it. People aren’t going to buy something that they don’t need, want, or like, so you’ve got to be realistic about this. Are you making this course because you want to make a course? Rather than it’s something that people need a course to be able to learn. Is it actually more of a blog post than a course? But also, don’t be too hard on yourself and I think this particular question is always very difficult for product based businesses and makers because depending on what your product is, people very rarely need that product, and it’s hard to think of what problem that product solves. So really think outside of the box with that so, say you make jewellery, don’t underestimate the fact that a ring that you’ve made might be the most clear expression of someone’s personality that they’ve ever found. And that by wearing it, they feel most themselves than they ever have. That is a real genuine reason for somebody to need your product or to want your product and to buy your product. Just because we’re not, as I’ve said before, at the ‘solving world hunger’ end of the spectrum with this, doesn’t mean that there isn’t that genuine value and that genuine need. One one hand be realistic, but also get out of your own head so that the self doubt doesn’t take over, and make sure that you are able to be, again, realistic but in a different way.
The third thing is: what is this going to do for your business and for you?
So do you actually need to launch another offering right now or are you actually pretty snowed under as it is? Are you looking to, say, move away from 1-2-1 work and does this offering actually help you with that. For example, say that you can’t deal with your inbox any longer, you need to start having fewer people email you, so you want to take on fewer 1-2-1 clients; is the idea that you’re thinking of solving that problem, or is it just giving more people different reasons to email you? Be really clear on what you want this to do for your business rather than just launching something out there just to make more money and to have another thing. What is it that’s going to make you move what you’re doing forward or make your life better?
Once you’ve asked yourself those things, you need to move onto your customer.
If you listened to last week’s episode with Susannah, you can really work with your customer to build the idea a bit more, because, as I said in that episode, you can be building this thing in isolation and spend six months on it and as soon as you release it into the world, people say ‘oh it would have been nice if it had been a little bit more like this’ and you’ve just wasted that whole six months. So work with your customer to work out whether it does serve a genuine need or problem and how you can tweak it so that it really does properly serve that need or problem.
Reigning it back a bit; do you already know your customer? Are you starting out and you’ve not done any work on this yet, or you’ve not built an audience, or maybe you have got an audience but you’re not 100% if they’re the right audience for this new product? Therefore do you need to find a new customer base? That’s very important, because you have to have somebody to sell it to. You can have the best idea in the world, but if you can’t get it in front of the people, it’s meant for, it’s not going to sell. You’ve got to be very realistic about this, and just because you’ve got 4000 followers that they’re following you because they want to buy this idea.
So start testing the water with an existing audience to see how they’re reacting to it, but if you’re starting from scratch, perfect, because you can start building an audience that you know need your thing, which can be much easier than shifting an audience to start to think that they want something that they probably didn’t. Work on making sure that you’re very clear on who that person is and how you can help them, and then you just need to make sure that the USPs of your products or idea really matches up to that customer’s needs. Again, this is going back and asking what they want, what their problem is, and just slightly shifting the idea so that it really matches up with that customer need.
The third thing in this planning phase is to do some market research. Now, I would want you to be cautious with this, because market research could very quickly turn into comparison, and that’s not what we want. You need to make sure that when you’re approaching your market research, you are in the right headspace. I always talk about asking a question of your market research, so you’re not just going to see what’s out there, have a scroll, look into people’s work, because yes, that way you’re going to be like ‘well there’s no space for me, I’m never going to do it’. Go in asking a question; maybe it’s ‘what is the price point of other people doing similar things’, ‘how are they marketing to their sorts of person’. Go in looking for specific information so that you can keep that more objective, researcher mindset. You don’t want to do too much, so that you just become other people and do what they’re doing as well, but just you want to be aware of the space that you’re moving into so that you don’t score any own goals like not knowing there’s another meditation app if you’re launching a meditation service, for example. That’s what you want to look at; where you sit in the market, who else is doing similar things, and also look at who is doing things that aren’t similar but solve the same problem.
For example, if you make bikes, well people are going to buy a bike because they want to exercise but also a gym is one of your competitors in that space as well because it’s somewhere else that people can go to get fit. So look at what all the different options are for your customer to solve their problem, and think about how you can then position yourself as the best solution to solve that problem.
Also look at what other people are doing to market their business, and what you can use and take into yours. So if somebody else seems to be having really big success with blogging rather than podcasting, for example, maybe that’s something that you can use because you know then that that kind of audience is consuming their content that way.
But also, what can you improve on? What are people doing that’s not quite hitting the spot with their customers? What are the questions that keep coming up? What isn’t feeling right to you? How can you improve on what others are doing? All that stuff so you can know that when you’re doing your marketing prep, you know what you’re going to be coming up against and how you can differentiate yourself within that market. It’s not about doing the same or following the rules, it’s about being really different. Once you know what others are doing you can make sure that you stand out to your people by being more this, or more authentic, or more that, but use that to be different, not the same.
The other thing to look at with your market research is pricing. We all hate to talk about it, particularly with service based offerings because it’s so subjective, because the only real cost you have is your time, and that in itself is quite subjective as well. With products it’s slightly easier, because there are many more formulas out there about the cost of materials, the cost of your time, percentages on top of that and it’s kind of easier to have a place to go from.
But generally with charging, my rules are always to charge your worth. If you start charging low for something, once you’re a week into the project and you’ve sold your first one, you’re going to immediately resent it, because you know you’re not getting paid what you want to be paid for that work. Don’t just start really low because people can’t afford it, because you’re not going to have a nice life working like that. So charge what you’re worth, but make it accessible for people. So that means payment plans, it means having maybe scholarship places on courses for people who can’t necessarily afford it, all that kind of thing so that you can be inclusive and help people but also make sure that you’re charging what you’re worth.
A slight caveat to that, however, is that it’s always easier to put your prices up than to put them down. You don’t want to have a course and then actually you sell, say, five places at £300 and think ‘next time I’m going to put it down to £150’, because those people who bought the course will be like ‘hang on, why did I pay double for this?’ and everybody else is going to be like ‘hang on, why is it half the price that it was before?’ Whereas you can double it and people understand. Those first people will be glad they got a great deal, and everybody else is thinking wow, great effort. So charge your worth, but if you’re thinking of a bracket when you’re starting out, go at the lower end of that bracket so that you can put it up for the second or third iteration.
PREPARATION.
So you’ve got your idea, you know who it’s for, and you know roughly where you’re going to sit in the market when you do eventually launch it. Obviously, somewhere in here you’ve got to now create the product, so go away and do that, and then we’re going to do our preparation stage of this process.
The first thing that I would do, and this is what we do on my Make it Real programme, is write a sales page. Which very often we leave ‘til last, but it’s always great for it to be first, because it makes sure that the idea is really clear in your head, because on this sales page you have to communicate what you do, what your idea is, what your product is to somebody else. In order to do that, you need to really understand it in and out in order to communicate it to someone else so that they understand it. What the sales page also does is make you really think and connect to those key selling points. What are the things that really help to solve that problem or to achieve that goal for my person? So it fixes you in and focuses you on being really clear about what your product is and how it helps people, because that’s what you want in your head when you’re planning your marketing materials.
Once you’ve got that and that’s all done, what I always like to do is that I work backwards from things. So if you’ve got a launch date in mind, work backwards from that so you can see what needs to be put in place in order for you to be launching with everything that you want to be launching with. So sometimes your date will be quite fixed, so for product based businesses, Christmas is always going to be quite a big one, so you can’t really shift that too much. You’ve got to make sure you’re starting it enough in advance, or even if you’re not, you then have to be ruthless about what you’re going to be able to include in that launch. Maybe you’re not going to be able to start a new podcast but you can get the blog posts out and that is going to be absolutely better than not doing anything at all.
But if your launch date is quite arbitrary, so you’ve just plucked it out of the air and it’s not really based on anything, make sure you have got the time and space in there to do the things that you want to do, particularly if it’s a brand new business or offering. You want to make sure there’s enough space in that launch and pre launch period to be really educating people and telling people what’s going on. Work backwards from those dates and think about what you want to be doing on that launch date – you want to have everything done. Look at all your channels; you’ve got your socials, you’ve got your emails, you’ve got your blog, you can use outreach to get more coverage of your product, so start thinking about when you need to be pitching those things. For outreach, it might even be six months before for some press opportunities, but with things like blogging and socials you can do those quite quickly depending on how you work.
Another thing that’s going to depend on the length of this launch and pre launch period really depends on your situation and your business. As we discussed earlier, do you need to build a whole customer base first? If you do, you’re not going to be launching in a month, because it’s just not enough time to build trust with people so that they know they can follow you, let alone buy from you. Just be really mindful of that and be really realistic. If it needs to be pushed back an extra six months so you’ve got more time to be doing the audience building and building the trust and establishing your expertise, that’s a really smart thing to do.
When I say launch and pre launch, by the way, pre launch is what you do before you put the thing on sale. So your pre launch, if you’re launching a course, might be that you’re creating blog posts about your experience with online courses, or your experience with the thing that you’re going to be teaching, before you’re even mentioning that this even exists, so you’re starting to sow the seeds, and set the tone of what’s going to be coming once you’ve launched the thing.
An example for this was my first Campfire launch, because it was my first course, first thing that wasn’t 1-2-1, and I launched that in April 2018, but for, I think it was a month and a half beforehand, I started to up the amount I was talking about content creation. So I was doing, maybe, every other blog post about content marketing in some way, before I’d even said about the course. I also had done some posts about investing in your personal development and how to know what course is for you, all that kind of thing, to set those tones of getting people into that mindset of thinking about their own content marketing and how they wanted to learn about it.
So I did all of that and then I launched the course, and I had quite a long launch period, about a month and a half again, during which I went a little bit more explicit with my content marketing posts, so there was a lot of ‘how to plan your content’ so that that really linked very explicitly with what the content of Campfire is. So that’s how I did that first launch, and that was very successful, but it was an awful lot of work, so I haven’t done it that way again because really I would run out of things to talk about content marketing quite quickly if I was doing that intensity. I also found it was unnecessary because people, in my experience, buy either right at the beginning of a launch, or, maybe 80-90% of the time, right at the very end in the last couple of days. I have shortened my launch periods since then and I think that I’m always in a pre launch state. So, given that I run the courses twice a year, when they’re not on sale, I’m always in that pre launch state of making sure people are thinking about taking a course or thinking about their content or their outreach, so that by the time the launch comes around, you’re not educating them from point 0, they’re already embedded in that idea of this stuff that I talk about.
What you DO need for both pre launch and launch is a good content calendar. A content calendar is kind of what it sounds like, it’s a plan where you’re going to say ‘this is what I’m going to post, this is when I’m going to post it and this is where I’m going to post it’. For a launch this is particularly useful because you might have a lot of different things going out, you’re going to have more emails than usual, probably, you’re going to have more social media, so for me I don’t just have my grid posts, I’ll have a few lives in there, I’ll be doing more stories than usual, I’ll have very specific blog posts going out, maybe some outreach, I might be on a podcast to talk about my course. All of those things all need to tie together, so I don’t want to be putting a blog post out but not linking it to the fact I was on a podcast, or not having an opt-in for people to sign up and all that kind of stuff.
The calendar really helps you make sure that everything’s going out at the right time and they’re all joined up, and that can really help in your pre launch and your launch period to know that when you’re talking on your live if you’re going to do one that you can refer back to a blog post that you put out earlier that day rather than ‘oh god, I did write a blog post yet’; it just makes everything a bit more seamless and helps you to stay really in control of it.
The good thing with doing that is also that you can batch your content before you launch as well. So you can be taking all the photos, you can have written up your email sequence, you can have written up your blog posts so that you’re not there during your launch period furiously typing out before you have to go on a podcast or whatever.
The preparation stage really is everything that we talk about in marketing, just on steroids, and to one end. Rather than just thinking about your usual email newsletter and your usual blog posts which are all quite evergreen (people can come to them anytime and get what you stand for) whereas launch marketing can still be evergreen, but it’s still very specific to that moment in time in your business. And for product based businesses, the same rules apply, so depending on what your business launch is about, say you’re doing a shop opening, all your social media can be talking about your shop opening, showing you making your products behind the scenes, reminding people of the date it’s going to be open, your emails can be a countdown, you can send maybe a product to some influencers and some magazines to get some outreach. So all the same stuff applies, just in your context as a product based business.
LET’S TALK ABOUT PRESENCE.
This is what’s really important during a launch period, is that you need to be visible. You need to make sure that you’re showing up in people’s lives frequently and regularly so they don’t forget that you exist, because you’ve done all this work to make the thing in the first place and then all your prep marketing work, you need to be there pushing it out there and making sure people are seeing it.
This is a thing that we all feel awkward about, and what I’ll say is that this doesn’t mean every day talking about your product and on stories every hour sharing, telling people to turn up and buy your product because that is very boring very quickly for everybody involved. You’re going to get people skipping, you’re going to hate yourself because of how salesy you’re being. So you can still use the 80/20 rule here, which is that 80% of what you talk about should be pure value for your customer, and 20% should be talking about your course or your product. During this period, even if you’re talking about something that isn’t related to your course or product or that’s not directly ‘buy this now’. To use the content marketing example again, you can be talking about how you plan your content, you can be showing that and be providing value through that but without mentioning the course so much. Or with your product you can be showing the behind the scenes of you making, without saying ‘buy this’. So you can use this 80/20 rule to make sure that you’re present without being boringly salesy. It’s more important that people keep seeing your little icon pop up on their stories feed, or continually see you posting or have blog posts to always go and read rather than they occasionally see you pop up and every time you pop up you’re talking about somebody buying your course.
With this, really play to your strengths, as I discussed on The Little Chapter’s episode on being an introvert a few weeks ago, I am somebody who is pretty good at doing live broadcasts. I find them quite easy to do, I actually really enjoy them, that’s a place where I am really good at showing up and providing value and answering everybody’s questions and all that kind of thing. For some people, that’s hell! I’m not saying you have to show up like that, you show up in the way that you show up best. So maybe it’s that your grid posts on Instagram always do really well because your photography’s great or your captions really connect, then do more of that so you can show up in that way. Maybe your email list is really strong so send a few more emails than you usually would. Show up where you best show up, where you’re going to be the best version of yourself, in order for people to remember that you exist – that’s the whole point here.
The other point is that you can be reactive. If people are asking questions about your product or something’s not clear to them, you start to see the same FAQ’s coming through, you can go in and you can change your sales copy, you can send a reactive email to say ‘hey guys, everyone’s asking me this question about my product launch, let me answer for all of you here’. If you are really bogged down in ‘oh god I’ve got to get that blog post out’, you’re going to miss this stuff, you’re not going to pick up on that ability to be reactive, you’re not going to have the time to send that email explaining things a bit more clearly. And you’re not going to have the time to be responding to messages answering those questions. So that’s the whole point of the prep work is that during the actual period of the launch when the thing is on sale to when it closes you can be there, you can be very accessible when people have got questions so you can answer them quickly and provide great customer service, and you can be present and visible so that, for the people who are on the fence or they’re not quite sure or they’re waiting til the day it closes, they’re not going to forget that you exist.
So that’s the three step process of planning, preparation and presence. And I know that a lot of people have a lot of fear about launch; I have a lot of fear about launching! Something that I wrote about a few months ago in a post about failure on the blog, and what helps me during that period, because I think the fear is always ‘what if it doesn’t sell’, you’ve got to ask ‘what’s the worst that can happen?’ Maybe it’s that your course has one person on it. And they know they’re the only person who bought it, that’s almost worse than no-one buying it, because if no-one bought it, no-one needs to know that no-one bought it! But if one person does, they know that nobody else did. So actually, turn that around. If that one person bought your course, then that person’s going to have the best course experience ever because they can have you working with them 1-2-1 on this thing that they’ve been excited to buy, so give them that and think of it like that. Take yourself and your ego out of it.
Similarly, in your product launch, if you don’t sell out absolutely everything, what’s the worst that can happen? You take extra stock to a fair, or you keep your online shop open, or you give it out to some more wholesalers; it still can be sold. It’s not a finite thing. And just a story really with this is that when I launched the whole business, so when I first quit my job, moved here to Wales, and proudly announced that I was open for business, I could take coaching clients now, I had my friends share online about how I was now available for booking, I had all these blog posts going out, I had emails going out, I had people on Instagram following me – I didn’t book any clients. In that launch period, I didn’t book a single client. In fact, I didn’t have a single enquiry, I didn’t have one email asking me about what I did, and that was really the worst that could happen I think. And to be honest I carried out because I didn’t have a choice because I’d moved up here, but imagine if I’d given up because that first launch didn’t live up to my dreams?
And actually it took three months of hammering away before anybody even enquired about working with me. So when I say ‘what’s the worst that could happen?’ I have genuinely been in that place where the worst did happen and it was okay, I carried on, I learned a lot from it, I reviewed everything that I was doing, started to see what might be going wrong, and changed it. So believe me when I say that the worst that can happen is an actually bad thing, and you can always learn from it and there’s always the next time. But by following the process, it gives you something to go on, something that gives you the best shot at being the best launch it can be at that time. The first one is always going to be the worst one, and you’ve only got to do the first one once. You can learn so much from it and move on. So yes, if you’re planning on launching a new business or idea, good luck! And let me know how it goes.