#315: Breaking Down Our $101,666 Launch: The Mechanics And Lessons Learned From Our Virtual Summit

0:13Hello, my friend, welcome back to another episode of Creator Science. Today, we're taking you behind the scenes of the Creator Science business. I'm talking with Anna Reich, the integrator here on the Creator Science team. We're talking about the six-figure launch we pulled off this summer, our first ever six-figure launch. And it all started with a virtual event called the Membership Summit, a free three-day live summit on building memberships. This was a joint effort with a third-party team called After Harvest. And this whole thing was the idea of this guy named Sean, who runs After Harvest.

0:47And his team really supported us in making this summit a reality. The summit was June 23rd through the 25th. It was just me teaching Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday for 90 minutes. We didn't have a bunch of speakers. We had one guest who came in and did a fireside for about 20 minutes and it led into a launch campaign for build a beloved membership. This is a four week live course on building memberships. If you missed it, I'll include a link in the show notes for 50 % off the self paced version of build a beloved membership. That is the same price, the same offer we made during the launch campaign.

1:20So if you missed it and you're interested in building a membership that is in the show notes, this whole effort was a massive lift. And for my team, two members of which were brand new at the beginning of May, it was really a trial by fire. During this period of time, I spoke at Press Publish LA in late May. We hosted our offline event for The Lab in Boise at the beginning of June. I spoke at a virtual summit right after that, and then ultimately hosting this event June 23rd to the 25th before running a four-week cohort all through July. It was a brutal couple of months, and I certainly experienced more burnout than I have in a very long time.

1:57But it was a massive success in many ways. And I wanted to do a full recap with Ana for you to learn from as well. So in this episode, we'll run through all the numbers of the event, the timeline of how and when this all came together, things we do the same way, again, things we would do a little bit differently, and what an 80-20 approach to this strategy looks like. If you enjoy this episode, tag me on social media at jklaus. Let me know that you're listening. I'd love to see it. We'll get to that full episode with Ana right after this.

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3:57Ana, first time on the podcast. Been in the business now for three months, four months? Three and a half months. It's mid-August. I'm looking at my phone right now and I'm looking at the date and it says August 13th and I'm just like, what? But how? That sounds like a long time since May. At the same time, a long time and a short time. It feels like I've been in the business forever. And also it flew by so quickly. So we're going to talk about the membership summit today, which was kind of the first project that I basically just threw you into. And you had no say in whether we do it or not. But I feel like you took to it incredibly well.

4:35I told you on a recent call, I was like, I don't know what would have happened if I didn't hire you in May. Would I have just died? Like, what could I have done on my own with this? I pulled all of the numbers as best as I could and the timeline details. So I'll run through that quickly. The Membership Summit, this is a three-day live event on building memberships. We had an optional fourth day for VIPs. And here were the numbers. We had a goal, a registration goal of 3 ,000. And the most recent figure I could find that we posted in Slack, the registrations were at 3 ,145. So we hit our stretch goal.

5:11Actually, I think our initial goal is 2 ,000. We said stretch goal is 3 ,000. So 3 ,000 people who registered. I actually couldn't get a firm figure on live attendees. I probably could have logged into Webinar Jam to find this, but I loathe the idea of logging into Webinar Jam ever again. So what I did see was on day one, we had more than a thousand unique people show up. So I'm going to guess that we had somewhere between 1 ,500 and 2 ,000 live attendees through the course of the three days. Probably not quite 2 ,000. Do you have a guess or did you ever see a number on this? This is one thing I wasn't totally sure of.

5:47The only thing I saw was we pretty consistently had about 300 people live at any one time, except for a few peaks that were up to 600 people at once. Yeah, I think those peaks all happened when we sent emails saying like, hey, Jay's live now. And I'm not even sure if those are real people. So I think we had three to 400 concurrent viewers at a real human peak. And the total for revenue of this summit, or I guess the follow on of this summit was$101 ,666, which is an oddly evil and ominous final three digits of that figure, but almost$102 ,000. Our costs were about$23 ,300, which made our margin about$78 ,400.

6:40I'm rounding some numbers here, but that's the total. So if we break down the actual sales for the event, we had 74 people join our live cohort. That was responsible for$63 ,739. Nine people upgraded on the upsell version of the cohort. So that's an extra$9 ,000. During the downsell portion of the event, or the launch, I should say, we had 97 purchases of the self-paced course for$17 ,752. And VIP tickets for the summit itself, 238 ticket sales, a total of just over$11 ,000, which was about a 7.5 % conversion rate of registrations to VIP tickets. So those are the cold, hard numbers. And I thought the financial side of this performed very well.

7:37I mean, we've never had a launch this large in business. The second largest launch we ever had was$61 ,000 for Creator HQ in 2024. This is a much larger launch than that, even if you take out some pretty high expenses. But I don't know if we ever really explicitly talked on how this performed relative to your expectations. How did you feel about the end result? I mean, it was the first launch I've ever been a part of, so I didn't have any reference point. Every launch Ana does is a six-figure launch. Exactly. Wow. I just really wanted to impress you during that time. So I was not sure if I was doing that.

8:18And so I was just pushing the whole time. And I remember that at some point we had thrown out a higher number. And so I was like, oh, no, we're not doing as well as that number. I think it was like 200K that maybe the summit team had told us as what they said as a target. Yeah. The first estimate, so the very first cold email, we'll get into the timeline here in a second, but the very first cold email I received from the team we ended up hiring to work on this with, he was like, I think you can make$600 ,000 from this launch. And I was like, okay, hold on. I love the enthusiasm. And I know this is like a pitch, but let's temper this a little bit.

8:59We did technically have a floor in the contract for$150 ,000 as like, if this launch does not perform here that we wouldn't even need to pay the summit team their fee, which I was never going to hold them to that. It just, they put in so much work. We'll talk about the timeline and all of that. But I had in my mind, I was like, I would love to be able to say we had a six figure launch. And that really did kind of push me. I think, I think having goals like that is really important. One of the takeaways I had from the creator HQ launch in 2024 was I didn't specify a goal to myself. But then through the launch, I felt a lot of disappointment, which meant that there was a like subconscious goal that I had set, but I hadn't made it explicit.

9:43And then therefore, I almost didn't have like accountability or reason to push as hard as I probably could have. We certainly campaigned harder for this than any other launch I've done previously. And before I forget about it, I mentioned the costs were about$23 ,000. So people are probably wondering, where did that come in. Those costs were 15 % of total revenue went to the summit team that worked with us on this. They were hired on a performance basis, which I love that model, super compelling pitch. I'll talk more about that here in a second. But basically it said, we'll do a lot of the lift.

10:14We'll keep 15 % of what is sold with a floor guarantee, incredible pitch. So that was the biggest cost. Second cost was affiliates. We had an affiliate strategy and we offer those affiliates 15 % of any referred revenue they had attributed to them. And that was about$1 ,800. The second largest cost was actually$7 ,800 for the domain membership summit.com. Did I need to buy membership summit.com for almost$8 ,000? I had the.co. I had the.org. I don't know. I probably over invest and care about design and brand and legitimacy more than most people. I think this investment makes a lot of sense if we use it again, which of course, like we'll talk about this and this is all still stuff we're deciding, but I have paid more for domains.

11:07I have paid less for domains. That domain was actually listed at$13 ,500 and a GoDaddy broker actually did some good work on this. So would I do it again? I don't know. We'll talk about that here in a minute. All right, let's talk about our timeline. So the summit itself ran June 23rd through the 26th. Let's start at the beginning. I first received a cold email from Sean from the After Harvest team on February 26th with this idea, which I did not respond to. And then he followed up again on March 2nd, which I did not respond to. And then he followed up on March 3rd, and I did respond. and actually I do believe I read the first two when I was doing this timeline I didn't remember that there were two emails that I ignored and each time he sent these emails by the way they were new threads so maybe a lesson for folks who are doing cold emailing out there he wasn't just like following up incessantly on the same thread he was basically trying again with a different approach in the body of the email but what was really great about Sean's pitch was the email itself actually maybe I should just pull this up okay the subject line was honest question which sounds a little AI written.

12:16That's fine. But the body said, Jay, you have 200 ,000 plus subscribers. That's a$641 ,044 opportunity sitting there. We already planned the entire strategy, $0 up front, but you haven't watched the video yet. And then there was a link with an embedded Loom video and I can see the autoplay that there are screenshots of me and my website and a written whiteboard strategy document. I like that. I like when I can tell there was proof of work. So I responded and said, thanks for persistence. I appreciate that you've taken some personal risk here in the time to put together this idea. So I'll bite and see more of what you're thinking.

12:55And then he sent another Loom video with more on the strategy. And so I was interested. So he got me on the hook on March 10th. We had our first call, April 2nd. We signed the contract April 15th and initially planned the summit for May 12th through the 14th. I don't know if you knew that. Can you imagine if we would have tried to do this on May 12th? That would have been like my second week. Gosh. No. Yeah, we planned to do it in May. And in my mind, everything he was saying, he was like, this is going to be really easy. We're going to do the whole lift. And I was like, okay, well, that sounds easy enough.

13:29I can do that. But glad we pushed it back. We pushed it back on April 23rd to late June because I was going to press publish LA. And I was like, let's actually plan this for after our offline summit. Bought the domain on May 26th. Registration opened on June 2nd. So three weeks in advance of the summit. We finished testing the whole like webinar experience on June 21st. I think we finished the slides for the presentation on June 22nd, the day before. Cart open was June 24th through July 1st. So a week for the car open for the cohort, we had a downsell option July 3rd through the 8th. And then the cohort itself ran July 3rd through August 3rd.

14:12Are there any other major dates here I'm missing? Besides all the other things that we had going on? No. Oh, yeah. What were some of the other things we had going on? Maybe we should talk about this. Some of the other things that were happening during the same period of time. Well, earlier in June, I believe, the lab offline. Yep. First week of June, we're doing the lab offline. So like Mal and I are completely MIA. which was the week that registration opened. Then you were speaking at several different events like Press Publish and the IPO Summit. Oh yeah, I forgot about that, Chanel's event.

14:45Which we created its own lead magnet. And also the presentation for Press Publish, the presentation for the IPO Summit, those were net new assets that we had to create or at least I chose to create. Maybe I didn't have to create net new presentations, but I did. Yeah, I think the IPO Summit was after Boise and then we went right into the summit itself. So it was just bananas, bananas, bananas, bananas. Let's talk about things that went well that we would do the same way next time. I think maybe we go one after another back and forth here until we run out of ideas on our list. What was top of your list?

15:21I thought the launch was a great way. I mean, you could argue if it's the best way to onboard two new employees, but it felt like a great way to bring us together as a team to have this occasion to build a lot of hype around, have daily check-ins on how are we doing in terms of the targets, and also to push us a lot. It felt like we expanded our abilities because we had to. Yeah, that's a really good point. I hadn't thought about that. That was our first sprint as a team, codenamed biggest launch ever. So we had a very clear, audacious goal for the team that everybody responded to so well. Definitely not like intentionally planned in this way.

16:08I mean, everything we're doing is intentionally planned, but it wasn't like, okay, we're gonna do this summit in June and I'm gonna hire people onto the team and then we're gonna do a brand new sprint cadence. And all of that was happily organized from you. So that was great. I would say what I would absolutely do again was having a VIP ticket for this summit. This like blew me away. This is a free event. Anyone can register for free. But we had this VIP ticket that people could purchase. And it was$47. The benefits of the VIP ticket were that you had permanent replays of the summit. You had an optional Q &A on Friday.

16:47It was an additional Q &A that was only for VIP ticket holders. We had a two-way telegram group for VIPs. I think that was it for the VIP ticket. But we had 238 people purchase that. Not a single refund. Everybody seemed to think it was a huge value add. And we were netting sales every day, which you've been in the business now for three and a half months. You've seen that in our sales channel in Slack. We don't have daily sales in this business. This business is pretty predicated on memberships, on sponsorship, on affiliates, but we don't have daily digital product sales right now. And having that in the business was such a comforting, exciting, and obviously missing piece that we need to focus on.

17:35But that was one of my biggest takeaways. I also had that on my list, not only for that reason, although that too, but also this really identified the most enthusiastic summit attendees. A lot of them ended up buying the upsell of the cohort. I remember all the faces and seeing them again in the premium experience of the cohort. So I thought that was a great way to show more love to the people who are more into it. Yeah, the pop-up telegram for that group was really active and people seemed to really like it too. So that was surprising to me. Okay, what was next on your list? I have creating posts with the vibe of my socials team is making me do this.

18:23Okay, I love this. I think we only did this once where I sat down with Ritzy, our socials guy before our one-on-one and decided with him that we were going to force you to record something during our one-on-one call. And then I just told you what to say and you picked up your phone and just recorded it and posted it right away. And so I feel like that's very on brand because you don't like to do a lot of self-promotion. And we are a little bit, as a team, a little bit more removed from that, right? We don't have that emotional burden. So we can just force you to do it. And I think it's very fun for us as well.

19:07That was fun. Okay, yeah. Good note. Good note. I'm open to this. I do need those pushes sometimes. So always open to that. Thanks for that idea, Ritzy. My next item that I said we would definitely do again is I thought the web work that the After Harvest team did was phenomenal. It like really pushed me to think about custom web pages for these standalone events and how far you can push this to be compelling. They were great at making compelling marketing pages for the free event, for the VIP upsell, for the cohort itself. Everything related to web that this team did was incredible and got a lot of attention and a lot of feedback from my audience.

19:50I mean, we had folks in the lab, there was a post that was like, this is the greatest summit website I've ever seen, which sounds a little bit like hyperbole, but it was really, really good. It was so impressive. And I think a seven and a half percent conversion rate from free attendees to VIP is really high. I also think that number is skewed downwards because a lot of those registrations were one click registrations from Kit, which may not have even been like totally purposeful. Some of those might've been like false positives, which means that the actual conversion rate of registration to VIP sales is higher than seven and a half percent.

20:24At one point it was about 10%. So I was, yeah, I thought their web work was fantastic. I have emails, sending a lot of emails I would do again or push you to do again. I had that on my list as well, as uncomfortable as it was. Along with the email checklist I made for you after it felt like we were just drowning in too many emails that had to get sent out and weren't keeping track. So I made this Notion doc and then it felt like everything was a little bit more calm and structured. So I would do that again. Oh, that was great. That email tracking matrix that you basically gave me because the summit team, they created so many assets around this.

21:08And I'll expand on this in the what we do differently section, but they created so many assets, including just like the number of emails they created for us to send, the number of messages they wanted us to send in Telegram. I would say we probably sent a third of the emails they suggested, certainly less than half. They wanted us to be sending emails like multiple times a day, every day for over a week, which if you think about a spectrum from like zero to Hormozy's $100 million book launch. I've never been to the right of center. And we definitely were the right of center of that spectrum this time around, which I think was net positive, good stretching, but still like a third of what this summit team wanted us to do.

21:57So we just had a lot and your document sharing, okay, here's what needs to be sent this day to these four different segments was super helpful to help me proofread, revise, and get out the door. I said that I would definitely continue doing a live pitch in the summit with a bonus for people purchasing live. We had a pitch for the cohort in day two at the end of that session, and we also did it on day three. But we had far more people purchase in the first live session than in the second. I think part of that is due to having a bonus on day two for purchasing live, which I'm not even sure is the most compelling bonus.

22:38I think we could do better with the bonus on day two, but I think having a bonus on day two is good. I had never sat in a live pitch personally on a webinar for that long. I think I probably like was pitching for 30 minutes, but people also didn't drop off. Like the concurrent viewership dropped fewer than 10 people during that period. I remember watching, which was crazy. And that was all again, thanks to the summit team's structure of the pitch in their slide design. So yeah, I'd never pitched that hard, but I would do it the same way and I would do it again. Agree. The pitch was great and got so much positive feedback as well from people either in the chat or afterwards on the VIP call saying, even though they knew this was a pitch, they felt like it was so authentic and they bought instantly because of it.

23:36So yeah, it worked really well. It was really good for breaking some of my inner narratives around sales and marketing. That was great. The last thing I have on my list is around the offers or the offer stack that we had. We had a core offer. We had an upsell. We had a downsell. and every time we switched to one of them, we made more money. So that's what I would do again. This is the last thing on my list for this section too. I was like, this is the most thorough offer architecture that I've ever done. Having like, okay, here's the core offer. And if this makes sense, here's the add-on for it.

24:15And after that cart closes, if that didn't make sense for you, here's the downsell. It was wildly uncomfortable the whole way through every bit of it. But you're right. Like every piece of that campaign just performed better and better. I remember being a little disappointed at one point during the launch because I was like, I don't think we're going to get to six figures on this thing. Because before the downsell, we were at like$80 ,000 to$85 ,000 in launch revenue. and then the downsell the self-paced course did almost$18 ,000 which was just shocking to me because that's as good as like a new workshop launch historically that I mean I haven't done this in the business for a couple years but it used to be I would launch a workshop for $49 to$99 and that would do somewhere between like$15 ,000 and$25 ,000 and so for a self-paced course that has existed for a few years to do that in a couple of days was surprising to me.

25:17And also a good reminder that like, oh, I have assets in this business that we could be selling. Maybe we should do that. Before we get into what we do differently, we're going to take a quick break for our sponsors, but then we're going to get into what we'll do differently the next time around and how we would 80, 20, this whole summit thing. So don't go anywhere. We'll be right back.

25:41As we approach the holiday season, it's time to start thinking about your Black Friday or Cyber Monday campaigns. I know it sounds early, but for years, I ignored this time of year because I thought it was for e-commerce and not for content businesses like mine. But then I ran a campaign in 2024. And do you know what happened? Not only was it my best month of revenue for the year, but it was my best month of revenue ever, nearly$98 ,000. I'm now convinced that Black Friday and Cyber Monday are a huge opportunity for creators like you and me, and we run a sprint in the lab every year because of it.

26:15We're about to reopen the lab to new members on our waitlist. If you're a full-time creator earning more than$100 ,000 per year or on pace to earn$100 ,000 this year, I invite you to join us. Head to creatorscience.com slash lab to get on our waitlist. We'll invite new members on October 1st, which is the perfect time to join our Black Friday sprint. That's creatorscience.com slash lab. You'll be glad you did. From athletic stuff like a full court pickup game, swish, to athletic stuff like a half mile stroll. Get those steps in. Head to Sierra or Sierra.com for the brands you want at the prices that let you do it all.

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27:28all right back and now we're talking about what we would do differently the next time around if we were to do this summit again what's top of your list i have a feeling we might have the same item at the top of our list but we'll see top of my list is i would keep it a lot more simple to me the launch felt very complex especially someone who hasn't launched before but even And I assume if you have, there were so many elements that we could perfect that it was hard to figure out what dials we need to turn to really make this successful. There were people that we're trying to get still from socials, like we were still building Top of Funnel and getting those people on our list, getting those people to attend the summit, then trying to convert email subscribers to summit attendees, to VIPs, to cohort buyers and two self-paced course buyers just so many conversion points i'm i would want us to build a capability of running a simple launch where we know okay this is a killer email this is a killer landing page this is how many sales we can expect if we have this many people yeah okay i have follow-up questions but i feel like this is probably going to inform the 80 20 part of the conversation.

28:49So we'll dive into that here in a second. My first item of what we would do differently is I would use a different webinar provider. We used Webinar Jam. This is actually a two-point thing. We used Webinar Jam for the webinar platform, but we didn't use it for registration. And so we didn't actually have a great mechanism at launch for getting the literal call-in information for the webinar on people's calendar. Like we had a Google calendar hold, and we said, we'll send you the calendar information the morning of. There's no reason that we couldn't have set that information up and had it as a calendar hold immediately on confirmation.

29:30Because I think this is actually one of the biggest levers to how this whole thing could have performed better, was to make sure that it was on people's calendar with the right link from day one. Webinar Jam as a platform was pretty buggy. People didn't love that. So I'd probably use maybe just Zoom. I really think we could just use Zoom. Riverside has a new webinar platform that is probably pretty good, especially if you're trying to create assets out of the webinar itself. And Circle also might work for this too. The thing I don't know about Circle, and I probably should know this better, I'm pretty sure you can set it up so that people don't need to have a member account in your community to show up to a webinar.

30:07And if that is true, then Circle webinars is probably pretty good. I did also write this down as never again webinar jam use zoom or circle i mean you always get the people in the chat saying like is this going to be recorded and like of course of course the webinar is going to be recorded but people are really struggling with just the tech itself having some like looping issues and lag issues i haven't personally used webinar jam in a very very very long time as a user there's a bunch of different platforms out there for a long time demio was the big player in the space but that seems like needlessly expensive i really think that you could just use zoom their webinar tooling seems a little expensive also, but I don't know.

30:47Reliability matters more than anything else. We want it to be easy for people to show up and to like attend and have a good experience. And I feel like Webinar Jam was not that. Agree. I probably had the worst experience of everyone because I had to keep jumping out of the window to like reply to emails of people who couldn't get in or who had that issue. So I, at some point I switched to the YouTube live stream and just watch that audience set because that was reliable. I did like that it connected to YouTube on the live stream and I actually kind of enjoyed just live streaming on YouTube generally.

31:18I feel like that's an unexplored strategy that maybe we'll talk about as a team in the coming months, figuring out if we want to do more of that on the channel. I don't know if you're going to agree with me on this, but I would try to build a launch capability as a core capability of us as a team rather than outsourcing this. Okay, say more about what you think that would require. There's a few things that the Summit team did for us that we would never have been able to do or wouldn't have done. One was just pushing us to send more and more emails and think of all the other places we could be promoting the Summit.

31:59Just the daily reminders. That is something we can do, I believe. Yeah. Especially if it's someone else other than you. who's pushing to do more, send more emails. There is the launch psychology side of they were telling us, these are all the emails you need to send. And they had already planned out the function that email needs to fulfill because we didn't use their email. So we were kind of reverse engineering what the email is probably supposed to do. And then you were writing a new email with the same function. So we could probably skip that part and just have a list of, I'm sure there's some best practices or people we can turn to to learn what are the different points you need to hit or the emotions you need to hit during a launch then there's a website I mean obviously that's the key thing that they did really well I think that's the hardest thing to replicate if we were to bring this all in-house that would definitely be the hardest thing to replicate I think we could do it and they've been very generous with the assets they created like here it is here's the github repo we build it as its own custom Vercel app and here's how you can whatever.

33:07And like, I'm comfortable with all that. I can handle that. But I don't know what prompt they use to build some of this because it's, it was in conversation with all of our existing brand elements, but almost inverted. Like in our actual brand guidelines, we specify that the red in the creator science brand guidelines should be used extremely rarely just as an accent and mostly blue. And they pretty much inverted that. And of the red and we're going to make the blue a very rare accent. And I kind of liked it. I was like, this actually works. This is very different. They had a very modern feel to the brand as a whole.

33:46So I'm taking inspiration from that. I actually want to pull more of those brand elements into what we do as a whole, but it is the hardest thing for me to wrap my head around how they did it. And like the literal just legwork of getting it done. If that's me chatting with Tubi, our AI assistant, who is also just great at code now. That's like an all-day thing to build one of those pages. And they built many, many pages for this whole process. So there was real, very real labor that this team provided that if we brought it in-house, those are like net new hours we would have to carve out somewhere.

34:23That said, one of the things on my list was that I would choose a more repeatable summit topic because obviously like, okay, we have all the emails and we sent these and we know which ones performed better than others. We have these assets now, like we could just run it back and do this same summit into the same offer. But I don't know if strategically that's like actually the summit and offer I want to run. I don't know, but we talk about this all the time. Now there's just no reason that we should be doing so many like single serving projects in this business. And so I would have been more thoughtful about what the topic was in the beginning sean was just like you have big audience and you couldn't make money from doing a summit what do you want to make a summit about our first thought was that we were going to do a summit that led into the lab and we changed that because the lab is application based with a pretty tight filter which is tightening all the time and it just didn't seem like to make sense with this format to try and maximize registrations for an offer that was inherently exclusive you know so we we shifted to this cohort model around the course that i had built i think it was probably a good enough solution but it was a short-term solution short-term plan as a whole i think if you're going to do this like you should really want to do it multiple times and reuse all of these assets multiple times and will that be true for us i don't know i will do my best to push us there because that's very much on my list.

35:59We have a$7 ,800 domain. We've got to do it again. A small one, I would let people opt out of all launch emails. Yeah, we did that too late. But the problem is you get so many false negatives. Yeah. So it's hard. Like, okay, so to do this opt-out strategy in Kit, you have a link trigger. and if people click it, you remove a tag or add a tag or update a custom field to say like, okay, filter out from this campaign. But we just know that inboxes click on links and buttons automatically to test for malware before people even really open it as human beings. So you run the risk of doing that, that you're gonna accidentally filter out people who would be a good fit prematurely.

36:45So that's tough. But I think we should have done it earlier. And even when we did do it, I don't know if you knew this, when we did put that link trigger in, it was broken. I had set it up incorrectly. So people who clicked it actually didn't get filtered out immediately. They actually got like one or two extra emails that they shouldn't have. And I had to go and fix it and like manually do it. I did not know that, but people were pretty understanding. People are understanding for sure. For sure. We only got, I'm going to say less than five emails that I received of people saying, you should let me opt out of this.

37:14And I did. And then I got two emails saying, Hey, I opted out of this. Why am I still getting this? And then I realized it was broken. My next topic of things I would do differently, I would, oh, I heard this from Joe Casabona in the lab. He proposed a VIP bonus of the recordings as a private podcast, which I think is a great idea as an extra bonus for the VIP group is not only having lifetime recordings, but you can listen to the summit in audio form through a private podcast feed. I think that's a great great great bonus i love that yeah i would try to launch without a live event without the summit oh wow spicy i mean it comes back to doing a simpler launch but there's really two parts that felt like a lot it was we had the launch period then we had the three days of the summit or really was four days because of the vip bonus and then we had another one week launch i believe it was about one week launching the cohort and then after that we kicked off the cohort and we also did another launch of the downsell offer and so it was just basically two months of this one launch it's just a lot to build up all the hype to launch something and then you're doing the work of launching it and then you're after that again delivering a four-week cohort.

38:43Yes. That was one of my biggest notes was whether we do the full like virtual summit mechanism or not, I don't think I would do it into an offer that has new, very hands-on fulfillment on the backend. Like I think it probably makes more sense to do a summit around improving your operations as a creator. And then on the back end, it's like, here's Creator HQ. And on day three, we're showing you how to use it or something. But there's ultimately no net new fulfillment on the back end of that. That would be so much better because by the end of the summit itself, I was so exhausted. And then it was like, and by the way, you're now going to run a cohort for four weeks and And be live on calls for four hours a week and responding to homework in circle multiple days per week.

39:35It was a lot. So that's definitely something I would change. I would also change the order in which we prepared for this. The way that this worked with the After Harvest team, early on in the process, they said, hey, here is a super gnarly, really long prompt that we want you to copy into Claude. so we can learn your method of teaching memberships. And I did this and Claude asked me one question at a time for like two hours. It was me talking to Claude for like two hours one night on the couch. And out of that, they got so much specificity and insight that they built all of our assets out of this.

40:18They created like, God, I don't know, 50 emails, a bunch of Telegram messages, the website, the structure for the three days of presentation, all of the interactive web elements that attendees could do. Like there was a virtual worksheet based on this. And so what I realized once I finally got their slide decks that they created for us, I rebuilt their slide decks from zero because it extrapolated too far from my initial interview, I guess, call it with Claude and started creating some concepts that weren't my concepts. And the design also didn't feel like us. So we literally rebuilt all three days of presentation from ground zero, because ultimately like this whole event centered around me presenting for three days.

41:10And if it's not actually how I would teach things, then to me, this is like a complete backwards project and non-starter. But that was the most exhausting part of the whole process for because there was already so much material created around some of these extrapolations, including the worksheet, including language on the sales pages. So really I would change the order of operations here to start with the three days of presentations and then build all the web work, all the emails, all the messaging out of that because we ended up having to go and like revise and undo a bunch of stuff because the team actually genuinely worked with AI in a very impressive way to create so many things.

41:52But when you're revising material, the pure amount of material that had to be rewritten was just enormous. So I would just back this up from the presentation first. Yeah, totally. It was a lot of going back and checking what we promise here. And maybe we even promised slightly different things in the video compared to the VSL, compared to the landing page, compared to an email because a lot of it was drafted with AI at least. And comparing that to our very high standards of we always want to under-promise, over-deliver, we want to be super trustworthy and stick to our promises as a brand that doesn't go well with having this massive AI input that we need to review with not that many people.

42:49Yeah. Yeah. I have one from our socials team. Ooh. Yeah. We had a little debrief the other day about the summit and the launch with the socials team. And they said they wouldn't do any polished Instagram story graphics anymore. They only would do very organic, like a picture of you or a picture of something that you took and then some text on it. They would not do anything that's too polished or too prepared, too designed to promote because it didn't work as well. I honestly feel like this is true of our entire Instagram strategy right now. But that's a topic for another team meeting. Okay, I did have one more.

43:33We use Telegram for this, which I've never used Telegram in this capacity before. I understand why he did it. it was basically, it was kind of like having an SMS component to your launch without needing to deal with SMS or the compliance challenges that come with SMS. So every attendee was allowed to join a broadcast telegram group that only I could communicate with. And then the VIP group had a two-way telegram with me where we could respond. And in the beginning, I was like, I don't really get why we're doing this. Like people are registered. Why do I need to be messaging them before the event.

44:07But after we opened the doors, I understood, oh, this is a another touch point for me to promote the cohort and talk about his benefits and try to get this in front of people. And I think that had a disproportionately positive outcome in the VIP group versus the non VIP group. But the problem with telegram as a whole is they really have a spam problem. And if you don't pay for premium telegram you end up getting just like a whole bunch of garbage messages from bad accounts and so i would probably if i was going to do that strategy again i would probably try whatsapp next time instead of telegram because it's better for that i think one challenge with whatsapp is they expose phone numbers and i know people don't really want that in a group setting so we'd have to look into that but the telegram sms-esque experience i think was net positive but I'd probably only do it for the VIP group.

45:05And I would try WhatsApp next time. All right, are we ready for the 80-20? Oh yeah, I'm very excited for this. Okay, I kind of want to hear your brain work on this. And we can just run through your whole design of this and I'll fill in whatever gaps I think make sense. Okay, sounds great. I split this into the prep work and then during the launch. So in terms of prep, very first thing I would do is launching after a period of top of funnel and list growth, which I don't think there was necessarily a period before that where you deliberately try to expand your list. No, I think this is actually like the most list expanding activity we've done in a very long time.

45:50I think we turned a fair number of those same people out and some other folks who were just not into this subject, but this was the best period of list growth that we've manufactured in a very long time. Then there's a few things I would try to get in place basically as early as possible because we were doing all these at the same time as we were already launching. So the first one is having a killer offer stack of a core offer upsell and downsell and that we all know as the team what we're selling. I agree. I think adding on to that bonuses for those things, because like, I think it's beneficial to say, okay, here is the downsell, which is a self-paced course.

46:33And we have a discount on it during this period, but also we gave the permanent summit recordings. So for people who didn't buy the VIP ticket, but wanted that, and one of those recordings, that was a bonus for it. It's hard to say like how much of an impact does that have? but I think the bonus had a material impact on the live pitch on day two. I think the upsell was great too. So yeah, I a hundred percent agree with you having locked in the offer itself. And I would say that offer should be more scalable than the cohort inherently is because actually that offer kind of breaks at a point. There's a certain point where we have too many people that I don't even feel comfortable delivering on it or would need to hire a third party to help.

47:16And is that the experience that I even want to sell? I don't know. So I think the offer itself should be more scalable and more aligned with the type of person we're trying to draw towards the lab anyway. Yeah. To add to the bonus point, we basically had a bonus on day two, which is the day you pitched and quite a few people bought during the session because of the bonus. And then we didn't have it on day three and nobody bought during the session because there was no reason to. They might as well just buy three days later, four days later. I thought, oh no, this could have been such a great day two of the launch if we had only had a bonus.

47:57Totally. Okay, keep going. I want to hear what else you have in your plan. I have one landing page that converts because we had a lot of landing pages. We had even two landing pages just for the cohort, I believe. Yeah, the offer. Yeah, I would outsource this part, probably, because it's a lot to build a landing page. But I would try to have it locked down before because I think it was maybe the day before, maybe the day off. They were still changing things and we were behind on revising those changes so that they still sound like you and fit our brand. And that was adding a lot of stress. I agree.

48:39I had in my notes for like order of operations, I said presentation comes first, then the web stuff. So registration on the web, upsell on the web, offer on the web, sales copy for the web and emails. Then we open registration. Then everything else is like fun stuff on top trying to drive people in. But we were building too much of the plane as it was flying here. It's a good way to put it. Then another thing I think we need to have in place before is a compelling launch story. It's not that we didn't have this, but I think it's a key element, a reason why we're launching. In this case, there was a big event and there was your paternity leave, which we used as a reason of why we're not going to do this again this year.

49:26Some way of having natural urgency and scarcity. I like that idea. Then I have a simple email plan. I say simple because we had quite a complex email plan that we got from the summit team with so many different segments. And it was all one big Google Doc. Or in the end, we had like five different Google Docs with updated things. And I was trying to feed all these things into Kit and then get you to rewrite them. So I think a simple email plan would have done where we maybe have some triggers for if we have this many signups, then we send more emails. And then I just tell you, you have to write another email today, Jay, but not the massive complex plan.

50:09And same for socials. I would probably do less on socials and I would focus up more on followers rather than pitching everywhere. So let's say on Instagram, I wouldn't do reels or carousels. I would just do stories which reach your followers. Single story PSA format. Shout out Gannon Meyer, lab mate. He has shared this on his Instagram a couple of times. If you take a selfie photo and then have an on-screen caption that basically says PSA, here's the thing I want to tell you. And now here's the keyword to comment for the many chat thing to kick in. If you do that single story and leave it alone for 24 hours, that just performs so well.

50:51That was definitely the best needle mover on Instagram for us was doing that, getting in front of existing followers more closely. I agree with you. And then the last thing I think to get in place during the launch is a waitlist email sequence that gets people really hyped up. So I registered, but the event hasn't happened yet, a sequence for that? Yeah, I mean, in this case, we didn't even have a waitlist. That was something we were gonna have, and then it was too late to still implement it. so I would first of all put in place a wait list either we don't tell them what it is or it's just not possible to sign up yet but it's like based on the topic they're interested in and they sign up and then they receive a sequence to get them really hyped and all of that happens whether or not we manage to do all the other emails during the launch okay I like it I had a lot of the same I think the things I would add I would have a stronger confirmation page with an ad event link post-registration.

51:55I said this earlier, but it's like so important to me that I'm going to say it again. Like you should get the right call-in information held on people's calendar as soon as they register. I think I would only have one Telegram slash WhatsApp group and it would just be for VIPs and it would be two-way. I wouldn't do the broadcast one again because I just didn't love the experience of like talking to the ether and like people didn't have a chance or like an ability to respond. I could just react to it. So I don't know. I just don't think that was really unnecessary. I thought about, do we even need the third day?

52:26Like the format of the three-day summit was basically day one was, here's why you should care. Day two was, here's how to do this really well. And that started the pitch. If you made it to day two, it means that you crossed through the filter of you care. Here's how to do it really well. And yeah, it's kind of a lot of work. If you want guidance, we'll help you to do that. day three was here's the plan that you can go and put this into action over the next 12 months but if you want to do it faster and skip some of the potholes here's how we can help you with that as well so the format makes sense and i don't know if i'm undervaluing day three because we didn't have any purchases live on the presentation but i'm questioning whether you fully need three days i think i would still do the vip q a so that would be three days instead of four but i'm questioning the third day of material.

53:16What do you think? It's hard to know the impact of trust building that they potentially did, especially because it didn't really have a pitch. So it felt like you already pitched us. What more do you want? It did have a pitch though. It's interesting that you say that because it did have a pitch and it was probably two thirds as long as a second day. But I was personally kind of tired and also like just felt weird going through the whole pitch again. And so I don't think I delivered it nearly as well as the day before. So I think part of this is on me that I did not have the same energy or follow through on day three as I did on day two.

53:56I guess to me, it felt more like a Q &A session almost. I'm answering some questions about the offer, but it didn't feel as pitchy because of that. Yeah. And I think I either removed some of that in the pre-design or might have even skipped over some of it because it's just so hard for me to like lean into that. But the proof is in the pudding. Like day two was great. Day three was not as strong. So yeah, I think either remove day three or be way more comfortable going through the full pitch process on day three that we did on day two. Like it probably needs to be slightly different. So it doesn't seem like I'm revealing this for the first time because obviously I'm not.

54:35This is the second day I'm doing it. But I don't know if I wanted to simplify this, I think you could cut out day three have two great days of teaching and I don't know what the impact would be, but I think it would cut out a third of the design work. I can tell you that. I mean, if you want to simplify, I wrote down as like a backup option, I would go to just individual webinars. Chris Donnelly does them. Oh, just one-off webinars. He will do like four in a row. So every Thursday, I believe for four weeks, he'll be running a webinar and then give people a special code to sign up to his cohort and then there's also a reason to join his cohort because there's like a warm-up party so the sooner you join the sooner you get to be part of the warm-up crew but they're not like no shade on chris but there's they're not teaching that super in-depth stuff they're still valuable but there is also a good amount of pitch in that webinar.

55:39That was good feedback we got from this group. They were like, I knew you're going to pitch, but there was so much that you taught. I don't know. Some people, some webinar folks might say that we gave too much, but I don't know. It felt right to me. The other thing I added as part of an 80-20 effort was actually two things. I think we could skip affiliates. I think we drove something like 300 to 500 registrations from affiliates, which isn't nothing. and that's good as a list building strategy. But I think for a high ticket offer as this was, this is a thousand dollar investment. I think we had maybe one or two affiliate referred people purchase.

56:17I think it's a tall ask to say, you're new to me, even if I was warmly referred by someone you already trust to make that big of a purchase, I don't know, is super plausible. So if we wanted to carve out some time and space, I don't know that we need affiliates if you're doing a high ticket offer. I do think it's good for overall list building if that's the strategy and if you're selling a lower ticket thing. But if we were selling this again, I don't know that the juice was necessarily worth the squeeze. I agree both for us and for them as well because we also want our affiliates to see the benefits of promoting us.

56:52And I don't think they saw them as much as we would have liked. Yeah, if I look at the sheet here, we paid$1 ,800 out in affiliates and the top was 591. So they had three buyers of the cohort and five buyers of the self-paced. So we did have some folks who did buy the cohort. I don't know. It's not nothing. We had$7 ,000 in value created from the launch from affiliates, but how much work went into that versus could have gone elsewhere for the launch? Hard to say. The last point I had is I think I would skip one-click opt-ins for registrations in the future. Because I think what this effectively did was create a bunch of false positives that then got a bunch of launch materials from us that they didn't actually want.

57:40if you can't be bothered to go and do like a registration button click on a web page to verify that it's a real human i don't know that you're going to be someone who shows up live or makes a purchase i think we're probably just going to bug you with extra emails yeah so what i had written down for what i would do during the launch there's basically just two activities that in an ideal world we would be doing, which is writing emails. And that would be your main job during the whole launch. It's just writing great emails and learning what works and then adjusting. And then the other one would be social posts that convert and tracking the success of those and improving them and making them organic, as we said.

58:28Yeah. And everything else is done before then. Yes. I agree. I agree. A lot of net new assets, which if we were to repeat this summit, there's a lot of stuff that we wouldn't have to create net new. We could use like the same decks and things. So we'll see. We will see. All right. On to our next sprint, Anna. Well, actually, on to a couple of well-earned vacations and then our next sprint. Yes. Very excited for the next sprint. Then it's also going to be one massive sprint of getting ready for your paternity leave. Yes. Yes, yes, yes.

59:05If you enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving a rating or review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify and letting me know the show is climbing the charts again. Love to see it. Thank you for listening. Thank you for supporting the show. Those reviews go a long, long way further than you probably realize. If you want to learn more about Sean and the After Harvest team, potentially work with them, there's an affiliate link in the show notes to get the conversation started. And again, if you missed the Build of a Loved Membership offer, if you want the self-paced course. There's a link to 50 % off in the show notes buried there just for people listening closely, people like you.

59:37Thank you for listening. I'll talk to you next week.

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