[00:00:00] Episode four, the Aligned and Thriving podcast with your host. That's me, Jada Dego. This is where ambitious female entrepreneurs come together and where we align systems, strategies, and self for sustainable success. Welcome. Okay. Today I want to dive into two commonly shared launch rules. That I don't believe should be taken as rules.
Let me explain. Now, don't get me wrong, the strategies that the really big names share around launching the strategies you have most likely learned, I hope, depending on which ones you've learned around launching for your online digital business are solid and they work however. There are some parts of them [00:01:00] that we need to personalize, and while I understand the science and reasons behind these two launch rules that I'm gonna talk about today are shared and and why people teach them this way and et cetera.
Which I will unpack with you as well. I also know from working with multiple online business women from early stages in new offers, through wanting to really scale their tried and tested offers and go bigger and reach new audiences with their launches, that these couple of rules can create less sales.
For one, for people in particular stages of where their offer is at and where their business is at, and or can create a lot of extra pressure and stress. Now, we don't want either of those [00:02:00] things, right? So what are the two kind of in air quote unquote launch rules that I am talking about? One of them is that you should only launch every three months.
And the other one is that your open cart slash sales period should be short, and a lot of people will talk about even just four to five days. The common kind of lengths of time are like four days, maybe four or five days, seven days, or a maximum of 10 days. So what I wanna do is I wanna dive into some of the reasons why.
These two quote unquote rules, launch rules are shared and taught very commonly so that we can understand and unpack that, and then you can make decisions based on whether that's a match for you or [00:03:00] not. We need to understand the science and reasoning behind the strategy, no matter what strategy, so that we're able to actually take it further than just copying a strategy.
So that we're able to personalize and innovate on that and match strategies no matter what strategy, business strategy, launch strategy, all of those things. To us and our strengths to our business, our business goals, and also the stage of our business to the kind of business and offer that we, and offer or offers that we have and to the people, our ideal audience that we are serving.
So. We absolutely need to go through that phase of learning, the basis of a strategy or a structure or a new skill, but then we really need to take it beyond that and we need to understand it enough and experiment with it enough so [00:04:00] that our learning goes beyond the base understanding and we can move into kind of mastering it and being able to personalize it for us, our business, our offers, and our ideal people.
So let's dive into these two really quote unquote common launch rules. So let's talk, talk about, first of all, the three monthly launching. So this is really common and there are two main reasons in my opinion, that this is taught as a base kind of rule of thumb, and that is number one. Well, I dunno about number one, but the two main reasons are you.
And your audience. So first of all, launching takes a lot of energy and there's a whole lot involved in it. And let's face it, we're also running a business beyond that. We're serving our clients or our customers. Uh, we are doing all sorts of things. We have a life outside of our business. [00:05:00] And so a launch has a lot of moving parts.
It takes a lot of energy. It, we are doing a lot in a launch. And so. You know, you want to be able to recoup your energy. You want to be able to. Uh, put the time and energy into it that it deserves because it is that extra output of time because you are communicating with many new people. So, we'll, kind of, we can go into that some more.
To just put a caveat there, you do not need to burn out when you launch. You can feel great. All through your launch, uh, it's not a thing that they need to be completely exhausting, so you end up curled up like a fetus on your bed after your launch. That is not what we want. Not at all, and it does not have to be the way, but there's no getting around the fact that launches have a lot going on and there is that extra energy that goes out.
Because it's, it's not happening all the time. It's a, it's an extra on top of what you're normally doing in your business. Talk some more about that another time. So [00:06:00] there's that, and then there is the side of your audience. So we, with a launch, we're often doing a lot of extra promotion. We're opening the doors, especially if you're doing like an open and close, open and close for your membership, or you're running a course that runs only twice a year or four times a year, and so you're doing a big extra promotion.
You are communicating a lot more about that offer in a live launch versus say how you might go about that if you are selling evergreen. And you're consistently promoting something. The level of that promotion or how you might go about it would be different to how you're showing up for what we refer to as a live launch.
Live as in you may or may not actually show up and do a live event. Most oftentimes there is some kind of live event, but it could even be through prerecorded videos that you have on offer for just a short amount of time. But basically you're having an open and a close. [00:07:00] To allowing people into your offering, your course, your membership, your mastermind, whatever it might be.
So there's a lot more promotion going on. You are. Uh, talking about this offer a lot more regularly on a daily or multiple times a day to your social media, to your email list, so they're getting a lot of information about it. Typically speaking, if you are following the launch strategy, you'll have a launch event.
Uh, so you'll be promoting that event a lot. You'll be talking a lot about that. And then you'll go into your open cart, your sales period, and you will talk very, um, heavily or a lot very frequently about your offer for a period of time, which we'll get into with the open cart length, uh, very sick. So if we did that amount of promotion for your offer, like.
Fortnightly or [00:08:00] monthly, then it would likely be taxing and tiring and your audience would switch off. Your audience wouldn't want to be hearing that much about your offer. Really, really frequently. Okay. So we can be promoting our our offers at all times and have the doors open at all times. That's something a bit different, but the level of promotion that we do in a live launch is a lot extra.
And so we wouldn't wanna be doing that on a super frequent basis because people would either switch off, unsubscribe, unfollow. We need to make sure that we're giving our audience time to, if they weren't ready at the last launch. We do things to nurture them and support them and being more ready. Next time you launch and open those doors, and this is where I'm talking about your current audience, your current email list, your current social media audience.
We need to also grow new audience in between our launches so that we're talking to new people when we are doing these live launches. [00:09:00] So that's how. You know, we kind of come to that, you know, three to four times a year is a good amount to be doing that as far as you and your audience goes, if it's the same audience, and also depending on your capacity.
So let's talk about that. It's not a hard and fast rule, and there are times when it's really great to be getting out to a new audience. And there are times when you really need to be growing your, let's talk about memberships for example. You know, you've got your membership going all the time. You could be welcoming people in at any time, and maybe you need to be working on growing your membership faster, and it feels like a lot of pressure to only be able to open the doors every three months.
It puts a lot of extra pressure on every launch that you do if you feel like you have to [00:10:00] wait another three months before you can grow your income. Am I right? I've had clients like when we've talked about this, get all excited about the changes that we're talking about and the new ways of messaging that come to light through our sessions and et cetera, and then feel really kind of disappointed and deflated that they're not going to be able to put it into practice.
For like another three months. I had a session. I'm thinking of someone in particular. Where we got on a clarity and confidence 90 minute launch strategy call. And she was literally like four days away from her live event that she was doing as a launch. And she was feeling really like a lot of pressure around it, uh, that was making it her feel quite stressed around, showing up.
She didn't have the numbers registered for her live class that she was hoping for, so she was already kind of feeling stressed and. Almost defeated in that she was not likely to reach her revenue goals [00:11:00] by any stretch of the imagination. With this launch and through our session, she gained a whole lot of clarity around messaging changes that she could make that felt so much more aligned to call in more specifically the people that she wanted and also to talk to them in a way where they would value what she has on offer more, and therefore, uh, make that invitation a lot easier.
For her and for them to say yes to coming into her membership. And she was expressing how just it felt like such a lot of pressure and so hard to then have to wait those three months and that, you know, she was needing to build her revenue faster and et cetera. And I just kind of paused and I said, but why do you have to wait three months?
And she kind of was silent for a moment and just kind of stared at me and she's like, well, don't I, don't I have to wait three months? And I'm like, no, you don't have to wait three months to open the doors to your membership. Again, there are a multitude of ways that you can be inviting people [00:12:00] in, uh, to your membership.
You can do that in so many different ways. That's, that's gonna be a for, for another, uh, breakdown, another set episode. But what she felt was this huge sense of relief. She's like, oh my gosh. So like, I could actually just decide to. For example, here's an option. Uh, experiment with like three different kinds of classes and do one every month, like two different sessions of the same class, um, one month, and then a different kind of class.
So I can experiment with the messaging and I can run slightly different classes, which means I can even invite my current audience. I don't even have to focus only on a new audience. Uh, and I can experiment with which of these options is going to. Get the best, best traction with my audience and with a new audience, so then I can invite people into my membership.
Like every month. It's like, yes, you can absolutely do that. [00:13:00] Now for her, she had. The capacity for that. She had already a lot of systems in place and a lot of launch assets in place. She had, uh, you know, landing pages already set up that she'd be able to duplicate and just kind of tweak with each different workshops, information.
She had nurture sequences already set up that she would be able to duplicate and update to match each workshop she already had. You know, the basis of her presentation, which she would then be able to, uh, change and tweak for the core differences that she would make in each workshop. She already had an open cart email sequence that she would be able to tweak with the new copy, uh, and the new ways of focusing in on the desires of her ideal people.
So a lot of those assets were already there for her. So this is really important. She had some foundation to be able to build on, and she was in a place in herself, in her [00:14:00] life, in her family, and in her business where she felt like she had the energetic capacity and the knowledge and the structure and foundations of a launch to be able to go out there and.
Basically launch, live, launch every month. And this created so much freedom for her and excitement, and it also took the pressure off of this upcoming launch. Suddenly she was like, oh, I just feel like I can show up. And. Serve these people who have have opted in to come and join my class with so much more energy and such a better feeling because I don't feel so much pressure on this launch being the only thing that's going to bring in income in my business for the next three months.
How much pressure does that take off your shoulders? To hopefully get your mind buzzing as well. I wanna share with you another way [00:15:00] of going about this. So there's the option of having slightly different workshops or boot camps or live events, whatever it is, of the launch style that suits you, your offer, and your ideal people best.
If you don't know, that is a core thing to look at for your launches, but another way to go about this. To get the juices flowing for you, I hope, is to go out to a cold audience, so people who don't know you yet, you would do this through paid advertising so that you are actually doing your launch. You could do it fortnightly if you have the capacity and the structure set up.
You could do it monthly, you could do it every two months, whatever it is for you going out to a new audience so that you're not doing that. Full-blown, higher level, super frequent amount of promotion to your current audience. Every fortnight or every month, you're doing that out to new people so you can promote your [00:16:00] live launch event out to new people via paid advertising.
And bring brand new people into that and invite them straight through into your offer, whether it's a course, it's a membership or mastermind if you're able to bring people in more frequently or run your program or course more frequently. So that's another way that you can be launching more frequently without overwhelming.
Your current email list or social media community, it's also a really great way to be building your email list and to be creating a larger community. All right, we could keep going around this ideas of ways that you can be opening up your doors and launching. More than every three months, but I hope you get the idea, and I hope that this is giving you some ideas.
The second quote, unquote launch rule that I don't believe is really suitable for everyone, and especially [00:17:00] not in the early phases of your offer and the earlier. Times that you launch the first times, few times that you launch. This mostly has to do with how much demand you have for your offer. So how well known it is, how many people you have in your audience who would be absolutely aligned and like waiting for it and wanting it, how well known you are in your space.
All of these things affect how long I believe your open cart should be. Your set open doors, period should be with your launch. So there's a lot of, uh, recommendation around having a short open cart like four to five days. Now, if you have a, think about if your offer is quite new, very new, or maybe you've been, you know, maybe you've opened the doors into this offer.
Two, three, even four times, it's still [00:18:00] pretty new. You need to have a think about that. How well are you able to communicate your offer? And when I talk about an offer, what I mean is your course, your program, your mastermind, your membership, but it's. The offer itself is, is everything that's on offer with that.
So when I'm talking about an offer, I mean your course, your program, your membership, your mastermind, how well you're able to communicate that and create the desire for that is going to impact how quickly you can open and close your doors. How well known you are is going to impact that as well, as I mentioned.
And if you imagine. A newer offer being newer in the space, maybe an audience that is relatively small or fairly small, all of those things put together mean that you need to do more. And [00:19:00] potentially spend more time communicating your offer to your audience. So if your messaging isn't dialed in and on point and you don't know it works yet, you're going to need to communicate more times and for longer for people to potentially get that messaging and be interested in joining.
If it's a fairly new offer and your audience isn't literally like waiting for you to open those doors so they, they can come in for the next time that you open the doors, then if your open cart is too short, they can practically blink and miss it If you're opening your doors one day and then you're only gonna talk about it for four days and then you're gonna close the doors.
They may not have even heard that you've opened the doors, or they might see one post or email about it. They might go away and think about it and they might come back and the doors are closed already. So we are not giving them very much time to [00:20:00] consider it if they're not already in that point of like wanting.
In the other part is how well you've done the lead into your launch and I get asked a lot, do I really need to do such a big lead into my launch? The better you job you do of the lead into your launch, the more ready people are going to be to actually buy when you open the doors. So depending on how good a job you've done in the lead into your launch of preempting it, getting your people ready, uh, helping them to feel ready, talking about it, coming up, letting them know it's coming, getting them excited, sharing about it.
So that they're actually looking forward to it and already primed and ready for you to be opening your doors. This is going to support as well a shorter open car if you haven't done all of those things and or you've kind of done them, but it's newer and you still need more practice, and you could [00:21:00] have done more sharing around it.
Then having a little bit of a longer open cart is going to help you have more time to talk to those people, to let them know multiple times that the doors are open. To give them a little bit more warning, a little bit more notice, uh, and to have them have that time to be able to absorb what your offer is and make that decision to join.
So there are a lot of aspects of the live launch that help us be able to have a shorter open cart when we have dialed in our messaging, when we've dialed in our pre-launch, when we have dialed in our audience growth. Before that, when we have dialed in. Uh, really engaging with our audience so that they are seeing our posts and they're opening our emails and they're used to responding and they, you know, already get value from us and they're looking forward to the thing that we're going to open the doors to.
All of those different aspects, [00:22:00] including the live launch event that you will do and how well you do that, and how much value they receive, and how much you are able to. Have them have mindset shifts and make sure that they are believing that they can be the person who has the outcomes that you offer in your course membership, mastermind, et cetera.
How ready have you helped those people be? To be ready to join your offer. All of those things affect what I believe the length of your open cart should be. So kind of to simplify that, what I have found with my clients and experimenting for myself is that a longer open cart is helpful. When your offer is newer, when you are a newer business owner, and when you haven't dialed in and practiced your launch many, many times, and maybe you're not getting all of those aspects, you know [00:23:00] right on the dot.
You're still working out all of those aspects, you're still working out your messaging. Then having a longer open cut period, more like at least seven days, is going to be helpful for you because you're going to be able to take that little bit more time. It's going to have more time to sink in. You're going to be able to do more of the mindset, shift, the beliefs, all of those things within that time period.
You might even like to have your open cart be 10 days in that case where you can really be showcasing your newer offering to people. So there's more time for people to talk about it, ask questions, consider it. Another core aspect that I go into with my aligned launch coaching and consulting clients is them how do they function best?
How do you function best? Do you have that kind of ability to show up with lots of energy across multiple days [00:24:00] for kind of a short period of time, or do you function better being able to kind of ebb and flow and would it support you to have a little bit more time so that if you're not, you know, really feeling it and able to show up, this might be due to your life circumstances right now.
It could be how you function best. In yourself or where you're at at the moment with your energy levels and capacity, would it serve you to be able to have some rest days in amongst your open cart so that there's not so much pressure to show up with your full energy over a full five or seven day period?
Would it help you so that you can show up at your best to make that open cart period be 10 days? Maybe even 14 days. We also don't wanna make it too long, uh, and I know that often that 10 days is like the max recommendation, but I also know people, and I've even experimented it on it myself, [00:25:00] where we'll have open cart or open doors for a longer period of time.
This is often with more of a, I guess, an organic, um, email based and social media based and less of a kind of like live event into open car style of launch, but where the doors are open for three weeks or four weeks, or even six weeks now we have to be really careful because, you know, this can mean that energy can wane.
It can also mean that. People, you know, are seeing it, uh, too much, but we adjust our strategies for that. So there we really need to look at where is the offer at? How do you function best? What's the phase? How dialed in is your launch? Also, what, who are you talking to and what kind of capacity do they do they have?
And how engaged are they with you? To be able to see your offer and make a decision. [00:26:00] Do they need more consideration time? All of those aspects, and this is where we need to. Yes, absolutely. Go with strategies that do work rather than reinventing the wheel. However, we need to understand why each of those aspects is there, and the varying things that play a part in choosing.
Should your open cart be five days, four days, three days, 24 hours, seven days, 10 days? Should you have a much longer period for this particular launch? Where is your offer at? So there are a lot of aspects that we need to look at rather than just. Following a very specific blueprint and thinking that's the only way to go about it.
And as I said, all of these strategies and these quote unquote rules absolutely work. However, they're not always, in my opinion, and from my experience, the right way to go for everyone, for every launch, [00:27:00] for every offer, et cetera. So I really hope that this has helped to kind of just bust some maybe restrictions that you might have been feeling around launching.
I hope that it has sparked some ideas for you around how you can utilize strategies that you have learned and personalize them. And if this is something that you would like more support with, it is something that I specialize in helping clients with on in a one-on-one basis through aligned launch coaching and consulting.
And at the time of this recording, I also have a couple of live workshops coming up where we are going beyond the launch formulas and looking at how to create an aligned and high converting launch. For you. It is raw and real. It's no frills. It is diving into the details with three core [00:28:00] areas that I see so many times are holding back the success of people's launches.
And I would love to invite you to come and join me. You can find out more information if you head over to my Instagram. You'll be able to find information there on the upcoming workshops. If you are hearing this, uh, in April of 2025, if you're listening to this at some other point, then just reach out to me and I can let you know what resources I have right now, what capacity I have, maybe for one-on-one, or how I might be able to support you with creating a more aligned and more high converting launch because.
That's really what we want. We want to feel good through our launches. We wanna have our launches resulting in the sales that we're after. We want to be aligning them with ourselves, with our business goals, with the phase of our business, with our particular offers, and with the ideal people we want to be serving.
I hope you've enjoyed this [00:29:00] episode. I'd so love to hear from you what your biggest takeaways were, if you had any light bulb moments, or if you've got some really great ideas about your next launch. Please head over to Instagram and find me at Jada Business Mentor. And if you'd like some more help with this, reach out and we can have a chat about if and how I can support you with your next launch.
Lovely to have had you here, and I can't wait to share some more with you next week.
