In this episode, Michelle breaks down exactly what's happening when your first offer flies and the next one stalls, using her three levers of business growth framework.
Your first launch sold out, so why did the second one flop? That gap between a killer debut and a painful follow-up isn't bad luck, and it's not the market turning on you.
In this episode, Michelle breaks down exactly what's happening when your first offer flies and the next one stalls, using her three levers of business growth framework. She walks through the real reason launch one worked (hint: you cleared a backlog, not cracked a code), what most people get wrong heading into launch two, and how to use that dip productively so launch three actually compounds
Resources
If your second launch left you wondering how to actually keep your list fresh between offers, Michelle's Relationship Funnel Bootcamp is where you build that out. Over four consecutive Thursdays starting May 18th, you'll work alongside a small cohort to construct your full relationship marketing funnel step by step, so you're not just guessing at how to find the right people, you've got a repeatable system for it. Check it out Here - https://www.themichellewarner.com/relationshipbootcamp
Other Links
Hi, I'm Michelle Warner, and I'm a business designer and strategist, and in the 15 plus years I've done this work, I've noticed the same trend everywhere. Business owners are falling into the trap of centering strategies first, when they need to be centering sequence, because the reality is the steps you take in your business and the order in which you take them is more important than how well you implement any single strategy. So on this show, my goal is to fix that by helping you find and trust your own sequence of actions, rather than blindly following someone else's strategy.
Welcome to Sequence Over Strategy. And for today's show, I want you to think back to a moment most of you have probably lived through, and that's that moment when you had a product idea. Maybe something people have been asking you for, maybe something that you've been sitting on and thinking about, and you finally pulled the trigger and put it into the world.
The Launch That Went Huge and the One That Didn't
And by the way, by product, I mean anything that you're going to sell, right? I'm not talking like little roll tchotchke piece of product. But when you did that, when you finally put it out into the world, it kind of went crazy, whatever version of crazy is for you, right?
People jumped on it fast. Maybe it sold out, maybe you had to open another round to handle the demand. And you thought, how have I been sitting on this, right?
This is the thing, like, I have figured it out. Look at the demand that this thing generated the first time I talked about it. And so you come back around, you offer it again, and crickets.
If this has happened to you, you are not alone. It happens to almost everyone who launches something new. I see this especially in like group programs, definitely in course launches, but group programs is one that's really common where I see this for service-based entrepreneurs.
And it has nothing to do with like luck running out, right? People will tend to look at this and they'll be like, oh man, I had some beginner's luck. Or in the market didn't shift, people didn't, you know, decide overnight that they don't like you or you doing something wrong.
It has everything to do with sequence and maybe you didn't follow the sequence correctly or you didn't understand the sequence that was in front of you. So today I want to walk you through exactly what's happening when this kind of thing happens when the first time you offer something into the world, it goes huge in whatever version huge is. Again, that can be from selling a one-on-one product really quickly to selling out a group cohort to whatever it looks like for you.
And then the next time it stalls and it takes a lot longer, it's a lot more painful or you don't totally fill the group. And I want to talk about what you should actually be doing between those launches. What is happening from a sequence over strategy perspective that is causing that?
And this way you can prevent a little bit of that. Well, we don't want to prevent the initial excitement because that's exciting, but you can prevent the second wave of maybe frustration or questioning things. By the way, like this is a conversation I have over and over with clients.
So again, if this has happened to you, it is completely normal. I want to emphasize that it's totally normal and we can't fully prevent it, but we can know what the heck we're doing.
The Three Levers of Business Growth
So before we talk about these launches specifically, I want to give you a quick framework to hold on to and to remember, because it's going to make the rest of the episode make a lot more sense for you.
And these are the three levers of business growth. Quick version, if you're new here, if you want a full dose of it, there are former episodes that go through these levers in detail. But what I'm talking about is that your business has three dials, three levers that need to be in alignment with each other for things to run efficiently.
What are those three? It's your customer segment, who you're selling to, your marketing mix, how you reach and attract those people, and your product mix, what you're actually offering when you do so. And think of these levers like a washing machine, like if the settings don't match, you know, what you're trying to wash, you're going to get like a little bit of a mess or not even a mess, like it just might be really inefficient, right?
Same thing in business. When those three dials are out of alignment, you get noise. What we mean by noise is that it's inefficiency, right?
So you get slower sales, confusion about why something isn't working. So when they're in alignment, when those three levers, customer segment, marketing mix, product mix are in alignment, things feel smooth. We call it product market founder fit, right?
It's not always effortless, of course, but it's smooth. And it feels like the business is working. So hold on to this because that's what's actually happening in the first launch, right?
And in the stall that follows, we have a sequence over strategy issue of these levers being in alignment and then falling out of alignment. So let's walk through exactly what the heck I'm talking about. So that first launch, right?
When that first launch, and again, by launch, I don't want you to assume I'm talking about these big internet launches that we see. I just mean the first time you're offering something, here's what actually is happening. There was likely pent up demand, right?
Your customer segment on our dials wanted something from your product mix that didn't exist yet. So in that moment, before you launch this thing, there's a misalignment, right? Your customer segment is asking for something that your product mix isn't delivering.
And so when you finally give it to them, they come running because they had been waiting, right? That dial, like those levers, they flipped back into alignment and everybody came running. And so when I hear about this being called and referred to as beginner's luck, I get a little frustrated because it's not luck.
It's correcting a misalignment between your customer segment and your product mix, right? When that sucker clicked into place, we get a big win and we celebrate that win and you should celebrate that win. But I also need you to understand exactly what you're celebrating.
You were celebrating the fact that you just cleared the backlog. You brought in everyone who had been quietly hanging out and waiting for that product to exist. And sometimes not so quietly, there's probably a loud segment that was telling you they wanted it.
I mean, maybe there's 18 months, maybe there's two years, maybe there's five years of demand built up and that all gets absorbed the first time that you offer this thing. And once that happens, I call this clearing the decks, like the demand is now gone. That pent up demand is now gone.
That's not a negative. That's again, that's like a really good thing, right? You have offered the people what they wanted.
We cheer. But it changes then for the coming launches because the pent up demand is gone. And so you have to go back to your three dials.
You have to go back to sequence over strategy to understand what's next. And that's where people stumble, right? Because launch two rolls around or the second time you're talking about this thing, if it's a one on one product and the instinct is, well, launch one went great, so I want to ride that momentum.
Why Launch Two Stalls and What to Do About It
And I understand that it's not going to look exactly like it did in launch one. Like people do understand that, but they still assume that launch two will be fine, right? They're like, OK, maybe like hordes are not stampeding into this, but like, gosh, there was so much demand the first time, surely the second time that, you know, there's enough that it might take a little bit longer, but we're still going to get the same results, right?
But it usually isn't fine. And the reason is almost always that the work between launches got skipped. So there are two things that need to happen before you get into launch two.
And again, like sequence over strategy, right? First is that you need to confirm the segment. Who actually bought the thing in launch one?
You had all this pent up demand amongst your list or amongst your audience or just amongst the people you talk about into, but probably not all of them bought, right? There may have been some patterns in there that tell you exactly which segment within your customer base was really into this. And so launch one, if you're looking at it, probably told you who's most ready for this product.
And so you want to document that. You want to take a minute after launch one is completed, probably 30 minutes to an hour, right? And just take a look and document, okay, who was most interested in this?
What is like a mini segment of my customers who really went for this? And then you can treat launch two as a marketing experiment. And that's the proper step because what did we achieve in launch one?
In launch one, we got the dials of customer and product mix back into alignment. Huge win. Huge win.
But what we didn't talk anything about was marketing because all those people just flooded in and essentially you didn't really have to do any marketing. And so now launch two needs to be a marketing experiment. It can't actually just be a full blown marketing attack.
And the reason for that is because you just cleared your list. And so you need to experiment and figure out how do I keep my list refreshed? You don't have that information right now because the only information you got out of launch one was that people who you have already brought into your world were interested.
So now you have to figure out, okay, how could I find more of those people between every launch so that there's a fresh group of leads who are going to be interested the next time I talk about this? So how do you keep finding those new people? What channels bring in the right people?
What message resonates? Is this a relationship marketing play, borrowed audience play, a traffic play, something else? You don't know until you try.
And by definition, experiments don't all work. So if launch two is you sitting there and saying, hey, I need to be really smart and get that marketing experiment in and launch two, well, then your results are going to go down because the best thing you can do in launch two is experiment. And again, by definition, unless you get really lucky, some of those aren't going to work.
And so by definition, you're not going to have that same performance as launch one. And that doesn't mean it's a bad thing. It means that launch two is about collecting information that you can use in future launches.
And so we want to know, again, what channels bring in the right people? What messages resonate? Is it a relationship marketing play?
All that stuff I just talked about. That's what you're learning in launch two. And so if you go in knowing that, then launch two, even if it takes a little bit longer, even if it doesn't fill in the way you want to, it's not a failure, right?
It's just you're collecting information that you can use in launch three and beyond.
The Productive Dip vs. the Unproductive Dip
So the mistake is assuming that launch two should just perform. And this is what most people do, right?
And so launch two is always going to dip in some way. The way that it can productively dip is if you go in and you have this conversation, you heard this episode, so you sit down and you say, okay, I need to go experiment with marketing so that I know how to bring my marketing dial, my marketing lever into alignment with the product and customer dials that I figured out in launch one. That's the productive way.
You know, odds are it's still not going to be as productive as launch one, but it is going to set you up for the longterm. It's the right longterm play to take that minute to gather some data. But the other thing that people do in launch two and what people most commonly do, so it's the minority who take that data collection mindset into launch two.
That's the productive thing to do. The least productive thing to do, and the thing that 90% of us have done and I have done is that you go into launch two, just it's a mindset thing. You're like, hey, gosh, there was so much demand in launch one that, yeah, it might not go as well in launch two, like I understand that, but I think it's going to go well enough.
It might take me a little bit longer to sell stuff, but there's still some juice in my audience and I'm just going to launch it to them again. That is not a productive recipe. That is a problem, right?
If you just go in and you're just going to assume that I'm just going to elbow my way through this one and we'll get to the end, that is a problem because that's not moving you forward in any kind of productive sequence over strategy fashion, right? All it's going to do is it's going to cause a launch that has a lot more friction and is a lot more frustrating for you and afterwards you're not going to have any new information. If launch two is inevitably going to dip from launch one, let's at least do it in a way that's productive and go out there and understand that we need to refresh our list and in order to refresh our list, we need to run some experiments in launch two so that we can do that in an ongoing basis.
That's the deal with launch two. It's probably going to dip, but you can accept that and have that dip be in the name of productivity so that you can gather data or you can again do what a lot of us do, but hopefully this episode will help you not do it, which is just assume that you can kind of elbow your way through it because launch one was so good. Don't do that.
Launch Three and Beyond: Building What Lasts
Go collect some data so that you can feel really good about how you're going to refresh your list, how you're going to meet people to invite them to the next one because that's what we want to do in launch three is that now we want to be moving forward, right? Now it's time to build. If you do launch two right as a real experiment, you come out the other side with patterns.
You know what worked and what didn't. You know how you're going to go meet your audience. You know what you're not going to waste your time on and you can start to build a repeatable marketing process instead of constantly running experiments that you probably don't even realize are experiments, right?
You can build on what launch two taught you and you can double down on things or you can try something else and you can just continue building in the direction of finding that stable and sustainable marketing and sales that are predictable. And that's always our goal, right? That's where launch three is where the dials can get back into alignment.
We can bring the three back into alignment, right? Launch one brought product mix and customer back into alignment, but kind of left marketing out there because we didn't need marketing because there was all that pent up demand. Launch two started giving us information about how to bring marketing into the fold with its buddies.
And then launch three, acting on that information, you do start moving the marketing into full alignment. Maybe you have a couple like small experiments still left over from launch two that you're not sure what worked and you want to confirm some things. But from launch three onwards, you are on that path to knowing what you do between each launch to make sure that you are bringing in the audience and that your marketing is in support of your other dials.
Because if you can do that, then going forward, each launch starts to compound. And even if the market changes, like that always happens, right? Even if the little tweaks happen, you're in a better position to respond to them because you have something that is stable.
And so if you have to tweak the dials a little bit to keep them up to date with whatever current trends and marketing conditions are, you can handle that. That's just normal business. You're not trying to find your full system.
You're not starting over, right? You're building on a foundation that you deliberately put in place.
The Three-Step Sequence: Putting It All Together
And so as we look at all this, here's what I want you to hold on to.
When a launch goes huge out of the gate, that's not the finish line. It is step one of a three-step sequence over strategy situation, right? Step one, the big launch clears the backlog, confirms the product, puts product and customer segment back into alignment because your customer segment has been asking for this thing.
And so when you finally give it to them, that snaps those two back into alignment. And then step two, it's just a real quick, like again, probably 30 to 60 minute activity that you want to do after step one, where you just say, okay, who actually bought this thing? What patterns within my audience can I see?
And that is where now you know, okay, that's who the audience is. So that's who I need to go figure out how to go meet on a consistent basis. Because step three then is to build on what you learned, right?
It's to go out there and say, okay, I'm going to go do launch two. And in launch two, I'm going to run some experiments so that I can meet these customer segments that I identified were the ones who were most excited about the initial launch. And then the final step is that now in launch three going forward, okay, I've learned a lot from launch two and my marketing experiments.
Now I can snap marketing back into alignment with the customer segment and with the product mix and double down on this and really start turning the sucker into a machine. So that is the sequence that you're going through, right? When you're introducing a new product, we're not just trying to ride the wave of whoever was waiting for it and hold on for dear life through a number of launches.
We actually want to have that first launch that clears the deck. And then we want to go forward and say, cool, like the audience wanted it. Now how do I find more of those people?
Because obviously it was a hit the first time. And that, my friends, is the answer to these beginner luck launches. They're not beginner's luck launches.
They're clear the decks launches. And those are positive things, but it means that you have to act in further launches differently because you did clear the decks. And so now you need to figure out how to go find more people for all those things.
Wrap-Up
All right, as always, thank you for being here today. If this episode helped you, I would be so grateful if you shared it with someone you know who needs to hear it. Or if you leave a review, that always helps people find the show as well.
And if today has you thinking about that marketing mix, and you know that what you need to really go deeper on is figuring out a relationship marketing component of how to get your services out there, how to meet more of the right people. Well, my friends, it is the right time. I have a relationship funnel bootcamp coming up in mid-May.
We start on May 18th, and we're going to be building relationship marketing funnels. So if you are a person who is offering group programs, who is offering one-on-one, and this is feeling too familiar today where you're not sure how to go out and refill your list after each launch, I would highly encourage you to take a look at bootcamp. We're going to go every Thursday for four consecutive Thursdays, and take a look at every step of how to build your relationship marketing funnel.
It's an extremely powerful program. I've been teaching it for years now, and the people who go through it get a ton of results and really understand and are able to consistently go find their audiences. And this time, for the first time, we're actually spreading it out, and we're going to do it on four consecutive Thursdays.
Usually, it gets taught over the course of one week, but with everything going on in the world right now, we're going to go ahead and teach it on four consecutive Thursdays so that you have time to really process the information and work with it. And right now, bootcamp is being offered at an early bird rate of only $1,500 to have your entire relationship funnel built with a small cohort and myself. So I highly, highly, highly encourage you to check that out if that is something that you are interested in.
You can grab your spot and read more at themichellewarner.com/relationshipbootcamp, and always feel free to reach out to me directly if you have any questions about it. All right, my friends, thank you, and I will see you back here in a couple of weeks.