5-Day $275,000 Creator Course Launch - A Case Study
Recently I fully planned and executed a course launch for a well-known content creator in the web development industry.
It went well. The launch did five times the revenue of the previous two courses that the creator launched put together, so I’d count it as a win.
I’ll share the key learnings which you can use to make your launches more successful.
Results
Total sales were $275,925. Including the taxes ($25,964) and the payment processor fees ($14,789). So net revenue was $235,172. A bit less impressive now, right?
Here’s the graph of net revenue by date (in euros).
A disclaimer about the graph:
We started off the launch pretty late (6 PM), which is why the sales on the first day are so low.
If you do it right, you first and last day will have the most revenue.
This is called an U-shaped graph.
Now if you price too low, you’ll end up with an L-shaped graph (most sales on the first day), and less overall revenue.
The client
At the time, the creator had:
- a YouTube channel with 700,000+ subscribers which focuses on web development tutorials
- Instagram with 220,000 followers
- Email list of 120,000
Audience
🌎 Geographically: Worldwide, mostly developing countries (eg. 33% of the audience is from India, and 9% from the US)
👥 Demographically: primarily 18-24 and 25-34, males
💼 Work: ~50% of the audience have web developer jobs
Product
The topic of the course was a new and highly popular technology. Not too many competitors had paid courses on that technology.
But there was an abundance of free content. So how do you stand out?How do you make sure your course is not just another course that only the hardcore fans will buy?
By being unique.
If your product can’t be compared to another, you have an unfair advantage.
One way to do that is by the product being different.
I did that by suggesting a new kind of active lessons which other courses, free and paid, did not have. These lessons help buyers cement the knowledge they learned in the previous video.
The second way is...
Positioning
Finding the Big idea or Unique selling point
I spent a lot of time on this step, and it paid off.
As a general rule, good positioning beats incredible copywriting.
But how do you find it?
Take a look at...
- You (what makes you unique)
- Your product
- Your competitors
And find what's different.
Here it was a combination of project-based learning, deep dives into theory, and active practice.
Yet it’s key to understand that this means nothing to customers. “What’s in it for me” is still the first rule of marketing. The result they get is what matters.
So I positioned it as “Become a top 1% XYZ developer in only one course”.
Big result, low pain, sacrifice, and time investment.
Talk to customers
“Half the advice I give to startups is some form of "talk to your customers."” - Paul Graham, founder of Y Combinator
I had interviews with people who both downloaded a course-relevant lead magnet and purchased a course before (filter by these two criteria in your CRM to get their emails).
I sent personal emails with the incentive of either a discount or merch.
Tip: Bulk sending them from the CRM didn’t work well, but quickly personalizing with their name in the subject line and greeting did. On top of that, sending the emails from the email address with the client’s domain (eg. luka@clientdomain.xyz) worked great, and I got a lot more responses than I needed1.
Now, some of these calls seemed like a terrible waste of time, but a few have helped me absolutely nail down the positioning. I highly recommend this.
What should you ask them?
This depends on you and your avatar, but here’s a good start.
- What's the biggest challenge you're currently facing?
- How have you tried to solve X so far?
- What worked and what didn't? What did you like - what didn't you like?
- What impact is X having?
- Can you describe a time when X was particularly disruptive?
- If you could wave a magic wand and solve ONE thing instantly, what would it be?
- Once X is resolved, what opportunities do you see opening up for you?
- Can you paint me a picture of your ideal situation after overcoming this challenge? How would your day-to-day life change?
Give these a shot.
Launching isn’t smacking pinatas blind-folded
The final step to determining your positioning is…
Brute force testing your positioning with (lead) ads pre-launch.
Run some tests instead of betting your launch on a hunch (no matter how good it is).
Every marketer who’s done launches sooner or later gets too cocky and doesn’t test if people actually:
A) Want what they have
B) Packaged or positioned the way the want it
And so it flops. They miss the pinata and smack themselves in the face. And tens of thousands of people witness it.
If you test, you’ll get 10 - 100x less revenue for a few hours of work. Not a bad return.
Back to the case study.
After getting a few ideas from the calls and a few of my own, I quickly created lead ads.
The one with the lowest cost-per-lead would be the headline on the sales page.
The winner was suggested by a customer I had a call with. 🤷
Quick round of analytics insights
Where did purchases come from? (Source/medium report)
- Yes, email still sells (53% of revenue came from email)
- Revenue attributed to Facebook and Instagram ads seems too low (3% of revenue on Google Analytics vs 20% in the FB ads manager).
Purchases by country:
India had 3.5x more users and purchases than the US, but 30% less revenue.
Why does this matter?
Because if we priced it at the lower, developing-country pricepoint we’d lose a lot of revenue from the developed countries where it would be dirt cheap.
And if we had no purchasing power parity and only had the developed country price, we’d miss out on revenue from developing countries and miss out the chance to help them with our product.
Take you time with pricing. It’s an important decision.
Email strategy
I sent 14 emails before the launch. The first one was 23 days out.
See, one of the most important launch principles is this:
90% of the success of the launch is determined before the launch even starts.
This means that you tease your product at least a month before the launch (the longer the wait, the more demand you’ll have).
Then, you share a little bit about it. Maybe the name, the topic. Behind the scenes of making it.
- Share your struggles.
- The insights you unlocked.
- Give them value (useful information), but don’t lecture. Build it with them.
Now, onto the launch.
I sent 13 emails during the (5-day but started late on the first day) launch.
You want to send the most emails on the first and last day of the launch. These are your highest revenue days.
First day means excitement, the last day means urgency.
Aim for 2 - 3 on the first day, and 3 - 4 emails on the last day. Yes, that many.
What do you send in those emails?
The best performing emails were…
- Story-based
- Addressing complaints & reviews
- Of course, announcement & last-day urgency
What is a launch period? Usually a 4 - 7 day period with a launch discount or other incentive (like an exclusive bonus) only available then. Or if you’re selling a cohort then after that period you’d have no more enrolments.
Content strategy
The content strategy was straightforward. It's the same as the email strategy (since email is content too).
You post and build demand and anticipation.
The only difference is you can get away with more posts on social media compared to emails.
Tip: Tease everywhere in a non-pushy way. Your bio, pinned comment or post description, last tweet in a thread, etc.
Ad strategy
Pre-launch
I ran two campaigns during the pre-launch on Meta ads.
The first was one an Awareness campaign with the goal of our audience (our email list & Instagram engagers) actually knowing about the course.
Here’s the post of a course creator in the same niche with 1.5 million subs asking if his subscribers knew about his course launch. Yikes.
If five times more people just knew about your product, would you make a lot more?
Probably.
The other ad campaign was a standard Leads campaign. The goal is to get people to opt-in to a waitlist for your course. Then, convert them with emails and target their email with paid ads.
If you’re concerned about wasting money on random emails that don’t buy your stuff, Those leads can always be tagged and you can see if they purchased or were just freebie seekers.
Launch
I ran a Warm campaign containing a big superset of the email list, website visitors in the last 180 days, and the Instagram engagers of the last 30 days. Performed great.
A Hot (retargeting) campaign targeting people who visited the website or initiated checkout in the last 30 days.
Overall, memes performed phenomenal (and I had an absolute blast making them).
As did the usual reviews, direct copy speaking to their internal state, and guarantees (eg. money-back).
Return on advertising was 17.56 or 1756%. Meaning we got $17.56 for every $1 we spent. Not too shabby.
Conclusion - two key takeaways
If there’s anything you take away from this, admittedly, dense case study, it’s this.
- Know thy audience. You can interview customers to find out more about them and to find what they want - in their own words. Then, brute force test the positioning with ads.
- 90% of the launch’s success is determined before the launch starts. Make your audience aware of their problem and your solution (so they make their decision to buy before the launch even starts). Start as early as you can. At least two weeks, aim for a month, but more time you have to build up demand, the better.
Bonus tidbits:- Launch at the start of the month. Most of the world receives a salary at the end of the month or the start. And if you let them know 30 days out, they might actually save up money for your thing.
- Test everything works (your payments etc.) before the launch. Won’t be as terribly stressful if fewer things go wrong (some definitely will). Launches are like weddings.
How I would launch again for even more revenue: step-by-step
- Start with a general idea of which problems you want to solve
- Make a few posts to see which one is the most valuable to your audience (gets the most excited responses)
- Ask your audience in an innocent way: “Have this idea of getting a small group together where I teach XYZ. Is that stupid?” No risk. If no one is interested, you move on.
- Post a few more times. Then, announce a cohort. A workshop. 10 spots for $500 - $2000. We’re not building anything yet. We talk to customers, learn their exact problems, false beliefs and hang-ups, which content they need and in what order. And we make some money and get an immediate reward (it’s hard for people to work on something for a few months without any reward). So, better product, more revenue. Win-win.
- Create the information for the first call in the workshop. The rest of the calls? Learn with your test group who is paying you to build your product. And they’ll be happy since they’re getting direct access to you so you’ll get delightful testimonials.
- You can repeat the workshop with a higher price and more spots, or move on to the pre-launch.
- With all the info on how to build your product, build part of the product. With the info & testimonials you received from customers you’ll know how to market effectively.
- Create a waitlist and softly advertise (don’t be salesy & pushy) over email & content. After a few weeks of building demand run a pre-launch where you’ll sell an unfinished product for a discount. This allows you to iron out even more kinks and improve your positioning and product - and get even more ecstatic testimonials. Most importantly - you’ll be able to use the launch frenzy period where conversions skyrocket twice (pre-launch and launch).
- Around a month later, launch with all the reviews and feedback on your product and marketing from the workshops and pre-launch.
- Once it’s all done - go touch some grass. You’ve earned it. 🏞️
If you’re a content creator launching a product or service - and you want to get 5x the revenue without the sleepless nights?
Reach out below.
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