[0:00] Music.
[0:13] I listened to a podcast the other day by a coach who I really admire and respect, but his episode was very anti-launching. And I totally get it. There are pros and cons to all business models. I think he actually said the phrase that he used to feel, he used to often say that launching ruins lives.
[0:34] And I kind of laughed at myself when I listened to this episode. Although, like I said, I really value his take and I can see both sides of the coin. But I smiled to myself because I almost feel like I could record the same episode, but with my very strong feelings against going evergreen. And I know he has his reasons for why he feels the way he feels. And I have my reasons for why I feel the way I feel, which I'm going to explain to you today. So let's first start by diving into the difference between launching versus going evergreen. And then I'm going to share with you my very honest thoughts and experiences for the pros and cons from each from my own experience. And then I want to talk about how I think you can adjust the traditional models and loosen up the boxes a little bit because I don't think you have to go all in on launching and I don't think you have to go all in on evergreen only. I think you you can have a beautiful, happy, healthy combo of the two. So first, let's start with what is launching.
[1:40] Launching is basically putting out an offer where your hope and goal is for a bunch of people to take the same specific action in a specific time frame. Typically with a launch, it's an offer that you put out there that has an expiration date. Maybe there's bonuses included that expire or the doors, the actual availability of the offer itself opens and then closes.
[2:04] What's Evergreen? Basically, Evergreen is an offer that's available 24-7 with no expiration date. Now, like I said, you're already going to start to see how some of your offers fall into one camp or the other, but probably not squarely. So you probably have some kind of client spots that you would love to fill, whether they're coaching spots or mentorship spots or a service that you offer. And you probably have a certain number of client spots that are available until you are fully booked. I think you could kind of say that private client spots could be considered evergreen if you have a team and you can always take on more clients because you can just scale your team. But if you don't have a team, eventually you're going to find that you're going to have to close your client spot availability because you are one person and you can't serve an infinite number of people. So even if you have client spots, you might find yourself having seasons and your selling of those offers, which might look a little bit like launching. So first, let's talk about reasons why you might be thinking about launching in the near future.
[3:13] First, you might want to add a stream of revenue. Maybe you already have client spots. Maybe you already have some of them filled. Maybe you already have all of them filled, but you would love to have another stream of revenue. This could look like launching some kind of a structured structured experience. Often these are groups. Maybe it's an experience that you provide for a smaller group of people for a shorter period of time. Maybe you deliver in a different way. Maybe it's in a Zoom room or it's in a Voxer group or it's a video course or an audio course or a workbook that you deliver. And maybe there's different touch points of support that you offer. Some reasons why I really love to launch are I like to use launches to test different types of offers. I am always doing this, by the way. This is why I have launched so many times is because I'm always testing different types of offers. And the two main things that I'm always testing for are one, what kind of offers do I enjoy providing the most?
[4:13] So this makes me think of in the past year, I put out an offer for a program that I called the greenhouse, which was a test for my current different greenhouse, but it was a, I think it was an eight week program and it included a lot of live teaching for me. And that was when I learned I would love to have and probably need a space where I can teach live a certain number of times per month. That was so joyful and so creatively fulfilling for me. It was like, I want to do this for the next five years. How do I make this happen? And how can I get a group of people in a Zoom room so that I can teach them for the next five years. The next thing that I'm testing for with my offers is what kinds of offers do people just gravitate to naturally? What kinds of offers are really easy for people to buy? What kinds of offers are really easy to sell?
[5:03] Next, I really like to offer because sometimes I just like something new. Sometimes I don't want to say I get bored with my business because that's not quite accurate, but I love and crave the invigoration of creating something new. I love variety. I actually think it's one of my human needs. I need variety in my life. But I also love that launching something new gives me something new to talk about in my content. It gives me clarity about what to talk about in my content. I love that it gets my audience to pay attention to something new and exciting. It gives them something to rally around because it's new and fresh.
[5:43] So let me dive into my experience with launching because I've experienced a lot of different angles, I'm going to say, of launching and going evergreen. And so I'm mainly going to talk about my very first digital course I created, which is called the Etsy Seller Gold goldmine, which is now expired. And it's going to seem a little bit like, wait, this is not relevant. Caitlin, you're not even selling this offer anymore. But that, because it was my first offer and I didn't know this launching world very well, I got to experience a lot of different labors of it by accident. So basically when I started launching the Etsy seller goldmine, I would open the doors three to four times per year, definite launch model. And yeah, open the doors, close the doors for about a week. And I wouldn't sell it directly in between. I did experiment with turning the course evergreen a little bit, which I'm going to talk about in just a minute. But first, I want to talk about this launching world.
[6:35] There are so many different ways to launch. There are varying degrees of softly launching or hard launching. I tend to think that some of these ways of launching tend to fall more in line with more masculine ways of marketing and selling and more feminine ways of marketing and selling. The more masculine way looks like using a lot of urgency, countdown timers on the sales page, countdown timers in emails. It might look like driving traffic to sales calls and then trying to convert them through a sales call. It probably includes Facebook ads. It probably includes a challenge or a webinar of some kind. It definitely includes strict attention on the KPIs, the click rates, the conversion rates, the close rates, the cost per click. It probably also includes a team of people.
[7:29] And when I first started launching the Etsy Seller Goldmine, I was kind of looking forward to the day that this would be the way that I launch my offers, truly, because I didn't know there was another way. I didn't know there was a feminine option available.
[7:44] Like, all of this was just so new to me. And so when I fell into the world of launching, I was trained by a pretty traditional, little bit more masculine launching coach. And so that was just the way that I expected to launch. But then I discovered this more feminine way of launching and I found the coaching world and I started to meet women who were making multiple six figures and didn't have a team. They were running it all themselves and they had no idea what their conversion rate or close rate was. And I started learning this way of launching and it felt like I could breathe again, which is an exaggeration, but just the masculine way was definitely not aligned with my soul. but I had never learned there was another option. And I didn't even know the phrase aligned with my soul, right? That was not on my radar. I was actually thinking about this in the last couple of weeks. I was having a conversation with my coach, Amber. I signed with her for the first time two years ago. And that same month, I also invested a lot of money into a program that was basically the masculine version of launching a course and scaling a course. And it was like a super structured program. I got my own private coach to work with in this experience. And they walked me through creating a challenge that would then lead into selling my Etsy Seller Goldmine course. There were definitely Facebook ads included. It was very masculine, very much like, let's look at the, let's put all these numbers in a spreadsheet and figure out what revenue it spits out on the other side, right?
[9:09] And I was game. Obviously, I invested in that program, hoping and thinking that it would result in a return turn on investment, but after two months in that program and two months working with my own private coach for the first time.
[9:22] I ended up totally ditching it. I totally ditched the masculine way of launching. I reached out to my coach for this specific program and said, hey, thank you so much. I've actually decided to discontinue my Etsy course. And I ended up just totally ditching the whole thing really soon after that, which is probably extreme. And I'm not saying that I think everyone should do that. I'm just saying that I started to figure out pretty quickly once this world of like doing Doing things intuitively and doing things in a way where I could express my creativity, instead of feeling like I had to like follow all these rules and fit in all these boxes was like, I'm going to go there instead.
[10:05] So yeah, basically a lot has changed for me in the past two years. I went from thinking that I would scale this course that I didn't really love and have a team and run Facebook ads and make a lot of money, even though I didn't really love it. And then I found another way and another world. I found this different way of launching that looks like 100% organic marketing through Instagram and emails only. It looks like marketing with having actual conversations with women. It looks like getting their attention by serving them so deeply instead of getting their attention by putting an ad in front of them.
[10:42] So when I'm talking about launching, that's the kind of launching that I'm talking about. out. The feminine, intuitive, creative, fulfilling way of putting offers out into the world. And I've experienced the two different ones. I've also experienced going evergreen. So let me tell you a little bit about that. Also at the Etsy Solar Goldmine course.
[11:04] Like I said before, an evergreen offer is basically an offer that's available with no expiration date, which sounds like it should be awesome, right? Because in theory, you should be able to bring people in and make sales to these people all day long. But when I turned the Etsy seller goldmine evergreen, basically all that I changed was that I recorded my webinar and put it up on an opt-in page so people could put in their email address, watch the webinar, then they'd be added to the email sequence, which would in theory then sell the course to them in a very passive way. The only problem is that, well, there's actually two main problems. I think I survived doing that for about two months.
[11:45] Before, I absolutely went insane talking about and marketing the same stinking webinar every day for two months. I like, it sounds extreme to say that when my brain gets bored, it dies, but it's kind of true for me. So after two months of talking about the same webinar every day, I was like, I can't do this anymore. And I changed it back and I actually closed the doors again and then started going back to the launch model.
[12:13] The thing they don't tell you about Evergreen launching, like I said, it sounds on paper like it should be beautiful and amazing and ideal. The problem that I ran into is that my audience wasn't growing quickly enough where I was bringing in new eyeballs all the time. And so what ended up happening was that the size of my audience was staying roughly the same. Maybe it was growing a little bit, but I think my audience started to go crazy too, because I was selling them the same webinar all day long, every day. And what I learned is that Evergreen works really well if you have an audience that's growing pretty consistently, pretty quickly, or if you're driving traffic with Facebook ads. And I didn't want to drive traffic with Facebook ads because I just don't. And I had like played that game with Poppy Seed Play with my product business, and I didn't want to play that game anymore. And so that was kind of just a hard line that I drew. It was like, I'm not going to throw money down the toilet and see what happens.
[13:15] I just like said, hard pass. I'm not doing Facebook ads. And so that made selling my course through the Evergreen model even more challenging because now I had this limited net of women who I had developed relationships of trust with and had already seen my webinars and already known well about the Etsy seller goldmine. And so I was annoying myself. I'm sure I was annoying them. So I may have been able to make it through offering the course evergreen if I'd had multiple offers in my offer suite. At that time, the Etsy seller goldmine was all that I had. And so I have seen other coaches do this where they have like three or four different evergreen offers, but they promote each one for a different season. So it's like all of them are available all the time. If If you go to their website, you could buy any four of them right now, but you'll watch them shift their content in different seasons to talk about each one of their different offers. So one coach that I'm thinking of, for example, she has a manifesting course. She has a money mindset course. She has a course to teach you how to create courses. And they're all evergreen, but she rotates through talking about each one of them for a season. I may have been able to survive evergreen if I'd done it that way, but I didn't. So I quit after like two months. But I do want to bring that up because I find a lot of female business owners, coaches, course creators, service providers...
[14:40] Falling into this trap a little bit where they see the ads being put in front of them about how amazing this opportunity of evergreen offers is. And I think that it can be, but I also think there are big red flags for me, which is that's actually the biggest one. If your audience isn't already organically growing on its own pretty consistently and pretty quickly, you might experience a boredom of selling the same offer for years on end. And maybe you won't. Maybe this is a personality thing. I follow some coaches who have sold the same membership for years, right? The same membership, they promote it in their stories, they promote it in their emails. And maybe we just have different personality types, but I just know, I know I could do that. I just really don't want to. And so I'm offering you some different ideas so that you can play around with what works best for you.
[15:36] Okay, next, let's talk about some different aspects of launching because there are pros and cons with every single business model. And like I said before, I do think there are some ways to mitigate some of the cons. So let's go through them one by one. Number one, a huge aspect of launching is that it can create a big cash injection, which is awesome, right? Huge pro. There is a con to that, which is that when you have a launching model, it can create big spikes in your income, which shouldn't sound like a problem, right? But I found that I really like having a floor in my income where my revenue never drops below that number. So the way that you mitigate that is by launching offers that have longer payment terms instead of, you know, buy this today and get access to it and you have a big spike in your your income one month and then zero dollars in sales the next month, you can just sell offers that have a little bit longer of a payment term. Maybe it has payment plans or maybe it's like a month-to-month payment offer. But I have found a lot of joy and fulfillment of launching offers that create a floor in my income, a recurring income that I know is going to come through for the next, whatever, three months, six months, instead of doing all the work to create a launch just to have a big flash in the pan, which is still cool, but I want recurring revenue for you.
[17:00] The next thing is that launching, I think, is super powerful because it gives the people in your audience a compelling event to rally around. This just works really well with human psychology. We love and sometimes need a reason to stop procrastinating.
[17:14] Sometimes we need something that's just incentivizing enough to get us off the fence because very often people are probably seeing your offers and thinking, that sounds amazing. I should totally buy that. But they need something holding their feet to the fire a little bit. They need a reason to get off the offense, which can sometimes look like the doors for this are closing. So if you want to get in for the next few months, this is your shot. Not always a requirement though. So I'm calling this, maybe it's a con. It's not really a con, but I do love having my high ticket offers available so that there's a type of client who knows exactly what she wants and knows that I'm the girl that can help her and she's ready to go. And she doesn't need a limited time bonus or urgency to help her make up her mind. There are definitely types of women who are that way. And those are the type of women who I love to serve as my private clients.
[18:05] But like I was talking about before, right now, I'm not quite to the point where I'm consistently 100% fully booked yet, but I can see a day in the future where I have to close and open client spots because I can't serve an infinite number of people in my private client spots. And so right now, those kind of look like, I guess you could say evergreen offers running in the background where when someone reaches out to me and wants help with a specific project, I can create a custom package for her or offer her one of my current packages and she's ready to go. She's an action taker. She doesn't need a compelling event to get her off the fence, but I like serving both kinds of people. And I think we can all be different kinds of people for different offers at different times.
[18:47] Next, this is one of the biggest reasons that I love launching, but it gives me clarity in my content. This is a huge pro. There were a few months there for a minute while I was considering leaning into helping women with their Instagram content specifically. But I realized that anytime I was coaching someone who asked me, help me with my content, what should I post today? My question back to them was always, well, what are you selling right now? What are you launching next? And so, you know, that's just how my brain works. I really like having seasons where I'm selling something and then seasons maybe where I'm not selling anything at all. Or I like having seasons where I'm selling one particular offer and then I can shift my content to talk about a different type of offer. But I just love that a launch gives me instant clarity around what I'm talking about and who I'm talking about. All of my offers are created for different types of people. And so I love that I can rotate through launching my different offers. And every time I start offering one specific offer, I know instantly who I'm talking to, what she's struggling with, and what she needs. And then after that launch is complete, I can shift my content and start talking
[20:03] about the next offer, which might mean that I start talking to a different person. A con of that could possibly be, does that make it harder for me to to become known for one specific thing, honestly, it probably does.
[20:16] But that's okay with me because I have a lot of different offers in my offer suite. So it's okay with me if people know me for a lot of different things.
[20:25] Now next, the final reason why I love launching possibly the most is probably not what you would expect, but it is this, that I love that some of my most challenging moments in my business have been wrapped up in launches.
[20:40] You're probably like, that doesn't sound like a pro, Caitlin. That sounds like a major con.
[20:45] So let me explain. So the thing about launching is that when you You don't use Facebook ads, which is great. You don't have any risk of losing money on a launch. There might be a time that you invest in creating content and putting content out there. Side note, I pretty rarely have content for the actual program that I'm going to put people inside created when I launch. I love creating my programs in real time. I love using the women inside to help me beta test. I love answering their questions in my content. And so most of the time when I sell an offer, I haven't actually created it yet until after I have people inside of it. A little side note, if you feel stuck or if you're procrastinating a launch because you feel like you have to go create this 15 module course, you don't. You could sell the course as a live program and go live once a week for the next six weeks, prepare content on a week to week basis for whatever you're going to teach that week, then record it. But then you have the however many module course created after that, just as a little bonus tip. But like I started saying, some of my most difficult transformational moments in my business have been included inside of a launch. So like I said, you don't lose money on a launch, but there's still a risk involved. And I think that launches are high risk and high reward, but the risk is not a financial risk. It's an emotional risk.
[22:12] Launches are very vulnerable. Launches are not easy. And I don't want to go, well, yeah, yep, I am going to go there. I think that launches can kind of be like a refiner's fire, if I'm being totally honest. And I think that it is my launches that have turned me into a fearless businesswoman. It's because of my hard launches that I can definitely say that I'm resilient. The really cool thing about launches being an emotional risk, though, is that even those emotions are made up. They come from our minds. Your emotions come through the thoughts that roll through your head. So your launch is going to push you to learn new levels of mastering your thinking, which will then help you learn new levels of mastering your own emotions so that they don't take such a big, huge toll when you have a hard launch. When? I'm not even going to say if because I think we should all have the expectation of having at least one really hard launch. I love a good hard launch.
[23:16] It's funny to hear myself saying that now because I don't know if I would always say that, but I love what a launch makes me. I love who I become. I become fearless. I become more determined. A hard launch pushes me to improve my marketing efforts. It pushes me to improve my marketing skills. It pushes me to be really honest with myself. It shows me my edges that I can refine. It exposes my vulnerabilities and my weak thoughts so that I can work on them. Now, I don't know anyone who wants to hire a coach who's like, yeah, I love when my clients go through a refiner's fire because that's not necessarily what I, it's not that I want you to go through a refiner's fire, but I know that you're not going to come out worse off on the other side. And my take is that there is no other way to become the business woman who is able to move the types of revenue that you probably want to move without experiencing experiencing contrast and opposites and easy and hard highs and lows, you're going to come out on the other side learning that you can handle all of it. And I think that's a really good thing. Launching becomes a personal development experience. You get more and more powerful. You become more and more unstoppable.
[24:41] And you become more and more valuable of an asset to your family, to your marriage, to your clients, when you become the type of woman who is willing to walk into the refiner's fire. You are willing to put yourself out there on the precipice of emotional vulnerability, of being willing to be seen, and being willing to take the risk of it going really, really well, and maybe really not well. But the more and more you do it, the more frequently you launch, the better and better you're going to get at it, the better you're going to learn what kinds of things do work really well and what kinds of things don't work really well. I think this is a really good thing. I think it's really beautiful. Now, if you would love some help with your launches, I just created an amazing free resource just this week, fresh off the press. It's called a 30-day launch content calendar. So if you know how I was saying earlier that your launches can answer the question, what what should I say in my content this week? If you find yourself going to create your content and you're always drawing a blank or you post at the last minute or you don't post at all because you don't know what to say, this content calendar can solve that problem. It's called the 30-day launch content calendar for a reason because I want to push you to lengthen your launches. I used to say that I would never launch something if I didn't have at least two weeks to promote it in advance.
[26:05] I'm kind of taking that back a little bit now and now saying that I wouldn't launch something unless I had 30 days to promote it in advance. That's because I've been testing this and I'm finding that it's working really well and I wouldn't pass it along to you if it wasn't working really well. And so this content calendar is going to help show you week by week a breakdown of what you should be talking about each week leading up to your launch so that instead of you feeling like you're just going to like post something about your offer just so that you can say that you did, you can feel like you have an actual strategy in your back pocket. The strategy is that you're going to use your content to move the people in your audience from having a desire to buy your offer to making a decision to buy your offer. And this calendar will help you answer that even more specifically. So you can get access to it for free right now by going to kaylenpriest.com slash calendar. Download it and start planning your content for your next 30-day launch. Your launches are going to get 100 times easier because of this SQL asset. Until next week, my friends, I hope you have an incredible week and happy launching.
[27:15] Hey, I hope you loved this week's episode. If you did, I know you would love to be a member of my community, The Greenhouse. It's where I teach you how to build an amazing, fruitful life while you build an amazing, fruitful business. It is a movement for women who want to unsubscribe from the traditional success path that says that life has to be a struggle and instead learn how good making more money can get, how fun marketing can be, and how much joy and presence you're capable of feeling as a woman and as a mother. Find out more and join at kaylenpriest.com slash greenhouse and I'll see you there.
[27:55] Music.
