Brian Casel
Brian Casel

Productize Launch Recap & Case Study

by Brian Casel on November 13, 2014
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Sunday night. The baby is down and my wife and I settle in to watch our favorite TV shows. This is typically my most relaxing, rejuvenating, stress-free point in my week.

Not this Sunday. I was freaking out. I was burned out. My emotional state swayed rapidly between anxious excitement and fear of failure.

Ya know. Typical pre-launch jitters.

In two days, I would go live with my new product, a course and workshop called Productize. For all I knew at this point, the last two months of a grueling production schedule, and the last year of growing my audience and doing research was a wasted, overblown effort. A swing and a miss.

Despite all of the signs pointing in the right direction — plenty of early-access subscribers and lots of positive feedback and engagement — I was convinced. The course wouldn’t sell. And if it did, it wouldn’t make an impact for students.

Today, two weeks after the initial launch period has ended, I’m happy to report those fears never materialized. The launch was a success. I met and exceeded my sales target, and (although we’re still only a few weeks in), students seem to benefiting from the lessons and community. Phew 🙂

Here in this article, you’ll get the full case study of this launch: The numbers, how the idea came about, the key steps and strategies that helped it be successful, the mistakes and lessons learned, and where I plan to go next with Productize.

We also just published episode 48 of Bootstrapped Web, where we talked through this entire launch sequence, in chronological order.

The Numbers

Look, I’ll be the first to admit that we all (myself included) place too much attention on the reports of sales numbers tied to launches and products. There’s much more to launching something new than just the dollar amount it generates.

We build and launch things because we’re adding something of value to our small corner of our world. We do it to make a positive impact on people that we care about. And we do it to gain (and keep) the freedom of doing our own thing. At least that’s what drives me.

But let’s be real: We do it to make a living too. That means we look at our numbers. We seek to find out other’s numbers. Numbers matter. Not as much as they’re hyped up to be, but yes, they matter when you’re building a business to sustain your lifestyle and support your family.

Everybody has their number. That dollar amount, sitting there at the forefront of your mind. Maybe it’s the amount you’d like to earn this year. Or your monthly recurring revenue target. Or total sales from the launch of a new product. That number is slightly larger than anything you’ve attained before. It’s just a few paces beyond your reach. But it’s there. Waiting.

My number for this launch was $10,000.

That was my goal going into the launch of Productize. I had made more than $10k in a month before in my other businesses, but never on the initial launch of a brand new product. In my mind, if I made $10k on the initial launch of this product, I’d be satisfied with the result, at least as far as sales are concerned.

Why $10k? Is the time I put into building this course worth $10k? No. If I were equating this to some kind of hourly rate, then $10k wouldn’t cut it.

So here’s how I came up with my $10k goal:

  • It’s a solid start. If I can earn $10k from the initial launch, then I’d feel confident this could become a significant part of my business over the next year and beyond. Not just a side project, but real product to build on heading into 2015.
  • It’s realistic. According to some back-of-a-napkin calculations based on the price point, my overall list size, conservative guesses on conversion rate, and gut feel, I felt $10k wasn’t an unreasonable expectation. Could I be wrong? Of course. And my irrational emotions probably convinced me that my assumptions were wrong…

Now the actual numbers:

  • Total sales at the end of day 1 (Oct 21): $4,431
  • Total sales at the end of day 7 (Oct 28): $10,341
  • Total sales at the end of day 11 (Oct 31, end of “launch”): $17,998

Define “launch”: This was the period that I offered a discount to the first people who purchased. Why 11 days instead of the typical 24 or 48 hour launch period? Well, I had a few guest posts and podcast appearances that published later than I hoped, some just before and some just after launch day. So I decided to extend the launch period through the end of October to include most of the new people who just recently found me.

There were 2 packages to choose from.  Here’s how they broke down:

  • Productize Live, $695 (discounted to $595): 6 sales
  • Productize, $395 (discounted to $295): 49 sales

The Productize Live package (which includes a live group workshop and a private coaching session) was a limited-time offering. I announced that only 10 spots would be available. Only 6 of those 10 sold. So this aspect fell a bit short. But I always intended to split it into 2 small group workshops of ~5 people each, so I’ll just be holding one group workshop instead of the two.  More on why I think this fell a bit short below.

One funny detail: The very first sale that came in was for the Productize Live package, and it actually came through 10 minutes before I sent the initial “we’re live” email. That person must have refreshed the page right on time 🙂

The mailing list:

The entire launch was promoted primarily to my newsletter subscribers. So here are how my email list numbers broke down:

On launch day (Oct 21), my overall newsletter subscriber count was 2,311.

Within the overall list, there are 2 segments to note:

The Productize Crash Course, a free email course, which serves as a good introduction to the material in the main Productize course.  I launched this email crash course in early summer 2014.  By launch day, there were 1,083 people who had gone through it.

I also had a pre-launch Productize “early access” list, which people could join when they view the pre-launch landing page for Productize (this page later became the current sales page). On that page, I gave plenty of details about the course, who its for, what’s inside, etc. It didn’t give exact pricing, but it did state that the price would be in the “low-mid 3-digit range”. I began promoting this page 59 days before launch day.  By launch day, there were 182 people subscribed to the early-access list.

The Idea

How did I come up with the idea for the Productize course, and why did it connect with my audience?

I think the way I came upon the idea, and why it “worked” are one and the same.

First, I’d only want to teach something that I personally had experience with myself. Over the years of bootstrapping and iterating my Restaurant Engine business, it has evolved into a Productized Service. All of it was built on lessons I learned the hard way. My goal is to teach my fellow freelancers/bootstrappers how to level up faster than I was able to.

That’s not to say the course is entirely based on my story. That was just the starting point. I felt it was important to do plenty of research into what others are doing with productized consulting and productized service businesses, so I incorporated plenty of case study interviews and other research into the material.

But the main reason why I think Productize really connected was because of the time I invested over the past year to growing my (still relatively small) audience. And more importantly, the effort I put towards learning as much as I possibly can about the people in my audience.  I wrote in depth about this here, here, and here.

Through reading daily replies from my newsletter subscribers, and conducting a survey this past summer, my main insight was that my audience’s core challenge/goal is to transition out of client work or a job and into a product business.

I firmly believe that productizing a service is the best “next step” that a freelancer can take to achieve that goal. The path of least resistance, if you will. So I think that teaching this course was the right match for my audience.

Always Be Giving

Alec Baldwin’s character in the movie, Glengary Glen Ross, fumed the mantra, “A.B.C… Always Be Closing”.

For the past year, and especially during the months leading up and through this launch, I focused on a slightly tweaked version of this:  Always Be Giving.

I made sure that every time I pressed send on an email newsletter, I was giving the reader something of value, for free. The same goes for pressing publish on my blog or posting something elsewhere on the Internet.

Over the 80 day period before and through this launch, I sent 11 emails to my list (you can read copies of all of them).  9 of those delivered a big piece of free content.  Most of those were 2000+ word blog articles, or during launch week, when I didn’t have time to write something on my blog, I linked to 5 recent guest blog articles I published elsewhere.  One email gave away an entire lesson from the course for free.  The only 2 exceptions were the email I sent on the morning of the launch, to announce that it’s now on sale, and one sent 3 hours before the sale ended on Oct 31st (but this one was only sent to a small segment of people).

Of course I made sure to mention and link to the upcoming course in many of those emails. But most of the time it was included as a P.S. at the end, or as part of the content (many of the articles related to research from the course).

I took this approach everywhere else too. When I’m a guest on other people’s podcasts (which I did a lot of lately, more on this below), I do my best to share and teach as much as I can fit within the time constraints. When I post to message boards in response to somebody’s question, I don’t simply link to one of my articles. I make sure to write a personalized answer first, followed by a link, only if it helps support that answer.

I make a point of reading and replying to every single reply to my newsletter.

All of this adds up to hours upon hours and days of extra work, none of which is directly compensated in the form of billable hours or making a sale. But it has made a huge impact in less tangible ways:

  • It’s fun. I genuinely enjoy talking shop with people who read my newsletter or articles. If I didn’t, I simply wouldn’t do it.
  • It builds stronger relationships. Granted, audience-building is relationships at scale, so it can be less personal at times. But I find that actively seeking engagement (replies, comments, tweets, etc.) helps break through that to an extent. The results come in the form of higher-than-usual open-rates, lower-than-usual unsubscribes, and amazingly thoughtful email exchanges.
  • The more I give, the better I do. The more I learn about the people in my audience, the better I get at writing for them. The more my stuff resonates with readers, the more positive feedback I get. The more feedback I get, the more energized I am to keep doing it… The easier it gets to launch the right product to the right people at the right time.

Mistakes

Now let me cover a few aspects of this launch that I think could have been done better.

No pre-sale

I told you about the emotional rollercoaster I went through, especially as I got closer to the launch day. It was like, the more I worked on the course, the more fearful I became of this being a big flop. Especially since I’ve been talking about it so much in the newsletter and on the podcast, etc.

I could have avoided a lot of this internal second guessing if I did some sort of pre-sale, whereby I’d sell spots in the course well before I went through the work of producing it.

I considered it, but decided against doing a pre-sale. Something about asking for that kind of money months before the customer can actually receive any of the content just doesn’t sit right with me. I’m not against doing pre-sales in general—they might be the best form of validation you can find—but I just wasn’t fully onboard with it for this product.

No mini-product

What I could have done, and maybe would have if it occurred to me earlier, was sell a mini-version of the Productize course, prior to producing the full video course.

I could have simply held a paid workshop or two. This would have validated interest in the topic. It also would have helped me refine the material and get a good understanding of my students’ questions that must be answered in a course like this.

Instead, I validated interest through the higher conversion rates on the early-access page, conversations with those people, and plenty of positive feedback from folks via email. Of course, this “validation” didn’t come with any money, so I had to take it with a grain of salt.

Productize Live package

I mentioned that only 6 of the available 10 spots for the Productize Live package sold. I’m still trying to diagnose why this piece fell short.

But I think it’s because I didn’t do a great job of explaining the added benefit of the live group workshop and coaching session. I had a few people email me and ask that question, so clearly there was a disconnect there.

I do intend for the live sessions to be very different from the recorded material, not just a live version of the recordings. They’re intended to be personalized, collaborative, and much-like a small mastermind group or advising session. I didn’t communicate this well on the landing page and in my emails.

Timing of guest posts/podcasts

My numerous guest posts and podcast appearances published a bit too late. By “too late” I certainly don’t mean the guest spots weren’t worth it. They always are and I love doing guest spots anytime of the year.

But in terms of aligning them ahead of the launch, my timing was a little off. Guest blogging and a podcast “tour” was my primary outbound marketing strategy for this initial launch. It’s a strategy I have turned to repeatedly throughout the years. In fact, thanks to the years of effort I put into guest blogging, this round was by far my most effective yet (except for the timing aspect).

Here’s the list of guest spots I landed during the past 2 months:

Articles:

Podcasts:

About the timing… Most of these published during mid-late October (just before or just after launch day).  A few haven’t even gone live yet (scheduled for November).

Conventional wisdom is that you want your guest spots to land as close to (or on) your launch day as possible. But it’s actually better if they publish several weeks ahead of your launch date. This way, those people who just discovered you will have a chance to read your stuff, receive a few email newsletters from you, and “warm up” to you before they’re exposed to a new product offer.

I pointed every guest spot to the free Productize Crash Course. This runs about 8 days, and it does a pretty good job of introducing new subscribers to the lessons in Productize and also to me and my writing/teaching style. Most buyers of the paid course already completed this free crash course weeks prior. But in the case of the Michael Hyatt guest post, which went live on Oct 18th (3 days before my launch), those people were only on day 2 of the free course by the time the paid course opened.

I initially reached out to the blogs and podcasts in early September. This was too late. In the case of blogs, it takes anywhere from 2-6 weeks just to draft an article and get it approved by editors.  Then it’s really hard to predict when they can fit into their publishing schedule. Some publish it within a week. Others take 6 weeks or more to put it in the queue!

Podcasts are the same story. They’re usually quicker to reply to the initial outreach, but episodes are typically recorded several weeks in advance, so it could be 4-8 weeks between the initial email and the day the show hits iTunes.

Had I done the initial outreach, say 4 months before launch instead of 2, my audience certainly would have been bigger, which probably would made for a bigger launch week. But despite this poor timing, I still surpassed my goal, which I’m happy to see.

What’s next

Now that the initial “launch” is over, what are my plans for the Productize course and workshop moving forward?

Community

Right now on a daily basis I’m dropping into our private community (a private Facebook group) for Productize students. I’m thrilled with how this is going so far. It’s awesome hear about what everyone is working on, and I’m sharing bits and pieces of what I’m up to too.

Surveys

I already have an automated survey which goes out to people who bought Productize. I have received plenty of great responses. They’re helpful, but generally pretty positive (afterall, they bought the course).

What I need to do next is send a survey to folks who didn’t buy. I need to uncover the most common objections, so that I can address them in the course and the marketing going forward.

The free crash course

One mistake and lesson I took away from last year’s launch of my book, Design For Conversions, was to plan the ongoing marketing strategy beforehand. After I launched DFC in 2013, I wanted to create some kind of email course to keep post-launch sales going. But as soon as the DFC launch was over, I was immediately sucked right back into my other businesses and never had time to build out any ongoing marketing for it.

This time, I knew I needed to create a free crash course before creating the paid course. Not only did it help me gauge whether or not there was interest, but it also gave me a marketing tool that would run throughout launch and beyond. As expected, this month I’m diving straight back into Restaurant Engine, so I’m glad this piece is already in place.

But I do plan to re-do it at some point, likely making it a video crash course instead of just text. I expect this will drive more engagement, which should boost ongoing sales of the course.

Webinars

I’m starting to do free webinars for my Restaurant Engine business, but in 2015 I’d like to begin doing some around Productization. I see this as a repeatable strategy to both grow my audience and convert new subscribers to buyers.

Workshops

I’m holding the first Productize Live workshop next week, so it will be interesting to see what works and what doesn’t there.

The workshop package is closed for now, but I plan to re-open that sometime in early 2015. Students of the main Productize course will have first crack at upgrading to a spot at the next workshop.

Coaching

The Productize Live package comes with one private 1-on-1 coaching session. A few people have asked about ongoing coaching/consultations.

This is something I’m considering offering in 2015. The goal would be to help you get from point A to point B through monthly calls, feedback, and planning next steps. Advising is something I truly enjoy doing, and I want to do more of it, but it will be a question of how to fit it into my (already packed) monthly calendar.

…

Whew!

Between this post and our podcast episode this week, I hope this tells you everything you want to know (but if not, ask!). More importantly, I hope you’re able to learn from this and see how you might align some of it with what you’re doing.