[48] Launch Sequence & a Case Study of Brian's Productize Course Launch
This is Bootstrap Web episode 48. This is the podcast for you, founder who learns by doing as you bootstrap your business online. And today, very exciting show. We're talking about launch sequences, and we'll get an inside look at Brian's recent launch of the Productize course. I am Jordan.
Speaker 1:And I'm Brian. Alright. So I can't wait to get into this, this little autopsy, the synopsis Mhmm. Look back at your, launch and, the first few weeks of of the course. But before we do so, why don't we get a little bit of an update on what you've been up to over the past week?
Speaker 2:Yeah. You know, I'm I am really excited about this episode. A lot of people have been emailing me and asking about how the course launch went and really excited about it. So excited to kinda divulge all of the details, all the numbers, all the sequences, and everything. We're gonna we're just gonna lay it all out in today's episode.
Speaker 1:Yes. And that's a that's a little bit of a foreshadow that it went pretty well. Otherwise, it wouldn't be nearly as exciting.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Exactly. Anyway. If if it didn't go well, then I probably would have, like, quit this podcast by now. I've been talking about it so much.
Speaker 2:Anyway. So, yeah, update. Now we're in November. The course launch is behind me. I I'm diving straight back into restaurant engine, you know, full full speed ahead now.
Speaker 2:Got a lot of lot of big things that I wanted that I wanna do in November and December to kind of finish off this year with a big push on restaurant engine and hotel propeller. The main thing that I really wanna do, and I've had this on my to do list for for like over a year, is do the first webinar for restaurant engine. And I I'm I'm I really wanna get this done in November, but all of the all of, like, the little things are kind of, like, getting in the way, and they're and they're holding me back, and they're delaying it. Like, every day, I I feel like I'm falling behind. So little things like, I I do need to migrate Restaurant Engine, like, mailing list to Drip.
Speaker 2:I already migrated to Drip on my personal newsletter on on Cast Jam, But restaurant engine is still on Mailchimp, and I I've been meaning to get it over to drip. And so that's happening this week. And it's seemingly like a simple thing to, you know, just export the list, import into drip. But it's it's actually way more complicated than that. I've got to make sure that all of the groups and segments are now mapped over to different tags.
Speaker 2:And I've got a whole bunch of, custom fields. And then I've got to update the forms throughout the website. We've got a number of opt in forms. So it's it's a multi day, multi step process. So I'm kind of like in the thick of that.
Speaker 2:And, of of course, I can't start promoting a webinar if my mailing list is in, like, two different places. So, you know, that needs to come first. And then the other thing, this week, I slightly updated the pricing on Restaurant Engine. The core plan is basically the same, but we changed some of the upgrades. Little minor details, but, you know, takes a couple of full days of tweaking different systems, working out the different plans in Stripe, you know, updating the pricing page, and and and then, like, all these emails and miscellaneous materials that might happen to mention pricing.
Speaker 2:We have to make sure those are all updated. So, you know, just all these little things get in the way, and you're it's like I'm swimming against the current or something. You know? I'm trying to make progress, but, and then the other quick thing that I did, it wasn't quick. It actually took me, like, three long days.
Speaker 2:I I wrote a really intense procedure to remove myself from handling billing issues. This is, like, one of those last things in Restaurant Engine. You know, like oh, so okay. So, like, over the last year or two, I've been working towards make making Restaurant Engine run on autopilot. It's a productized service, but it's completely delegated, systematized.
Speaker 2:My team is running on these procedures. But there's a there are little processes here and there that I still have to touch myself. And one of those things really frustratingly was dealing with billing issues when a when a customer's credit card declines. We do use a service to, automatically email them Dunning emails. But then after three of those, if they ignore them, which a lot of customers do, then we have to start picking up the phone and figuring out what's up.
Speaker 2:And do we need to, you know, suspend your account or or get it straightened out? You know? I was basically handling those things. Or sometimes I would delegate it, but we didn't have a procedure for it. Well, now I have a kind of a bulletproof procedure, Trello board, whole system for if this, then that.
Speaker 2:We've got, like, how to deal with objections, how to all of this stuff for getting clients billing straightened out.
Speaker 1:And it's I I have seen one of these Brian Castle procedure documents. One of them exists for for this podcast. And Yes. It and it's not a mystery why you're you've been able to extract yourself from Restaurant Engine because these these things, it looks like a a document, but it's a lot of thought and experience. And it's very hard to articulate your thoughts and experience on these little procedures to other people.
Speaker 1:So that's that's nice to get rid of that piece of it, especially, you know, asking people to update their credit card information. Not the most pleasurable use of time.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. And and, you know, in the productized course, we have this private community.
Speaker 2:It's a it's a private Facebook group. And that's been that's actually become one of the really my like, my favorite part of the whole course. And so I shared this whole procedure with with the guys in that group. It's really kind becoming, somewhat of like a mastermind group, like an online mastermind forum. And, you know, just kinda sharing things that I'm working on because, of course, the productized course is all about automating and writing these these systems and procedures.
Speaker 2:So I shared something that I actually wrote up this week. And and and then, you know, other people in the course are kinda chiming in and sharing what they're working on. So that's been a lot of fun as well.
Speaker 1:Very interesting. I find people when when you share that type of document or template, one of these things that really takes a lot of thought to go from a blank, you know, Google Doc into something valuable in the business, people appreciate that so much because it's like, even if they know that that's what they need to do, to have something to work off of instead of going from the blank slate is so, so helpful. So that's that's great. So that's that sounds like the type of thing, that they paid for. That's really why they signed up and the fact that you can pass off things that are happening in real time, it's awesome.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Totally. So Jordan, what's what's up on your end?
Speaker 1:Okay. So let's, breeze through my, update quick so we can get to the the juicy stuff about about the Productize launch. But over the past week, Cardhook integrations, this thing that's been plaguing me for weeks is starting to work. So I actually hired a fellow podcaster. Here's an example of podcasting being great for lead generation.
Speaker 1:I'm working with Scott Yule, one of the cohosts of Bootstrap with Kids, and working with his company to build these integrations. And in the meantime, I've got a few other developers that I kinda, you know, had going at the same time. So the integrations are starting to roll in and I plan on being very aggressive on the integration marketing front. That's really been working for me.
Speaker 2:And I mean, adding those integrations for you is essentially opening up entire new customer bases because each is like a different ecommerce platform.
Speaker 1:Exactly. And it's a whole new crop of potential customers. And what I have I have found is that a personal approach is what works. So instead of standing back and saying, there's an ecommerce platform. Let me do an integration, and then let me announce to my tiny little audience that I have an integration.
Speaker 1:Instead, I reach out to the company. I befriend and form a genuine relationship with somebody at the company. They are excited and appreciative that we're going through the process. And then using that it's not even using, not like in a negative sense. It's just like a genuine natural progression of the relationship to say, hey, we've worked on this together.
Speaker 1:We now work with your platform. How about I write a blog post about it and you can send it out to your customer base on how to do this, how to recover abandoned carts? And so in that way, it's like an integration, but then right off the bat, I get exposed to a bunch of potential customers. So that has worked well.
Speaker 2:I like that a lot. It's kind of like a, you know, the the biz dev integration marketing combined with a little content marketing, like guest posting.
Speaker 1:Right. Because they're appreciative. It's great content for them, and I can put together a killer post with screenshots and explanation and, you know, obviously, the call to action to sign up or download, like, a the sample AvantaCart campaign. It yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:That that has really been working, so I will continue to pursue that, more and more aggressively. Yeah. The latest one is with FoxyCart, so that'll be good. The other thing I've really been working on, struggling with, whatever you wanna call it, using a lot of my brainpower and time up on, is an SEO strategy. So, you know, people carry around baggage from their previous experiences.
Speaker 1:And in the ecommerce business, SEO is very successful for us. It's a big reason why our acquirer was interested in in purchasing the company because he intended to stop paid advertising. And he what he was able to see was that our SEO was solid enough that if he turned off paid advertising as he intended to do, that revenue would still be there and more profitable revenue. Yeah. So so SEO worked.
Speaker 1:And so I want to pursue SEO for Cardhook. But, you know, four years later, SEO these days is tricky. It's like, what do you do? Hire a traditional SEO firm? You know, it's not like I'm a fencing company and I want my local area to know about me.
Speaker 1:This is this is different. And I think a lot of, software, a lot of people just struggle with this in general. And what I came up with, that I can definitely talk about as it starts to be implemented is a content and SEO strategy hybrid. Yeah. And so I talked to a few traditional SEO companies, and I just hesitated on it because it didn't make sense.
Speaker 1:The the blogging thing doesn't make sense to me unless it's very actionable and and has results tied to it. So basically, what I'm doing is I hired, some writers. So I'm gonna be creating content or paying for it to be created anyway. And I'm going to marry that with a content linking strategy described best, I believe, by Backlinko. You heard of backlinko dot com?
Speaker 1:Backlinko.
Speaker 2:I love it. I haven't really looked at it.
Speaker 1:Brian Dean, he's an SEO guy, but he's fantastic. So he has a technique called the skyscraper technique where he shows how you can do research on what content you should be creating before you actually create it. So instead of just coming up with ideas off the top of my head, you do this research, then you have it produced. And then as part of the research in the skyscraper technique process, you you're finding people who have linked to that content. So you use BuzzSumo to see who is linking to that content so that after the blog post is produced, you can then reach out to those same people who are presumably more likely to share and link to your content.
Speaker 2:Right. Is that something that you will be doing or or you're hiring that firm to do it?
Speaker 1:So here's the thing. When I talked to these SEO people, I told them that is my ideal. I want you to do the research. I want you to come to me with recommendations. I wanna choose the topics.
Speaker 1:I want you to go off and have the content produced, and then I want you to reach out to these people. And they were like, I don't know what you're talking about. That is just so far outside of what we do that they can't do it. So I'm basically just gonna get started. Right?
Speaker 1:It's three parts. Research, content production, and then sharing, linking
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 1:Outreach, whatever you wanna call it. So right now, I have somebody hired for parts one and two. And so part three will be me for the time being until I can get that into a procedure, and I can high outsource and hire someone else to basically say, okay. Here's the research. Here's how you get their Twitter profiles.
Speaker 1:Here's how you get their email addresses, and then put that into an email software that can send send things out on a on a larger scale.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I mean, I we should definitely do a whole episode on I feel like I say this every every week. But we really should do a whole episode on, like, SEO today. Right? Like like, how it's changed and and what it means.
Speaker 2:And you and I were were talking about this yesterday, like, SEO for a SaaS versus something like an ecommerce business. And I think they are super different. Right. And I can see how, like, for an ecommerce store, you you you rank for all these, really long tail, like, item names and things like that. And those and and your spend on SEO can be directly tied to product sales for an ecommerce company.
Speaker 2:But for SaaS or for really any other kind of, like, brand it's really all about brand building. Right? And, like, and, like, content and, yes, like, content can help you get to the front page for certain key terms. And we've seen that with Restaurant Engine, but but still, I think a lot of our customers, both with Restaurant Engine and now with this course, it's not because we're ranking in Google for Although we do come up for things like restaurant website design, people end up buying because they're they're they're on our mailing list and they trust the content.
Speaker 1:Right. So that's the thing. So it's brand building in a sense, but that is not the primary goal. The primary goal is still to capture email addresses. And Right.
Speaker 1:And so right. So just links in general, like, it just didn't make enough sense to me. It wasn't quantifiable enough. So now with with this type of strategy, it's like I can accept that. I can accept spending money on that because I can say, okay.
Speaker 1:Not only is it gonna help SEO in general over the long term, but in the much shorter term, it will get more traffic to the site. And traffic, I see as like raw material for for a marketer. So you can't experiment. You can't try things. You can't try different opt in, different pop ups, different offers unless you have traffic.
Speaker 1:So all I see this as providing me with raw material Yeah. To then work with. How do I capture the email address? What do I need to offer them? How do I go from email address to an actual free trial conversion?
Speaker 1:What do I need to put in place? So that's next. But first, I just wanna get this rolling so traffic starts to come in over the next few weeks and months. And then once that's in place, then set about the actual fun stuff. Okay.
Speaker 1:What kind of pop up? What kind of content upgrade? What kind of autoresponder? Is a webinar involved? And and that's the optimization piece of
Speaker 2:it. Yeah. Totally. And I think, you know, investing, like, especially if you're gonna hire a team or or anything, like, if you're investing in content creation, you know, a lot of people come from this, like, from the SEO standpoint, like, alright. Create content, get SEO.
Speaker 2:But I think really, it's more what you just said, really, it's it's about invest in creating great content, and and the direct return on that is email subscribers. Create content that's so good that makes people want to subscribe, and then and then you continue to send them more stuff and market to them over email. And the SEO stuff is kind of like a a byproduct that happens over time. Right. You know?
Speaker 2:You so you measure your results in terms of email subscribers and Yes. Not so much in terms of ranking, which should come if if you're just putting quality stuff out there
Speaker 1:and and build the audience. And it's interesting to hear us say that because that sounds to me like Google accomplishing their goal of of not allowing search rankings to be gamed but to be earned. So if you start to take your focus off of the keywords and the meta tags and the links and the directories and forums and all these different things and put it toward email addresses, it's almost like, okay, it has to be good enough for the email address. And then you don't have to worry about all the algorithmic piece of it because if people link to you, it'll work out. So it's really a it's a good evolution over the last few years.
Speaker 2:I love it. Like, so many there are so many marketers out there over the last couple of years who who are just like, oh, man. Google killed my business, and and all these algorithm changes are devastating and and everything. You know? But I I love this trend because, you know, it it kinda takes it back to its roots, like getting back to email and getting back to personal relationships between you and your audience.
Speaker 2:You know, because you own your email list. You know, you own those relationships, and and you have to treat them well in order to make sales. That goes any business, Internet, offline or online. You know, the an SEO based business is completely dependent on what Google does. And then same goes for, like, social media.
Speaker 2:Like, who like, if your business is entirely based on Facebook, what if Facebook changes their their rules, which they do? You know? It's all about email, man.
Speaker 1:Yep. Yep. That's yeah. That's that's where it's it's moving, and that that's what makes sense currently. So that'll be interesting over the next few weeks to, you know, to to see how that starts to play out.
Speaker 1:There are a few factors in there that you gloss over that are really important, what to write about, the quality of the content, all all these other pieces of it. But for now, the last piece of my update, believe it or not, I'm actually working on my first blog post that I've been talking about for a long time, but now I finally have something I'm really excited about, and I plan to publish that next week.
Speaker 2:And this is your on on your personal blog?
Speaker 1:Yes. On jordangott.com. It's time for it's time for that to to start working. I just have so many ideas and so much built up, you know, potential and energy on it that it's it's it's time to
Speaker 2:go. Awesome.
Speaker 1:So that's it for the update. But I think we had a few very, very smart people leave us tunes reviews.
Speaker 2:Yes, we did. So let's let's take a look at those. We've got two new ones to to mention today. We've got one somebody goes by the name of Max is now. That's a that's a kind of that's a funny screen name there.
Speaker 2:Five stars. He says, I actually come from a technical background, but have a serious interest in starting my own bootstrapped business. These guys got topics from the technical marketing and biz dev buckets. Really great to get a full stack insight. I like that.
Speaker 2:Especially since I'm clueless in the business aspects. Well, all of us are clueless, really. We're we're just figuring it out out here. So, awesome. Thank you for that.
Speaker 2:And then the next one comes from b k Moore, five stars. He says, after listening to two episodes back to back, I was hooked. Brian and Jordan take a very authentic and transparent approach to sharing their experiences working on the web. This podcast has not only brought a source of inspiration, but has taught me many lessons that I often turn around and apply in some way in in my wife and I's online business. And that is awesome to hear.
Speaker 2:Thank you, BK Moore.
Speaker 1:Very cool. Thank you very much, guys. Appreciate it. And if, you're enjoying this and getting value out of it, we would appreciate an iTunes review. That's what helps us, move up in the rankings as we're talking about.
Speaker 2:That's right.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So let's let's move into today's topic. It's all about Brian's recent launch of his course. And, yeah, we're all looking forward to to hearing all about it, Brian. So, you know, I guess we can take kind of a sequential approach to it in terms of idea and creation and sales and email and all that.
Speaker 1:But why don't we, why don't we talk about brass tacks? Give us give us some of the dirt on the sales. Sure.
Speaker 2:So, yeah. So, you know, the sales numbers overall from the productize course and and by the way, you can check out the course at castjam.com/productize just to get just to see what what what it is we're talking about. So overall, day actually, let let me frame this. So there was a launch period, and the launch period was was eleven days long. I was originally going to do, like, a two day launch period, and the launch period being, the discount, the the sale for the course.
Speaker 2:I offered a $100 off both packages. I extended it to eleven days long only because I had a bunch of guest articles and podcasts scheduled to go out, which which were coming out a little bit later than I hoped. So I wanted to kinda extend this period so that, you know, the launch covers covers that. And I can talk more in a minute about the guest stuff and how they came a little bit late. But, anyway, so I I extended it to an eleven day launch.
Speaker 2:I I launched on October 21, and the launch discount lasted through midnight on Halloween, October 31. So on day one, at the end of day one, sales were $4,431. Day seven, after the first week, sales hit $10,003.41. And I was pretty happy at that point because my goal going into this whole thing was to hit 10,000. I I I was I ran the numbers in my head, and I thought I could do that.
Speaker 2:And I and I did that in seven days. And by day 11, the final day of this launch period, I went up to 17,998. So, $22 off of 18 k.
Speaker 1:Very, very nice. That was the golf clap over here from Portland, Oregon. It's really impressive, and congratulations. Very nice to see. And, now we get to not only hear about that and be a little jealous, but much more importantly, we get to talk about it and see, you know, how people can apply this to their, experiences and their launches.
Speaker 1:And I think it's really interesting to hear you talk about what you did and then also what you learned Yeah. You know, what you would do differently, what you would do again, what you would double down on.
Speaker 2:Yep. So
Speaker 1:it's really real world experience and knowledge that can only be learned by going through this process, but we get to, we get to listen in.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Sure. So before I get into the whole sequence of everything, I I a few more things on on these numbers. So there were two packages available. One is the productized course.
Speaker 2:That basically includes all of the course materials, the videos, the audio, the book, the case studies, and the live commit the the the community, the the Facebook group that we have. There were 49 sales of that package. The normal price, you know, ongoing is $3.95, and it was discounted by a $100 to $2.95. That was that's like the main package that's available ongoing. And then for a short period of time during this launch period, there was the productized live package, and this was the higher one.
Speaker 2:That includes the whole course plus a live workshop and a live one on one coaching session with me. Both of those are recorded. And the workshop is kind of like a small mastermind group, where a group a small group of us will get on a Google Hangout and we'll talk about each other's, productize businesses and give you feedback and strategy and, you know, track some goals and things like that. So 49 sales of the core course, and there were six sales of the workshop package. I was actually hoping to sell 10.
Speaker 2:Only made six on that one, which is okay. I I actually did wanna keep the group workshop small. My if I had sold 10, I would have broken it into two group workshops so that it's, five people in each. But so there's there's six of us, and that's gonna happen. So that first workshop is gonna happen this November.
Speaker 2:I'm really excited about that. And then and
Speaker 1:how much how much was the workshop level?
Speaker 2:The so the normal is $6.95, and that was discounted by a 100 to $5.95.
Speaker 1:That's interesting. So it's, like, 10% of sales were for the workshop. And then how much percentage of the, of the revenue was it? Right? So six times is it $500?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Right.
Speaker 1:It was was $5.95, and during the sale, was $4.95?
Speaker 2:During the sale, was $5.95. The normal is $6.95.
Speaker 1:Five times six, that's 3,500 divided by 18,000. Yeah. So it's like 10% of the seats brought in 20% of the of the revenue.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And let's see what else. In terms oh, and by the way, the very first sale that came in was for the workshop. And it was funny because this sale happened before I even sent the productizes open email. It came, like, ten minutes before that.
Speaker 2:So this guy must have been because I I actually put it live, like, twenty minutes before I sent the email, And he must have caught the landing page and made the purchase. So that was pretty cool.
Speaker 1:That super fan right there.
Speaker 2:Not so much. I mean, he he and I were emailing the night before, and he told me, like, he was planning on buying it. So Right. That was pretty cool.
Speaker 1:Very nice, man.
Speaker 2:Very interesting. And then email list numbers. Some people ask about this. So Right. On on the launch day, on October 21, my overall list, my newsletter list on Castjam was 2,311 subscribers.
Speaker 2:And I I break that down in a few ways. Within that, I've been offering this productized crash course, which is, kind of a six six lesson email course for free, still available now. It's been available for a number of months. There were a 83 people on that.
Speaker 1:And and those that 1,083 is part of the overall list of 2,300.
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:So that's like fifth almost 50% of the overall list either came in through the crash course or were on the main list and opted in for the crash course.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So the the productized crash course, I I launched that. Like, I opened that up, like, early summer, I think. So maybe five or six months ago. I've been building my list, you know, taking it seriously for a little bit more than a year now.
Speaker 2:So the prior thousand people probably came in, like, in back in 2013 and, you know, through other stuff. Right. And then within that and I'll I'll get to this in a minute. But, in late August, I opened up the productize landing page. This was about two months before the product the the course launched.
Speaker 2:Opened up the landing page, announced it, and started collecting early access email list subscribers. So by the time launch day arrived, there were a 182 people on that product highs early access list. So those 182 people are probably, like, the most clearly interested in this product. They've they've read everything about it. They saw kind of a teaser about the pricing saying that it's the on that page, it said it was going to be in the low to mid, three digit range.
Speaker 2:So Yeah.
Speaker 1:And then they requested to be notified as as soon as it's ready.
Speaker 2:Yep. Yep. So okay. So that's the email list. Those are the sales numbers.
Speaker 1:Let's Now here's the thing though. That was on launch day. So maybe maybe toward the end of this, let's remember to update where the email list is after launch day. Because one of these things about doing the launch is that in the process of trying to sell something, you're also building up your email list, which some people buy, but then you can also sell to them later. So it's like a
Speaker 2:Yeah. I'll I'll actually give that number now. So
Speaker 1:Okay. So it started off at 2,300.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Started off at 2,300. That was on October 21. Today, we're we're recording this episode. Today is, what, November 7.
Speaker 2:And I checked it this morning, I think. My list is at 2,800. Like, I think a little bit more than 2,800 right now. So I I added 500, over the last two weeks, which it it's been doing okay. I I did have a big and I'll talk about this more in a minute.
Speaker 2:The the guest post, especially the Michael Hyatt post, added a lot. And that actually happened that came out, like, October 18, a couple of days before the launch. And that that one post added, like, I think, like, 800 subscribers.
Speaker 1:And most of those hit right into the crash course?
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Very nice. Very nice.
Speaker 2:Alright. So let's let's kinda like break down everything. I I will get to the entire sequence of emails in just a minute, but I first, I wanna step back and talk about the idea for the course. Right? Like, why did I decide to do a course on productized services, and why did that resonate?
Speaker 2:Like, why was that the right idea?
Speaker 1:Yeah. I remember talking to you about this months ago when you were still, you know, settling on the idea, and you basically told me your plan for how you're gonna go about making sure that this is the right thing.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So what I did I mean, you know, first of all, I'm not just gonna create a course about anything that I think will sell. If if if I wanted to do that, I could write a course about online porn. Right? I mean, we you know, I'm not gonna write about something, know.
Speaker 2:I I needed to write about something that I know and and experience and have experience with and have demonstrated that, you know, through my work with restaurant engine and stuff like that. So that's number one. I wanted to write about, productized services because I've done it myself. I've I've really liked this whole process of building up and systematizing a business. Okay.
Speaker 2:So that's that. And then the other piece is, of course, I need to know my audience, and I've really invested heavily in this in 2014. Now that my audience is starting to grow a little bit, you know, it's not huge by any means, but it's but I have 4 figure numbers now, and and I think that's enough to start really honing in on on learning as much as I possibly can about them. And I do this in two ways. Number one, I have a welcome email, and I suggest everybody does this.
Speaker 2:Even if you only have 10 email subscribers today, add this to your email newsletter, an autoresponder that goes out either the same day or the next day after a person signs up. For me, I I send it out the next day. It's a very simple email. I've talked about it a a number of times. It just says the subject line says questions.
Speaker 2:The body says something like, you you may know a thing or two about about me by now, but now I wanna learn about you. Here are three questions. Number one, what are you working on? Number two, where do you wanna be in the next twelve months? And number three, what what are the biggest hurdles that are holding you back between now and getting to that goal?
Speaker 1:Yep. I am blatantly stealing that.
Speaker 2:Do it. I I tell I tell everyone.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I you know, you emailed me maybe yesterday if somebody somebody responded to that email with a question. Right? Not even a question. They filled out a few sentences for each of your questions.
Speaker 1:It was it was beautiful. It's perfect. Yeah. You forwarded it to me, because it had something to do with both of us and and the podcast in general. But I then I scrolled down and saw your email, and I said, oh, shit.
Speaker 1:I'm copy not only I'm telling you. Here's here's my to do list. It says under jordangobb.com, welcome autoresponder dash copy Brian's intro.
Speaker 2:There we go.
Speaker 1:And I feel fine about it because I think you stole the what are you working on question from me, so we're even.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Okay. Yeah. I I actually I don't know who I I I think I stole part of it from from Brennan and a couple other people. But, you know, yeah.
Speaker 2:Definitely steal it. Everybody listen to this, do it. This has been huge. Seriously, huge for for everything that I do on cashjam.com. I get I get a number of responses just like that one every single day in my inbox.
Speaker 2:And after these guest posts, like the Michael High one, I I was sifting through hundreds of these people responding. And I get really long. People write so much. And I Yeah.
Speaker 1:But but that's the gold, man. That is right from right from the customer's mouth. Not not everyone's a customer, but what to talk about, what to market on, what to any of it directly from people. I talked about this in my Mixergy interview. When people called us for the ecommerce store, when we listened to them and adjusted based on that Yeah.
Speaker 1:You you find more success.
Speaker 2:So It's gold. And and you start to hear the same sentiments over and over and over again.
Speaker 1:And that's that's the stuff.
Speaker 2:And so, yeah. Mean, anyone can do this. If you only have 10 email subscribers, start doing it so that every single new subscriber sees this email. Of course, not everybody's going to reply to it, but if you keep it short, just a couple of questions Like, I get so many people saying, wow, I've seen someone take such an interest in their subscribers before. That I've seen a few people say that.
Speaker 2:And then the other thing that I hear is they'll say like, look, I know this is an automated email. I don't you're probably not even gonna reply to this, which I actually do reply to every single one. Right. But a lot of them say, you know, just the act of me answering these questions has been helpful helpful
Speaker 1:for me. Mhmm.
Speaker 2:You
Speaker 1:know? And the people that don't answer, you still get good karma with because you asked and and you don't do any additional work for it. You just set it up once. So it's it's a no brainer.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's a great takeaway. And if you don't have a large list, this is like an ongoing survey that can that that just runs constantly. I've been running it for over a year. I continue to so it's awesome.
Speaker 2:And then the the other thing that I did, and I did this over the summer, I wrote some blog posts around it, was I did run a one time survey of my list. I put up a form on my site. I asked a couple of questions, like, what do you what do you do? Like, are you a freelancer? Do you work at a job?
Speaker 2:Do you are doing products business? Where do you wanna be? A few more, questions kind of digging further into those same questions.
Speaker 1:And Yes. But but you weren't lazy about it. You didn't just get survey questions. You actually went the next step, and you got in touch with them.
Speaker 2:Yes. I I did that. Well, I I so I I got in touch with people who signed up for the product ties early access list. So that was a little bit separate. Okay.
Speaker 2:But the oh, you know, I did do a few calls with the with the survey people too, actually, now that I think about it. Okay. So the the biggest insight that I get from all of these responses to my welcome email and all the responses to the survey was, first of all, the vast majority of my audience make their living as freelancers, consultants. A lot of them are web developers, but not all of them. And then the other really big insight here is that almost everybody wants to transition away from client work and into building a products business.
Speaker 2:And I mean, you know, it's it's not surprising. Like, write about that stuff. I've I've made that transition myself. So people like to kind of tune into these this type of content that I that I write. So Yeah.
Speaker 1:Doing client work sucks universally. Yeah. You know, it's not it's not like people are like, you know, so into it. So it it does make sense, but what I love is that you're not what you ended up offering isn't asking them to make a huge leap. It's not, I will teach you how to make a product.
Speaker 1:It is, that's next. But first, let me teach you how to systemize your service so that it acts more like a product.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And then I Start to bring you the the freedom you're looking for.
Speaker 2:Exactly. And and that's Beautiful. That's why I wanted to do this course, was because I I strongly believe that that productized consulting or productized services is the most accessible, you know, kind of like risk free or what's the way to say this? It's
Speaker 1:the path Highest likely
Speaker 2:It's like the path of least resistance. If
Speaker 1:you Yeah. Highest likelihood of success That that most doable. Achievable. Yeah. So all these things that that make sense.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Like, it's it's based on something you're already doing. It's easy to do alongside. You can literally launch something like this in in a weekend as we've seen a lot of the case studies. So it's like, I wanna give them something that that they can actually do and and actually help them level up.
Speaker 2:And that's what I that's what I was teaching. So okay. So that's why the idea, I think I think resonated. Yep. Other people
Speaker 1:And that's that's a lot of work. That's a lot of work to put in before you have an idea, and then instead of just doing it, you, you know, swallow your pride and you say, I might be wrong. Let me actually do the work to make sure that this thing is is going to be successful before I put the work in.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And actually, the first thing that I did after I learned this stuff from my from the survey was I created the free productized crash email course. So that's that started sometime over the summer. And I and I'm immediately, I saw a higher opt in rate on that than my previous email courses and and things. So I knew I was I was kind of on the right track.
Speaker 2:I started putting out heavily, you know, content around productization and stuff like that. Okay. So the other thing that people ask about is how long it took to produce the course. And the answer to that is basically two months total from the time that I started working on producing the course to launch day. And the the first month was heavily writing intensive.
Speaker 2:I I was writing a ton. I wrote 21 lessons, which amounted to the course book, which is over a 170 pages long. Meanwhile, during that same month, I'm writing 2,000 word blog articles on my own site. I'm writing 2,500 word articles on guest articles for other sites, like Smashing Magazine and all these other ones. So, like, basically, that whole month of September, I was writing 2,000 words a day or some something crazy like that.
Speaker 2:It's just writing. Month two, so this was like the month of October leading up to the October 21 launch. It was all about video recording, video editing.
Speaker 1:There it is.
Speaker 2:There's there's our friend.
Speaker 1:Let's let's take a moment to say goodbye to the sirens. Yeah. You know? I don't know when you're moving offices, but
Speaker 2:that's At least, like, two more weeks. Anyway, so, yeah, month two, October, I was recording video, editing video, recording audio versions. This was a huge pain in the ass. I was like so I I was using a a DSLR video. I I wanted to get better at video production.
Speaker 2:I'm still a little bit of a hack when it comes to this stuff. But, you know, I I kind of just muscled it out. And my office here, as we know, is so loud. I couldn't do the video recording during the day when I'm here. I had to come in at night just to just to do video recording.
Speaker 2:I did that like, you know, for for a week of just coming in at night, you know, when it's nice and quiet and nobody's around and and recorded a bunch of video. And then the night before the launch, and I was hustling, like, I'm doing all this other work for Restaurant Engine, like, things are going on. One of my teammates is out on maternity leave during this month, like it was crazy, like total hectic It's intense. Craziness. And so, was I really want to get all this stuff, all the course material done in time for launch.
Speaker 2:I thought that I might be a little bit late, which I was I was okay with. I if if I had to launch with like 18 of the 21 lessons and get the other two other few in later in the week, I would have been okay with that. But I really just wanted to be done with it on on October 21 and then take, like, a week off. Right. So I I came into the office on October 20, stayed here until five in the morning, recording the final two or three lessons and editing those, getting them exported and uploaded to the site, just, you know, hustling.
Speaker 1:That's that's hardcore, man. That's a lot of work. You know? You know, I I have a saying that I I usually when when someone asks me what I'm doing, and I basically explain it as the the world refuses to just hand over money because I'm awesome. You you have to work for it and create value for other people.
Speaker 1:And, you know, that's that's what you did, man. You worked hard. A 170 pages of writing. Look. The the videos, like, how necessary were the videos?
Speaker 1:Or how much of it was, this is gonna be better if I create these. And so, I'm going I'm going to make it better by doing these.
Speaker 2:I I think that they added something to the course. It's I wanted it to be almost like a like a personal coaching session, like like you're sitting here with me and I'm and I'm talking through some concepts. Of course, the videos do include a bunch of like screenshots and and and text overlays and like listing bullets and things like that. I I would have actually like to do more visuals in in the videos aside from just me talking. And I at some point, plan to kind of, you know, come out with like a version two of the course and I'll I'll do a little bit more of that.
Speaker 2:But I I do like having the video in there. The audio, which I recorded separately, the audio on on on like the nice microphone and optimize that. So the m p threes are really good to kinda just load up on your iPod if if you like that.
Speaker 1:And You went you went all out, man. This is not what I would recommend for someone just starting out. No. But this this is how a pro, you know, goes above and beyond.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And, you know, I mean, part of me kind of not necessarily regrets. Like, I I I'm proud of the package that I put together, but I I could have done something simpler. I could have invested less time. But I don't know.
Speaker 2:I just wanted to do do something like this.
Speaker 1:I think you're over delivering by such a wide margin that it will it will come back as as a benefit to you. The people are gonna get so much out of it. And when you relaunch it and continue selling it, you know, you you can be very confident in raising your prices, very confident in the product that's already there, and the results that people are gonna get out of it. So it it will it will pay off.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So okay. So let's get into the email sequence. Right? Right.
Speaker 2:And and I'm gonna go I'm gonna start all the way back on October 20. And this is fifty nine days until the launch day. And this is about okay. So this was the time that I officially announced that I'm starting to work on this product. And, you know, before I get into this, all of these emails, I'm gonna talk about something like eight I don't know, like 10 emails, maybe more than that.
Speaker 2:All of these emails, my thinking is, I always want to be giving you value. I upfront, the first the purpose of every single email is I need to be giving you something that you can find value for free, read this article, whatever it is, and and and attach to that some kind of mention of of the productized course launch. Okay. So on October 20, the purpose of the newsletter was to announce this week's article, as most of my newsletters are. That that article was called why build a productized service instead of software.
Speaker 2:So I'm starting to kind of like introduce this idea of productized services, like what they are, why they're valuable. That's what the article was about. And in the PS of that email, I that was the first time I mentioned, hey. There's this productized course landing page. I just put it up.
Speaker 2:Check it out. You can enter your email to join the early access list. So this is two months before launch, and early access is now open to sign up for.
Speaker 1:So you write a quality valuable blog post about the topic, and then you mention at the end of the email that you're working on a product that's very, very similar to what you just talked about. So you proved your expertise in it, and then said, if you're interested in more along the lines of the same topic, this thing is gonna come out in the future.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Exactly. And by the way, before I go on, I I also wanna mention here, on on my blog today, the day that this episode publishes, I'm also putting out a a companion article on castjam.com, all about the launch sequence and and some of the lessons learned there. And I'm gonna be offering this whole notes. All the notes here, including all the screenshots of every single one of these newsletters, the wording, the subject lines, the numbers, all of it is packaged in in this, package, which you can grab at at you can go to castjam.com/launch to to get that.
Speaker 2:We'll have a link from the bootstrap web show notes as well. So okay. So that was the October 20 email. And then the next one that I sent was on September 8. So at this point, we are forty nine days away from from the launch date.
Speaker 2:Again, purpose of this email newsletter was an art a new article that I wrote called having something to sell. Now, this one was a little bit interesting because at the top of this newsletter, like the first sentence of the newsletter I mentioned, you know, the productized course is happening. And this article that I wrote, having something to sell, is based on the conversations that I was having with people who who joined that early access list. So I I reached out to a bunch of them. I had about 10 to 12, conversations with with those people, like, why are you interested in this?
Speaker 2:What are you working on? What's challenging you? Things like that. And one of the big things that they told me was like, you know, I'm I'm selling my time. I'm selling these hours, but I really just want something to sell.
Speaker 2:Like, here's a product. Here's an offer. It has value. So I wrote a whole article based on that. And I'm kind of like responding to what people are telling me also building anticipation for this course.
Speaker 1:So that phrase, something to sell, that that's something that came from right? Not from your brain.
Speaker 2:No. That was literally something From
Speaker 1:the conversation.
Speaker 2:Somebody told me. Like Right.
Speaker 1:And then you phrased it. Right. You take that and that's the title of the article. Yeah. And that's what you're talking about.
Speaker 1:So this is the beginning of the process of taking what you learn and bring it right back into into into the customer base.
Speaker 2:Yep. Awesome. September 22 is the next email I send, and now we are twenty nine days away from the launch. So, I'm I'm emailing my list about every two to three weeks. And Okay.
Speaker 2:So, again, this my newsletter, almost as always is the purpose is to tell you about a new article that I wrote. And this one is called how to delegate as a creative. So I wanted to write an article about the automation and the systematization side of it. Because that's a huge part of the course is writing those procedures and and things like that. So I wrote I wrote that article all about that.
Speaker 2:Product the product has courses mentioned very briefly at the end of this email. Okay. And then the next one is October 6. So now we are fifteen days away from launch. Again, I've got another article called how to uncomplicate your marketing.
Speaker 2:So this kind of covers the third piece of the course. I'm I'm taking I'm not necessarily copying material out of the course. I'm I'm writing these unique articles, but they are based on a lot of the same concepts that I'm writing simultaneously for the course. So this one is about marketing, about knowing your customer, kind of things that we just talked about, and there's a bunch of lessons on that in in the course. So I wrote an article about that.
Speaker 2:Okay. And this this newsletter, unlike the other ones where I kind of mentioned product ties like in in the in the PS at the end, this one right at the very top, I'm saying, okay. The date is set. We now have the launch date. I'm telling you what it is.
Speaker 2:It's fifteen days away, October 21. Remember it. Right? Right.
Speaker 1:So less ambiguous as you get closer to the date. So this one, the first two paragraphs are, you know, very straightforwardly talking about the launch and the date and when it's gonna be expected and all that.
Speaker 2:Yep. October 15. So this is about one week later. Now we are six days away from launch. I don't have an article today, but I do give my list access to one full lesson in productize.
Speaker 2:So by this time, I I didn't have all the lessons done, but I had at least at least this one done, so that I can give them access. And I I was also creating the membership site on cashjam.com, where where students log in and gain access to all the course material. Right. And I set it up in a way so that this one lesson can be accessed for free. So anyone who who gets that lesson, they they they go in.
Speaker 2:I used a plug in called Restrict Content Pro. That's how I set up the the membership site. But this newsletter that I sent on October 15, it's, you know, hey, again, you know, there's there's six days away from the launch. And and today, I'm giving you access, a behind the scenes look, a preview. You get access to one entire lesson.
Speaker 2:That includes the video, the audio, and there's also like a worksheet that came with this lesson.
Speaker 1:Awesome. So this is now a taste, a preview of if you think you might be interested, take a look, and then this is what you can expect. Yep. So, did you choose which which lesson to to give?
Speaker 2:Yeah. That was a tough decision because I a lot of the lessons are kind of they're actionable and sequence based. So, didn't want to just take like lesson 13 of 20 because it it wouldn't really make a lot of sense coming out of context. So, I chose one of the earlier lessons, and this one is called why productize. And, you know, because it it takes more of like a high level strategic look at why you're productizing, and it actually gives you a framework to work through to to help you make better decisions about about the changes that you're going to make in in your business.
Speaker 2:And and by the way, you any of you listening to this, you you can get this this lesson for free if you wanna check it out. So so that was the purpose the whole purpose of this email on the fifteenth was get this lesson for free. Okay. Then we go to October 20, and now we are one day away from launch. The launch is happening tomorrow.
Speaker 2:This is the subject line is everything you need to know about productize. So I did include an I did write a new article, but that wasn't the focus of this newsletter. So at near the top, I say, I I did write a new article, and and that article is called how to get a promotion as a freelancer. Again, built on a lot of the concepts from the course. But the meat of this newsletter, and it's a long one, I go through I kind of cover all the key questions about the course.
Speaker 2:And we're one day away now. So this is the very first time that I actually announced the pricing for the course. Up until now, in terms of pricing, on the landing page, wrote pricing is not finalized yet, but it will be in the low to mid 3 figures. That that was the copy that I used. So if you're Right.
Speaker 1:Just a little foreshadowing. Yeah. Don't don't expect this to be $50.
Speaker 2:Right. Exactly. And and I wanted to put that, you know, right near the email opt in. So if you're opting in, chances are you've read that and you know this is gonna this is in your range and and all that. Right.
Speaker 2:So this
Speaker 1:this email I find really interesting because what what you're doing here this is newsletter marketing. Right? It's not a launch sequence. It's not an autoresponder that leads into an offer. This is marketing to your newsletter, and one of the biggest concerns there is not screwing up the relationship.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So in this email, it looks like what you did, whether it was purposeful or just out of your nature because you put a lot of importance on the relationship with your your readers, you allowed people who are interested excuse me. You allowed people who are not interested in the productize product to jump right over to the article Mhmm. Without without almost without dealing with with your pitch. But the people who were interested could could read on.
Speaker 1:So it's almost like preserving the integrity of the relationship.
Speaker 2:Yeah. That that is basically what I was going for there. I again, I didn't wanna just send an email without giving something of value. You know? I didn't want it to just be all about the course.
Speaker 2:And even if you're interested in the course, I still wanna give you something. Like, there's a reason you're opening this email today and and, you know, yeah, you can learn about the course, but you could also get an article that should hopefully teach you something.
Speaker 1:Right. And I don't know if that's that's the approach to maximize sales, but it does send to me like the right approach for your situation and for Yeah. To just do things the way you normally do them, which is I I demand to provide value if I'm gonna email these people.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And I mean, now that being said, this particular email is the first email in a while, maybe ever, that I'm not like in the subject line. The subject line was everything you need to know about productize, the course. It wasn't about the article, and I did notice a a bit of a spike in unsubscribes after this email. And I and I had some more unsubscribes in in the emails that are coming up.
Speaker 2:Kind of kind of expected, really.
Speaker 1:But Yeah. How dare you try to make a living after all this work that
Speaker 2:you do. You know? But I am trying to combat that by giving some kind of free value. Okay. So that was one day away.
Speaker 2:This takes us to October 21, 10:00AM eastern time. That is the time I chose to open the cart, as they say. This was a very, very short email sent to the entire list. It says, you know, the cart is open or productize is open, I think was the subject line and, shortened to the point, you know, here it is.
Speaker 1:Link to the link to the sales page.
Speaker 2:Link to the sales page, and that's it.
Speaker 1:So so this is, right, really important. This is unexpected. People are getting emails, have been talking about it, and then the day before, you give them a heads up, and then people get this and it's and it it's expected.
Speaker 2:Yeah. This is not coming out of the blue. If you're on my list, if you haven't unsubscribed by now, you're expecting it. Okay. So so that's the first day of the launch.
Speaker 2:And and, of course, I give a remind I think I gave a reminder in that email that it's a $100 off, you know, for the launch sale and all and all that. Three days later so this is now day three of the launch, October 23. I didn't have a new article of my own or on my blog to share because I was just way too busy getting the course out. Didn't have time to write one. But I did use this day to send out links to five articles that I wrote or pod other podcast articles and podcasts, guest posts and guest appearances on podcasts.
Speaker 2:That was the purpose of this newsletter.
Speaker 1:So Right. I think we talked about this and you were guilt tripping yourself about not having a new article. And I told you you still had, like, so much new content that people would wanna hear, especially people who are in the middle. They know that your product is available, and they're not sure. And I know the way, you know, my brain operates.
Speaker 1:I I just consume a lot of what someone has to say and each each interview covers something else or a topic is brought up in a different way and it all it all helps.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, I I think that was good. A lot of people found some of the articles that are elsewhere on the Internet that maybe if you're on my newsletter, you haven't it hasn't come across your radar. So so that was good.
Speaker 2:Know, in in that email, I think I mentioned the the Michael Hyatt post, a post on Web Designer Depot, and a like the Bootstrapped with Kids interview, startups for the rest of us, and a a couple of other ones. So that was good. And then October 27. So now, again, this is three days later. And, you know, right now, I'm I'm emailing my list like every three days.
Speaker 2:And this is a lot more frequent than I than I usually do. And I actually had one person email me back saying, hey, man. I got like eight emails from you in the last week. It's it's a little overkill. I I appreciate Oh, come on.
Speaker 2:I appreciate the content. Because what happens was, I had a lot of new people join my email course. The crash course. So they're getting like the daily emails for six days, plus my launch announcements, you know. But, what I did, that welcome email that I sent to everyone that I talked about earlier, the three questions
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:I tweaked that just for this week. So, just during that week, I added a paragraph at the top of that welcome email. I said because these are people who just joined me, who just discovered me in the last couple days. Right. I wrote a paragraph that said something like, hey, you know, you happen to have caught me on a really hectic week.
Speaker 2:I'm launching my new course product ties. So just to let you know, you're gonna get a few extra emails from me than than normal. Right. So I up so I had that in that email for about this week, and then and then I took it out.
Speaker 1:Very aware. Very very very well done.
Speaker 2:Cool. So that okay. So that was October 27 with the guest links to guest posts and podcast. This takes us to October 30. So now we're one day left on the launch sale.
Speaker 2:And I sent this, like, the evening of the thirtieth. What is it? Okay. So telling you that, again, I don't have a new article for you this day, but I but I am telling you there's one day left. You can get a $100 off.
Speaker 2:I'll you a little bit more info about what's included. Like, there's over three hours of course material or yeah. Three hours of course material, like five hours of case study material. A little more details in case you didn't catch them earlier. You know?
Speaker 2:And this was actually the first time that I had a couple of testimonials to include in in the email because now people have been buying it. You know? So I was able to reach out to a few people and ask for testimonials. So I included those in in the PS, and and that was that. That's on October 30.
Speaker 2:The final email that I sent was on the last day, on October 31, This is Halloween, at 09:00PM eastern time. I sent this. It's just three hours left to go in in the launch sale. And I only sent this one to the early access list. So a very small segment of the overall list.
Speaker 2:I didn't send it to everyone else, you know, just because it again, there's no extra value here. It's just a a warning. I I just I did wanna tell the early access people, like, look, if you since you haven't bought yet, I was able to exclude the people who did buy. If you joined early access. You expressed some interest in this at some point.
Speaker 2:It's on sale right now, and and the email basically just says, like, now's the time. After every one and so that's the last email that I've sent. If after every one of these emails, unsubscribe unsubs surprisingly, you know, you you do see a spike in sales. Sales kind of die down a couple days, and then as soon as I send an email, that day I'll get a a whole bunch of sales.
Speaker 1:Right. So some people unsubscribe and some people buy, which is, you know, pretty much perfect.
Speaker 2:Yeah. You know, I definitely I had more subscribe unsubscribes than usual during this launch period. But at the same time, my list grew. So so that was good.
Speaker 1:I would I would ignore the unsubscribes entirely.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Nice, man. So that's the launch sequence. I feel like this podcast is like a little little little blueprint for for for how
Speaker 2:to do this.
Speaker 1:So that's that that's beautiful.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And I did I I put a heavy amount of effort into guest blogging and guest podcasts. So I'll just cover that real quick right right here at the end. Right. You know?
Speaker 2:And this has been a strategy that I continue to come back to for years, year after years. I always do guest article writing. It helps a lot with building the email list. My only regret on this was I reached out to these blogs and these podcasts, maybe a couple of weeks too late. So I started reaching out in early September, about two months away from the course launch.
Speaker 2:But what happens is if we agree to an article in in early September, I end up writing it, like, two weeks later. They approve it a week after that, and then they don't publish it maybe for another month. So a lot of these things came in a little bit too late. And even like if like the Michael Hyatt landed just a couple of days before the launch. So I can't expect those people who just met me to buy, you know
Speaker 1:Right. A few days later.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Exactly. So Right. But, you know, I I still leveraged these existing relationships with blogs, which I've built up over a number of years. You and I kinda talked about this in a previous episode.
Speaker 2:So I had an article on Michael Hyatt's blog, one on Mashable. I've I've had, you know, several articles on there over the years. Web Designer Depot, another one that I've come back to several times. Smashing Magazine, this one actually hasn't published yet. It it I'm expecting it to come out sometime this November.
Speaker 2:And and I was really happy that I got one on there because that's my first article to go up on Smashing Magazine. Podcasts. I did, a podcast tour.
Speaker 1:Yes. You did. And I go I go to my Stitcher app, and I just, like, go to my favorites list, and then, like, every other one is with Brian Castle. Like like, that that worked.
Speaker 2:I know. It it was a little crazy, but but it was fun. Because I I think I did talk about, like, different things on on different shows. So here here's here's like a little actionable thing for you to take away here. This is what I did to do outreach for these podcasts.
Speaker 2:Step one, reach out to the people that I that I already know. Right? So I kind of met Brett briefly at at a micro comp, and and we had been emailing. So I I got on bootstrapped with kids. I emailed them, emailed Justin Jackson, got on product people, Emailed Mike and Rob from Startups for the Rest of Us.
Speaker 2:Mike was kind enough to have me on there. You know, these are all people that I've met before at conferences and have been emailing with. I was on the Gently Mad, which I think is publishing in a couple weeks with my friend Adam Clark. Matt Report, another friend, Matt Madero, who was just on our podcast. So, are people that I knew, reached out to them, and booked a show with them.
Speaker 2:But then I got on a few other ones using kind of like a cold email outreach. And what I did was I went to iTunes and I searched for freelancing. Again, I know that my audience are freelancers. The course is targeted at at freelancers and bootstrappers. So I searched for those keywords in iTunes, found a bunch of shows around the topics of freelancing and bootstrapping a business.
Speaker 2:I targeted only those shows that actually have reviews and that are actually publishing episodes, you know, because you you find a lot of like, old podcasts in the iTunes directory that haven't published in, a year or maybe they are publishing, but there's clearly, like, not not a very big audience. So I Right.
Speaker 1:That's that's pointless.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I kinda skipped those. I click over to their the site of of of the good ones and reached out to them. Did a cold email. In that email, I said, you know, I'm assuming you don't know who I am.
Speaker 2:So I included a bunch of links like, here's here's my blog, here's my Twitter, here's what I'm working on. I can talk about Credibility. I can talk about product type services. If if you even need, I can give you a bunch of questions and bullet points to make your job easier. And so through that, I think I outreached to, like, 10, and I landed about four or five, like, web agency podcast, the freelancers show, the wave review podcast, and the smarter freelancing podcast.
Speaker 2:So that was a lot of fun.
Speaker 1:Nice, man. That's that's that's some good work right there. Obviously, a great hit rate. Yeah. This is this is an awesome I literally just moved over to my to do list and wrote this down to to do myself, as you were saying it.
Speaker 1:Yet, one of the one of the things that people don't think about is that you're not bothering these people, especially if you're looking and reaching out to shows who have guests on regularly. Like, if there's a host who talks with a guest, guess what? They need guests. Yeah. It's not like a big reach to you know, it's not that unlikely that they'll say yes, especially if you can show a bit of credibility.
Speaker 1:People are are happy to to get people that they need especially if they publish every week or every other day or whatever it is, you're not bothering them. You're giving them an opportunity to book another show and check that off of their to do list and and move forward.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Exactly. I mean, I definitely targeted shows that that I know are relevant that like cover this type of thing. Like on the web agency podcast and a couple of these other ones, I noticed that they actually had episodes talking about productized services. So it's like this is kind of like a good follow-up to that.
Speaker 2:And, yeah, like as you said, a lot of these shows, the interview based ones, are always looking for guests. You know? So I think it's important to do your research and know what the show is about and and make your cold email, you know, kind of relevant. And make their job easy. Like, give them all the links that they need to find out about you and and all that stuff.
Speaker 2:So
Speaker 1:Very nice.
Speaker 2:So again, you know, I'm gonna package all this stuff up and include it on the blog post. You can check this out at castjam.com/launch to, to get all these notes, screenshots of all these emails, the whole sequence. And and you can, you know, use that and and hopefully put it to use. Not that everything here was perfectly done, but, you know, hopefully, you can kinda see how how this was done over a long period of time.
Speaker 1:Right. And we talk about this all the time, Brian, where it's really good to see what other people are doing, especially at this level of detail that you provided. But don't think to just copy it exactly and it's gonna work perfectly for you. You need to take this and then bring a little bit of thought and innovation to it to apply to your situation. But, you know, first, congratulations from myself and and other people in the audience on the successful launch.
Speaker 2:Thanks. I I appreciate it. You know? Yeah.
Speaker 1:Hell yes. It's great to
Speaker 2:see. I was I was talking to you and and others, in the mastermind group and stuff the day before the show. Alright. Day before the launch, I was really I I was convinced, like, zero people were gonna buy this thing and kind of freaking out a little bit about it. But and, you know, the other thing is that I stretched the launch 11.
Speaker 2:So, that made it that made the sales come in slower. Like like that first day did $4,000 is nothing to to, you know, to write off. But it I didn't hit my the the 10,000 was my number in my in my head. I was like, if I don't hit that, then I'm not gonna feel super great about about this.
Speaker 1:Right. It's the amount of work you did and
Speaker 2:Yeah. Research. You know, not that not that it was really all about the money. Again, it was it's like something that I'm about. I wanted to teach.
Speaker 2:I enjoy teaching it. But, you know, you gotta you gotta have a goal that you're striving for. I hit the 10,000 mark seven days in, and and that was good. And and after that, I I I felt I just felt really really great that blew past the goal. Look at
Speaker 1:The rest rest is gravy.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And I I'm just I'm I'm really excited about going into 2015 now and making this like a significant part of of my business, especially what I do on on cashjam.com. Kind of building out the course, doing doing a couple more of these live workshops and and that kind of stuff.
Speaker 1:Right. This is now an an asset that you can kinda optimize over time and and can be included as as a stream of of revenue on an ongoing basis. And that's it. Besides the con the congrats, also thank you for, you know, being willing to share all this stuff. I know personally, I'm gonna head over to cashjam.com/launch and download the whole thing and and use it as one of my resources, you know, if and when I'm going through this, the similar type of process.
Speaker 1:Awesome. So thank you.
Speaker 2:Cool. So let's let's wrap it up because my voice is dying now.
Speaker 1:And it's Friday. It's it's it's time for a beer.
Speaker 2:That's right. And I'm actually heading out to right now, going out to going to New York New York City with my wife. We're going to see Mark Marron tonight.
Speaker 1:Oh, no way. Very cool. Yeah. Is he is he oh, yeah. I think I heard him talk about it.
Speaker 1:He he's got a date coming up in New York.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Something like New York Comedy Festival or something. So
Speaker 1:Very nice. Well, enjoy yourselves. That does it for us. To dig into the backlog of episodes, head over to bootstrapweb.com. And if you wanna be notified when new ones are published and join the list, and if you're enjoying this, you're finding value in it, head over to iTunes, which you can now do directly on your phone and leave us a five star review.
Speaker 1:Thank you very much. Until next week. Later.
![[48] Launch Sequence & a Case Study of Brian's Productize Course Launch](https://img.transistorcdn.com/LDB_Cv9bHAA2vtoSPkZCpkdHPF6fAqfl7PL-PG7_c-M/rs:fill:0:0:1/w:800/h:800/q:60/mb:500000/aHR0cHM6Ly9pbWct/dXBsb2FkLXByb2R1/Y3Rpb24udHJhbnNp/c3Rvci5mbS9jMjkw/MDYxZDQ0MWIxYTUw/NTMzMGI2NTExZWMx/MWQ1Yi5qcGc.webp)