Let me catch you up to speed so you can act like a sponge and soak up as much goodness as possible from this admittedly long (but hopefully helpful and refreshingly honest) email 🤗 

A month ago I launched a brand new offer –- a high-ticket, high-touch, high-vibe group coaching program and mastermind. 

Despite having worked on lots of launches like this one for 1:1 clients, this was the first time I’d done it for myself. I learned so much, friend.

Thing is, I did a TON of things differently than I normally would in a launch situation. I broke several unspoken rules and:

• Shared my pricing up front.
• Didn’t use any bonuses, artificial scarcity, or paid ads.
• Didn’t have a sales page until almost the end of the launch!
• Pitched to an audience that’s not even necessarily interested in my wacky hippie-esque holistic empathy marketing ecosystem ideas.
• Ran a 3-hour long workshop with minimal pitching based on how to work with our resistance and physiological response to change (it was practically a mini course!)

So buckle up, because in this blog, I’m going into detail about all of the above and more. I ain’t holding back — I want you to get the most out of my rulebreaking launch experiment.

Estimated reading time ~8 minutes

Ready? Onward!

Let’s start by talking about AUDIENCE ALIGNMENT… 

This isn’t talked about enough, if you ask me.

Online marketing teachers make such a fuss about building an email list but don’t soapbox (yeah I made it a verb, come at me!) hard enough about WHO is on said list. 

Here’s my personal pickle 🥒

I built an email list largely composed of people who signed up to hear me talk about quizzes. 

How that happened was wholly intentional because once upon a time, that’s all I really talked about. Quizzes are at the heart of almost all of my offers. 

So what’s the problem? 

Welp. Maybe I want to talk about *MORE* than just quizzes. 

Maybe I’m an evolving human and business owner who’s discovered some gaps that I’m certain I can fill. 

I didn’t account for my potential growth and personal evolution when I developed the lead magnets that took my list to where it is today. 

But when developing this new offer that wasn’t really about quizzes at all, I knew there would be a high likelihood of potential audience misalignment. 

My interim solution was to be upfront about that and send an email asking anyone in the “quiz info only please” boat to self-select and segment themselves out of the tangentially related email topics. 

The problem with that is one email asking readers to take a specific action can only do so much.

The irony is, that if I were my own client, I would advise myself to have a quiz that speaks to the diverse segments of wonderful humans I help.

I call this a Signature Quiz, but the visual that pervades my brain is an umbrella. 

I want to huddle my whole audience spectrum under one umbrella, and from there wrap each person in the grown up version of a muddy buddy, and send them on their way down the path that’s going to suit them best within my ecosystem.

^^that’s a muddy buddy if you’re not a rainy life toddler mom who lives and dies by these things. 

Spoiler: I *am* actually creating a new quiz after this launch experiment that will speak to the broader audience I want to attract! 

More on that later. 

For now, launch lesson #1 = prioritize audience/offer alignment 

⇒ If you’re launching something new that might not be on point for your existing audience, you need a way to attract the people who will be a fit for your new thing. Whether it’s with a quiz or a different lead magnet. 

I did create a new thing, which on some level I thought would serve this purpose.
But in hindsight I made 2 mistakes… 

Levels of lead magnets and constructing “conversion events” 

I just hate the language we use to define certain things in digital marketing. Take “conversion event.” Writing or saying those words out loud makes me feel like an AI powered robot with no creative capacity. 

So sorry for that and if you have a better term, hit me up. 

Let’s continue the lead magnet musings and talk about where I went wrong with my “conversion event” (AND maybe a dash of what I did *right* for good measure). 

The new thing I did create for this launch was a free workshop all about navigating seasons of change.

🐝 WIN = I honestly felt so damn happy putting it together. It was the most fun I’ve had as a creator in a long time and reinspired me to do more IP development and training/workshop creation. 

☠️ CHALLENGE = I get way too extra when I get excited and I ended up creating a 3-hour workshop 👇

A 3-hour workshop isn’t necessarily a problem. Except when you tell people it’ll be a 2-hour workshop. 

That and the fact that it was free. I could’ve jumped on this paid workshop to bigger offer funnel bandwagon and had a more committed audience in the Zoom room. 

If I were to run the workshop free again, I think I would break it up into a 5-day series of something a little more digestible for the busy people I was trying to attract. I don’t think I’ll do that though… 

My plan is to turn that workshop into a low priced digital product, because I think it’s that good and I got some really stellar feedback. 

Which is another win 🐝both the feedback AND the fact that I can repurpose what I created. 

Another influential factor in this launch: NO ADS 🤯

I stopped running paid ads a few months ago, mostly because I wanted to see what would happen. 

FB and IG ads have been good to me over the years, and with this launch, I kinda missed the easy extra eyeballs I could’ve gotten on the workshop and even the offer itself. 

That said, I’ve been really into seeing what’s possible from a purely organic perspective. 

I only promoted the workshop to my email list and social media following. Out of a combined audience base of around 10k I got around 100 workshop registrations. 

Thems aren’t very “good” numbers, but again, the topic of navigating change probably felt totally left field to anyone who’s here to learn to list build and make mad moneys. 

The one thing I do want to point out is that despite not running ads for this, 2 of the people who joined DID originally discover me (albeit years ago!) from ads. 

I’m cooking up some ways to get back to running ads, especially now that so many advertisers are jumping ship or pulling back out of recession fear. 

Upfront pricing with a high(er) ticket offer 

Fertile Ground was priced at $9,997 early bird and $12,997 after that and I didn’t pussywillow around that reality. 

I love pricing transparency. But I recognize it can immediately close people down from considering whether your offer’s a viable option for them. 

On the agency side of my biz, we started sharing prices for our quiz funnel packages when someone applies to work with us. It’s made sales conversations sooo much easier. 

I figured the same would be true for this offer. But I fear it freaked people out a bit. It’s possible more people would’ve been interested if we’d just had a conversation. 

Ultimately, I’ll probably keep doing it the transparent way, because it honestly just feels better ⇐ such an underrated metric if you ask me! 

What happens when you have no FOMO, no bonuses, AND, no sales page… 

I hate to disappoint, because I’m sure what you want to hear is that those things don’t actually make a difference. But alas, they do! 

As long as humans gonna human, we will be motivated by external factors like scarcity and fomo. 

I really wanted to get Fertile Ground off the ground without all the bells and whistles. It’s a program that I know will grow and that I’m invested in for the long haul. 

Having a sales page and bonus structure definitely doesn’t need to be hella complicated, but for this first iteration I wanted it dead simple. 

I absolutely think that affected the final outcome and how many people joined, but there will be plenty of opportunities in the future to go BIG.

Commitment to the long game is key. Which naturally, is a big part of the medicine behind my Empathy Ecosystem message 🌰

Seeds don’t go full bloom overnight!

The conversion conversation — results, ROI, and what the next iteration might look like 

I am so beyond grateful to have welcomed 5 beautiful brilliant business owners into this brand new baby of a program. 

To help those 5 peeps navigate the twists and turns of the sometimes tumultuous business of building a business is a true honor. 

A LOT goes into developing a new offer and making even a small launch happen. 

In terms of how much time and team effort was invested in bringing this to life, it’s probably a break-even moolah wise, but a major achievement when it comes to mindset and future focus 💪

Sometimes just starting is the hardest part of a project. 

There’s so much resistance. 

So much pressure. 

Now that we’re in motion, and those 2 forces are subdued, shifting into rolling enrolment seems a lot less intimidating. 

I learned a whole heck of a lot that I’m excited to continue sharing with you. Thanks for being here, friend 💚

Now to close the loop on how I’m addressing audience alignment moving forward… 

*My biggest takeaway from this entire launch is*→

I can’t be solely building an email list off the back of lead magnets related to creating a quiz. 

I’m a multi-faceted pony with way more than one trick and it’s time the entry point into my world reflected that.

^^me and you, pony pal. 

I’m developing a new quiz and NEED YOUR HELP! 

It would mean the pasture to me if you would tell me what topic you dig most. I want to make sure whatever I create is as applicable to YOU as possible. 

My idea for this quiz is to do a very, very affordable one-part free and one-part paid assessment. We’re going deep and building this baby out with major branching logic features that’ll allow me to decipher both where you’re at in your business + your dominant personality and how that impacts your business. 

Give me your feedback and you’ll get the full results for free! 

Hope you learned something here that you can apply to your next launch. 

Keep calm and create on, 

Chanti xx