How to Pre-Launch Your Offer (and avoid the frustration of a flop)

Sometimes the thing that’s holding us back from creating our exciting new offer in our business is… ourselves.

Perfectionism and anxiety can make us feel like we have to have the perfect course, or program, or offer, all created and set up and perfect before we even put the idea in front of people to see if they’re interested.

But here’s the thing:

What if your people aren’t interested in that offer? You’ll have spent all that time, money, and energy creating something that doesn’t sell.

That’s where pre-launching comes in.

If you tend to be a bit of a perfectionist, or be overly prepared for things, this post might give you a bit of anxiety, but trust me, this will be a game changer for you in your business.

So hang in there – because we’re going to get you launching products and content and whatever services you do best in no time at all with as few frustrations as possible.

Striving for the Perfect Final Draft?

Most of us have a sort of default from going to school where we get programmed to think that we can't turn in a rough draft of something and call it done.

If we did that, our teacher would say, “Okay, great. Now you need to do the final thing.”

There's this sense that the rough draft is not worthy.

This invalidation of the rough draft, compounded with a fear of needing things to be perfect and needing them to be just right, makes us think that we need to have the complete, polished, full, perfect final draft of our offer in order for our customers to feel like their investment was worthwhile. 

It needs to be done, beautiful, and ready to deliver to the world before we put it in front of anyone. 

So whatever that is – a course, a membership, a group program –  we convince ourselves to spend three months making this thing and making sure that nobody could possibly criticize any part of it.

We do all that before we even launch it.

But what happens then?

Sometimes, when we launch the thing, we come to find out that people aren't actually interested.

As we’re creating our new offer that we’re super excited about, all we’re thinking is “This is amazing. People are going to be signing up for this. They're going to love it.” We spent all this money on a platform to host it, say for a course; or paid all this money to upload all the course modules.

We did all these things. And then it’s crickets.

And that is incredibly, incredibly disheartening.

I thought like this at the beginning of my business.

And then a coach told me “When you launch something, only have the very beginning done, and then build as you go.”

I thought she was crazy! But I trusted her advice, and gave it a try.

It was a hard process and I wasn’t always great at it. But it's something I've gotten much, much better at doing over time. 

Now, this approach is how I live and breathe and talk to my clients.

When it comes to launching products, I teach and preach pre-launching, because I know it works.

There’s two basic parts of pre-launching.

First, actually pre-launching.

Second, creating as you go.

Part 1: The Pre-Launch

Before launching the beta offer or creating the rough draft of a sales page or the first two modules or whatever you’re going to create, there’s one thing you have to do: the pre-launch.

There are lots of different ways to go about pre-launching, but no matter how you work it, this approach prevents you from going too far down the rabbit hole, spending your very precious time creating a bunch of stuff before you know if it will even be something that people in your business are interested in.

Pre-launching is when you sell something or pitch something before you’ve done anything with it at all.

This could be something that’s just in your head – something you’ve started to dream up, but it's not put together yet. But you have a plan.

For example, you know in 30 days you’re going to open up a group program. To do this group program, you need to get at least five people, or else it's not gonna run. So you know that if five people are interested, you can roll with it and start to grow your idea into a viable product.

You can just give people the parameters for what it is that you want to do. No final draft, no perfecting.

Just say, “Hey, this is the amount, these are the details, this is who it's for.” The same as you would do for selling anything.

Then you just need to clarify payment details – this could mean where to put a deposit down, or how to pay, or if you don’t get the participation you need you’ll issue a refund, or how to fill out an application to secure a spot, and if you have enough participation you’ll send an invoice.

And if you don’t hit your pre-launch goal of five people, then that's totally okay. But the offer is not going to happen.

Maybe, in our example scenario, four people expressed interest, but not five. In that case, you could come up with a variation of your idea, or a pared down version of what you were thinking. Or maybe you just decide to do something one-on-one with the people who are interested.

Now, this doesn't mean you can't revisit your initial idea or revise it if, say, you don't get that right number.

There are a lot of different ways that you can do it.

But at least you don't have to go through all the work of creating the thing before you even know if people would be interested.

An Example of Pre-Launching from Real Life in My Biz

One thing that happened recently was I had this idea. It was for a slightly lower priced offer, a group program that would help with offer creation and launch.

In my mind, I was like, “This is amazing. Like, this is great for people who just don't want to spend the money right now to work with me one-on-one.” I could take them through the process of offer creation and launch like I would with my private clients, but because it's in a group setting, I could make the price lower. And it was only going to be four weeks instead of three months.

I was really jazzed.

I created a sales page. And I felt like the sales page was pretty good. I thought it really spoke to who it was for and what we were going to do and what the investment would be.

I put it out there. And lo and behold, I didn't get a lot of takers.

I decided this was clearly not the right thing right now. I was trying to create something for certain people who said they wanted to work with me, but it still wasn’t the right moment for them to invest, even at that lower price point.

And I scrapped it. 

Literally. I just pivoted. Because all I did was put the idea out there. I didn't make any worksheets, I didn't start to build out a membership portal for it or make a Facebook group. I didn't do anything other than the sales page.

And it was an amazing learning experience.

It gave me a lot of clarity. And I didn’t have to waste a ton of time to find that clarity.

And of the people who said they were interested but not at that time, I can mentally keep a list – or make an actual list – of those folks so I can practice some good follow-up with them on different offers later on.

The moral of this story about pre-launching: lf there's something new that you have a hankering to do, pitch it out there.

But don't waste a ton of time building out everything first!

My other top tip: Give yourself a set number of people you need to be committed before you spend time and money and energy building out the rest of the program.

Part 2: Create As You Go

If you hit your enough number in your pre-launch phase, and you know your offer is freaking good and you’re super excited about it, it’s ready to move forward!

At this point, you could then do a full public launch to enroll even more people, or you could just move forward with the people from your pre-launch, it’s entirely up to you.

Doing a full launch is an entirely other topic for another post, but I do want to talk about the other key part of pre-launching: creating as you go.

So far, you’ve had your awesome idea, you pitched it to people, and enough people expressed interest and committed to it for you to move forward.

You’ve sold a thing that doesn’t exist yet. This is where you throw your inner perfectionist out the window and create an MVP.

Here, MVP stands for Minimum Viable Product.

This is when you create the absolute minimum that you need to create in order to sell (or fulfill) your offer.

It could be the bare bones of your framework. It could be the first module is done. It could be the first month's worth of content is done. Whatever is your minimum viable product for the offer you just pre-launched, that’s what you’re going to create before it actually kicks off.

Let’s say you’re going to teach people how to do their brand messaging and then create content around that messaging. You have some fundamentals, some crucial things that are part of your signature framework that you want to put in there.

Here’s what you should do: 

Make an outline. Jot down any non-negotiables. What are things you absolutely know you need to talk about at a bare minimum? Then start to create just those few things, in the order that people are going to need them.

This is what I did when I first created my course, Sell It, Sister. 

I ran the bulk of the content as an in-person, two-part workshop that had a very boring name – Business Basics. I created the first day's worksheets and whatnot before the first session, then I created the second session’s worksheets before the next one.

I just knew that if I gave myself that deadline and I had people who were committed to being there, that I would do whatever it took to get that work done.

I also didn't give myself an overwhelming to-do list. I wasn't creating 47 worksheets and all this stuff – it was just a few worksheets and a little bit of training for each session.

Less is more.

I didn’t overload myself, and I was certain I was going to finish the work. So I was able to do it. Then I took that MVP and I turned it into my online course, Sell It, Sister.

At first, I literally just had it on my website. Then I built it out fully online as I went. Since I wasn’t in front of people, I recorded videos of the content I’d already created for the in-person workshops. 

I put up password-protected pages for each of the four weeks on my website. And I had all of the lessons for the first week, maybe even the second week, done when it launched, so people could go in and they could start moving through the lessons. I basically just unlocked each week as they went. 

Then I recorded the remainder of it about a week or so ahead of when it would come out. 

This was helpful because it meant I couldn't be a perfectionist with it. I couldn't re-record those videos a million times and make myself bananas doing it. Each video took only three or four takes, so I had to get over myself in order to make sure that it was done and the info would be out there in the time that I said that it would be.

It wasn't until later on that I switched over to Podia and started moving all of my courses over there. For the longest time, the content just lived on password-protected pages on my website. I would send out emails with a link and the password to that page.

And that was the MVP of the online course.

Part of why you don't want to build stuff out too far in advance is that as people are going through it, new things will come up. They will have questions you hadn’t thought of or there will be things you need to clarify that you didn't even think would be confusing. You’ll realize there are other adjacent things you want to include.

You’ll have so much more flexibility to add good nuggets into your content as you go.

If you have units one and two ready to go, then as new things come up, you could include maybe some additional trainings, or create bonus modules, or separate worksheets, or just different things that support learning and support your clients.

This makes it more impactful and more powerful, and people get bigger wins and more transformation.

It's a win-win for everyone.

A Quick Note on Doing a Full Launch After Pre-Launching

If you’ve pre-launched something, and it's a go, and you decide to do a full launch of it because you feel very strongly about it and confident that it will pique people’s interest, make sure you don't give yourself too much time to spend on it.

We will use whatever time is in front of us. If we say we’ll launch a thing in six months, there's a very good chance that we could actually get it done in three months instead, and we’re just freaking ourselves out.

Sometimes the reason why we want to launch something at a different time has to do with personal factors in our life, or things happening in our industry or in the world. But usually we give ourselves too much time.

Now It’s Your Turn

Will this pre-launching approach feel terrifying at first? Probably. But it’s so worth it.

We want everything to be “perfect” before it's out there. Because if it's perfect, no one can criticize us. No one can be disappointed that they invest in it.

But here’s the thing:

I have gone through enough trainings and programs with very smart people who are very good at what they do – things that I am so thrilled I invested in – and there’ve been typos or random errors. 

I used to think when I was starting out that I would be mortified if that were me. I thought people would think I'm a joke and they wouldn't want to invest in me or take me seriously.

But I’ve realized that that’s not the case.

I don't care about the typos as long as the value is there. If I'm getting the learning that I am investing in and I'm getting the transformation – one misspelled word won’t change that.

It's really proven to me that the people you’ll enjoy working with are not going to care as much as you think they might about little things like typos and small imperfections.

So pre-launch. And launch without everything being 100% complete. And create your MVP as you go.

It will make your life so much easier. 

It will save you so much time and headache and frustration and money. 

It means that you will get the revenue now instead of six months from now. You can start impacting people now. And you will learn so much about yourself and so much about your clients as you go.

You'll get that clarity that only comes from action and it's going to change the way you work in your business for the better.