This week’s topic is about guaranteeing a successful launch.

Without spending months building a product/service. Without hard sales.

Huh - how can I guarantee that? Black magic!

This guide is inspired by this exchange with the excellent George Ten (who you should be following on Twitter if you aren’t already):

Here’s George’s brilliant guide in full. Go and read it on Twitter - copy/pasting it here in the newsletter makes zero sense:

Make sure to go check it out for full context. Link here.

The basic idea is this

• Ask your audience if they would be interested in participating in a cohort or workshop with you.

• Soft launch a small cohort or workshop to a targeted group, keeping the number of spots limited.

• Be close to the participants, work with them closely, and build a product/course tailored to their needs and feedback.

• Leverage the success stories, testimonials, and case studies from the first cohort to make selling the next one easier.

• Increase the price for the second cohort, as you now have social proof and a refined offering.

Over the week I’m going to use George’s excellent guide (I claim no originality here!) and combine it with AI to make the process even more frictionless for you.

I’ll also go into more detail about each step based on my own experiences with the method.

Specifically, this week we’ll cover

• Part 1: Fail without Failing

• Part 2: Soft launch

• Part 3: Laying track in front of the train

• Part 4: Building together

• Part 5: Scaling and price bumps

Let’s get started

Fail without Failing

Basic Offer Idea

First up we need a basic idea for our offer.

If you already have an audience fantastic. This simplifies things!

Straight up ask them (via polls, posts or interviews) what their biggest problems are right now.

First ask broadly to get a range of options. Then run polls and surveys to find out what the most pressing issues are.

If you don’t have an audience (or even if you do!) look at what other people and companies are doing in your niche.

If they have been successfully selling for any period of time then chances are they’ve hit upon the market’s problems, challenges and desires. It’s your task to reverse engineer what these are!

If you have zero idea find a competitor’s landing page and copy the text content.

Then use it with this prompt to divine the core offer

Act as a marketing expert

Analysis the below sales page and extract:
-the defined audience
-the core offer
-the audience problems being solved by the offer

[copy/paste sales page copy]

If I run this on (for example) Dickie Bush’s Ship 30 for 30 programme I get the following insights:

and for audience problems

Use this along with your own knowledge and research about the market to decide what problem you want to solve (your offer) and for whom (your customers).

It doesn’t need to be perfect. Stop chasing perfection. This is the reason why many people fail to launch anything at all!

We’re now going to immediately test the idea out with the only people who matter : our audience.

Going Fishing

Your idea by itself is worth nothing.

Only via implementation does it become valuable.

The problem most people have at this point is we tend to fall in love with our ideas. We think they are special little babies and that anyone who says anything against them is plain wrong.

We over-identify and tie our egos to our ideas. Bad idea.

Instead we’re going to circumvent all of that by immediately getting our idea out into the world. We won’t have time to get attached!

As soon as you have your basic idea you’re going to tell your audience.

We don’t announce we’re selling it. Because if we start bigging it up and no-one responds it feels like a flop. Our (fragile!) egos are damaged and we get disheartened by this whole entrepreneurship malarky.

Instead we go fishing. Low-stakes, just testing the waters.

Here’s the exact phrasing George Ten uses : “Have this idea of getting a small group together where I teach [topic]. Is that stupid?”

Adapt this as needed. Make it fit your normal style.

Here, for example, is me asking people about whether they’d be interested in licensing my teaching material to go and teach companies about AI for $1500-4000/hour:

View referenced TikTok post

In this video I frame the idea and basically ask “is this something you’d be interested in or am I stupid?”. I then ask them to tell me if they’d be interested in something like this.

200+ people told me they wanted it in comments. Another 100+ DM’d or emailed me.

That tells me the idea is a goer. I’ll talk more in the next Part about how I quantify this and how I continue to verify but first it has to pass this initial hurdle.

Failing forward

The “is this stupid?” post should take you minutes to make.

No longer.

You have an idea for a product or service, you throw out a post and see who reacts. That’s it. Don’t belabour it.

Nobody responds? Great!

Genuinely.

You’ve learned something extremely valuable. People don’t want this.

You do not need to produce the product or service. You’ve just saved yourself months of work! You can move on and in a few days post about another idea. And continue to do so until something clicks.

You didn’t “fail”. You’ve instead falsified a hypothesis. That’s all. And you are free to come up with more ideas, keep testing responses and only moving onto the next step once you’ve got the go ahead from your customers.

We’re going to continue in this manner over the rest of this Playbook. Following along will let you build without the normal massive risks of failure. Step by step, each time verifying and adapting.

Hopefully you already see the power of this method!

If you are a premium reader we’ll cover

• Part 1: Fail without Failing

• Part 2: Soft launch

• Part 3: Laying track in front of the train

• Part 4: Building together

• Part 5: Scaling and price bumps

If you are non-Premium you buy get the whole thing next Saturday or join the Forge now to get access this week:

Keep prompting,

Kyle