From failed launch to $150k in 18 Months

My first online course launch sold four places. One person refunded. I gave one of the remaining spots away to a friend. So a failed course launch is where this story starts, and I want to be specific about how bad it was, because I think we skip over that part too often. I had built a Facebook group for the programme. Not one comment. Not one post. Not a single like. I had a podcast with a real audience, thousands of monthly visitors to my website, people who emailed me regularly and told me my work had changed things for them. And when I asked them to buy, almost nobody moved. Eighteen months later, that same offer had generated $150,000. I was selling 50 places every time I opened the doors, and I was working a couple of hours a week around a toddler and a baby. Nothing about my expertise changed in between. What changed was how I packaged the offer, how I priced it, how I positioned it and how I sold it.

What a failed course launch actually tells you

Here is the thing that took me far too long to understand. A failed course launch is not a verdict on you or on your ability to help people. It is data about your packaging, your positioning and your audience size. There were plenty of other coaches in my market who were probably better coaches than me. I was the one with the full programme and the consistent sales, and that had very little to do with talent. When I look back at that period and try to work out what actually separated me from people who were more qualified and more experienced, I land on three things. None of them are strategy.

Self-belief

Not the affirmation kind. The practical kind. The assumption that you will figure it out, that this will work eventually, that if you need an answer you will go and find it. I want you to read the rest of this article with one question running underneath it: are you currently making decisions in your business from a place of believing it will work, or from a place of believing it probably won't? Because those two women make completely different choices about pricing, about how much they promote, about whether they follow up, about whether they run the launch again.

Speed of execution

I have never been someone who sits with a decision for months. I decide, then I go and do it. A lot of that came from very early in my career when I worked in sales for a hotel. They handed me monthly KPIs, and one of them was around 80 phone calls a month to people I did not know, asking about their corporate accommodation. It is a horrible thing to have to do at 22. It is also the single most useful thing that ever happened to my business, because it stripped the cringe out of taking action. By the end of it I was desensitised to the discomfort of putting myself in front of strangers and asking for the sale. Most people are not blocked by a lack of information. They are blocked by the awkwardness of doing the thing.

Showing up consistently

Same origin. Twenty years of having to put in the reps whether I felt like it or not. Consistency is boring to write about and it is the reason most offers eventually work. You sell it, you learn something, you fix it, you sell it again.

The context: why I was launching in the first place

When my second daughter was born, it was a genuinely awful birth. I have a condition called major placenta previa, so I had to be rushed to hospital, and from arriving to her being born was about 45 minutes. I spent two nights in critical care. She spent five nights in special care. I had a hysterectomy in the process. I also had a two year old at home. I had explicitly told my employer that I was not available to work on this maternity leave, because I already knew the birth was going to be complicated. By the time she was four months old I had completed eight projects for them. That was the first crack. Then, when she was around ten months old, I was sitting in their waiting room to hand over yet another project, and they told me their marketing manager had resigned. They had a huge event coming up, the centenary. They asked me to come back. They joked about building a daycare on site if that is what it took. I had run their last event and generated four times the best revenue they had ever had, taken them through a full rebrand, and left them with a waiting list. So I applied. I asked to work 6am to 2pm so I could do school pickup. I did not get my old job back. They told me another applicant had run that kind of event before. I knew what had actually happened. I had asked for flexibility at an organisation that talked a good game about supporting women and did not deliver on it in practice. They created a new part-time project role for me instead, and that was the nail in the coffin. In 2018 I decided I was not going back to work for anyone else. If you have your own version of that moment, you already know it is the reason you are still going.

The launch that flopped

At the time I had an infertility podcast, which had grown out of a food blog. I had taught myself photography, taught myself how websites worked, taught myself how to get traffic. When I announced publicly that we were going through infertility, the response was enormous. Someone told me I should start a podcast. So I did, without much thought about it, which is the speed-of-execution thing showing up again. So at the start of 2018 I built an online course. I pre-recorded every module before I sold a single place, which is exactly what I now tell people not to do. Then I priced it at around $249 and sold four places. I was scarred. And because I was scarred, I did what a lot of people do after an online course launch fails, which is decide that the whole model was wrong and go and do something else entirely. In my case, that meant deciding to start a marketing agency. I spent about $2,000 on a logo and business cards before I had a single client. Then I spent $4,000 on an eight-week one-to-one coaching package.

The $4,000 question

On our very first call, my coach looked at me and asked: do you actually want to start a marketing agency, or do you just feel jaded because the launch you just had didn't work? She got me right in the feels, because that was exactly it. I felt wounded and embarrassed and I was making a very expensive strategic decision from that state. So she made me an offer. Have one more go at it, and I'll show you exactly what to change.

What we actually changed

We did not change the topic. We did not change my expertise. We changed four things. The delivery model. We took it from a pre-recorded online course to a live group coaching programme. That one shift changes the perceived value enormously, and it also means you stop building in a vacuum. You build with your buyers in the room. This is the core of how I now teach people to move from 1:1 work into a signature programme. The price. We doubled it, to $497 as a one-off pilot price. Raising the price when the last launch flopped feels insane. It works because the number is a signal about what you are getting. The bonuses. We added several, and each one addressed a reason someone might hesitate. The way I sold it. This is the part most people skip.

The hand-raiser email

I sent out one email. It is a specific type of email that I still build with clients today, designed to pull all the lurkers out of the woodwork and get them to put their hand up and say yes, I want to know more about this. Fifty people responded and asked for a call. That was a wonderful problem and a genuinely difficult one, because I had a one year old and a two year old. In the end about 40 calls happened once you account for cancellations and calendar chaos, and I spent close to a full week camped at my mum and dad's house working through them. I was not a good salesperson at that point. I understood marketing, I did not yet understand online business sales. Out of roughly 40 calls I sold five places and made $2,500. I did not make back the $4,000 I had spent on the coach. I did not care, because for the first time I could see the mechanism. The offer was not the problem. The way I had been packaging, positioning and selling it was. I still think about those five women. They joined before there was any proof, and a few of them followed me around for years afterwards.

From five places to fifty

I sold it again. Five or eight the next time, I honestly can't remember which. Then I got a repeatable process for selling it, and from there it was compounding. I learned how to write a sales page. I learned how to run a webinar. I learned how to build an email list so that every launch had a bigger pool of warm people in it, which is usually the actual difference between a $10k launch and a $50k one. If your audience is engaged but not buying, the size and warmth of your list is the first place to look. Each launch, one question: I've got eight people per round, can I get more? By May 2019 I was consistently making 30 sales per launch. Two months after that, 50 places per launch, every time. The happiest moment I have ever had in business happened around Easter of that period. We were camping in Denmark, about six hours south of where I live in Western Australia, and there was no phone signal in the campground. I had pre-scheduled every email and every piece of social content before we left. We were driving to the beach, I came back into range, and my phone started going bing, bing, bing, bing. Sales had come in overnight. And because I had automated the onboarding, every one of those women had already been welcomed into the programme, already had access to their first module, already had the rest drip feeding to them, already had emails scheduled at each milestone. That combination is what I am still chasing for my clients now. Revenue arriving while you are not there, and clients being genuinely well looked after at the same time. It is the same principle behind building a coaching business that earns more while you work less. All up I sold close to 250 places in that programme before I retired it. I retired it while it was working, because I had retrained as a life coach by then and I wanted to rebuild the whole thing from scratch with much more care around language, representation and trauma.

Why group offers work differently

Selling a group offer is a fire hose of information compared with anything else you have done, and that is the honest reason people find it hard. Serving 1:1 clients from referrals is a different skill set entirely. Selling low-ticket products is a logical purchase and a checkout. A mid to high ticket group offer asks you to get someone emotionally invested in a transformation before they hand over money, then deliver depth rather than a quick win, then understand enough sales psychology and launch mechanics to do it repeatedly. Once you know how to do that, you cannot unknow it. It is an employable skill and nobody can take it off you. That is why I keep saying that a flopped launch is fixable far more often than people believe.

What to do after a failed course launch

If you have just had one, here is the short version. Don't blow up the offer. Look at your packaging, your price, your delivery model and your audience size before you decide the whole thing was a mistake. Don't make a big strategic pivot while you feel humiliated. That is when the $2,000 logos get bought. Do go and find someone who can see the thing you can't see from the inside. And run it again. The gap between four sales and fifty is much smaller than it looks from where you are standing. Mine took eighteen months and a handful of tweaks that I now teach in an afternoon. You are probably a lot closer than you think.