Biz Q&A: How to Avoid "Flopped" Launches

I was recently asked, “Monica, have you ever experienced a flop launch or no one buying? Plus, how did you navigate it?”.

Real talk (you know we’re always here for the real talk) and the short answer: yeah, of course I’ve experienced flopped launches! But I’ve never experienced no one buying — and that isn’t down to luck.

It’s because I set myself up for success from the beginning. 👏 

Here’s where people go wrong:

I've noticed that a lot of people, especially in the coaching space and service space, will go from nothing to launching a group program, or from nothing to launching an online course. Hypothetically, it could work. Have I seen it work? Nope. 

What I've seen work successfully, and what worked very well for me and then also for my clients, is that you want to become an expert before you scale to group products. You want to have testimonials, social proof, and frankly, the confidence in what it is that you're doing. 

That confidence comes from doing one on one work — you can’t skip steps. You build yourself to a point where you have the energetic capacity, the confidence, and the ability to run a whole group-based program. AKA, you put in the work and you plant the seeds for success long before you try to reach your end goal. 

I don't think that you can fully understand what a course needs, or what somebody in a course needs, until you've worked with so many clients that you literally know what ANY fucking person needs. 

Even as I'm going through the re-recording of The Feminine CEO, there are so many new things that I'm dropping in, or new ways that I'm saying things, because obviously in the past few years I’ve helped even more women in their businesses and have new insight to share.

If you have never done 1:1 coaching in any kind of capacity, and all of a sudden you're wanting to create an online course, how do you even really know what people need? And how are you going to explain to a wide variety of people if you’ve never worked with a wide variety of people? It just doesn’t make sense and it’s not gonna work, simple as that. 

So, while I’ve had flopped launches, they’ve never been detrimental to my business. Maybe they didn’t go 100% to plan, but how I navigated those times is how I’ve come out on top time and time again. 

When something doesn’t go to plan, I always reflect on what role I played. Ask yourself questions like:

• Did I just not have the energetic capacity?
• Was the universe actually doing me a favor because I wanted X amount of people but could only actually handle X? 
• Was it that I didn't fully believe in the course?
• Did I not talk about the program enough?
• Did I not sell it well enough?

Ask yourself these questions so that flops become lessons and springboards for your next launch. Because let’s face it, flops happen. But what you do with those flops prevent you from repeating the same mistakes and facing the same undesirable and unsexy outcomes in your business. 

I dove even deeper into this question on episode 310: Business Q+A - Real Talk on "Flopped" Launches, Getting Clients, Staying Motivated, Cash Flow & More, plus answered some juicyyy questions because I love me a good Q&A.

And if you’re looking for more individualized help avoiding flops in your business, you can also look at my program The Feminine CEO which is my unconventional feminine business program for women, everywhere. 

xx Monica