Launch At Last? What I Learned from a Huge Flop
This was the title image to my landing page: Launch at Last. Sadly, I no longer have the credits for it, but I fell in love with this picture.
It was January 2018, and I was part of a group mentoring programme for new coaches. Our leader challenged each of us to create a coaching package for our ideal client. We were meant to talk to real people, find out what they were struggling with, and create something that met their needs. So, not knowing quite who my ideal client was, I began to reach out to strangers and have conversations with them. Based (somewhat) on what I found out, I created a package designed to help them. And the rest is history! My coaching business was born.
Well….. Not quite.
Fast forward to October of the same year.
It had been almost a year since my interviews, and I was … still …. working on the landing page for my package.
But let me tell you: this landing page would have won awards.
Every image had been painstakingly chosen to convey the perfect balance of imagination, possibility, and credibility. Its copy would make professional writers weep with pride and envy. It was a perfect showcase of all that a coaching package could be: the pinnacle of transformation.
The coaching package was called Launch At Last, and the irony of the title wasn’t lost on me.
I’d created this package for people who wanted to launch something they cared passionately about, but who felt paralyzed by procrastination and perfectionism. They were going around in circles, chasing their tails, desperate to get out of their heads.
I hadn’t realised that this description would end up exactly fitting my own experience.
Normally, I loved the process of creating something new. It had come to me naturally since I was knee-high. But this time, it felt like pulling teeth. Each stage of this process required a Herculean effort. All my fears around self-employment, and whether I would be taken seriously as a coach, became wrapped up in this venture.
No wonder I had so much resistance and fear around it.
By November 2018, with lots of support from my coach, I’d done enough of the work to press ‘publish’ on my website, and – the really scary part – to share on LinkedIn. It was live! I felt sick.
The hours ticked past. While I received a lot of kind comments, I didn’t get any enquiries. And as the days crawled by, though I refreshed my email obsessively, my inbox remained empty.
Not a single person ever signed up.
A year or so later, I quietly took down the page.
There are two ways to look back on this experience: tactically (“what did I learn about entrepreneurship through this?”), and developmentally (“what did I learn about myself through this?”)
What did I learn tactically?
I made all kinds of mistakes; mistakes that would be spelled out to me later through ThePowerMBA and its Lean Startup Module.
For example:
Research Interviews
In my call for interviewees, I described myself wanting to speak with ‘people who feel stuck’. This was very vague, because I really didn’t know who I was wanting to work with. As a result, I got a huge amount of variation in how people described and experienced ‘stuckness’, which led to a lot of murkiness in who I was creating this package for.
Content
I created my beautiful landing page in total solitude. Again: this landing page took me ten months. Ten months, people. Looking at it now, I’m still immensely proud of it. I might still do something with it. But the time to create something this polished and time-consuming was not at the beginning of my process; it was at the end.
Timeframe and messaging
I posted one message about my programme on LinkedIn. Just one message. I didn’t want to bother anyone by going on and on about it. And so if someone missed that message, or didn’t go to my website, they had no idea that my programme even existed.
I didn’t have any intake timeframe. Launch at Last was open indefinitely and people could contact me if they wanted to join. As a result, there was no incentive for anyone to join.
In sum, I spent a lot of time polishing my product behind the scenes, making it beautiful, and not a lot of time actually talking to people about their problems, finding out what they’d truly see as a solution, and testing a beta version of it to get their feedback.
These are all cornerstones of The Lean Startup approach, and ThePowerMBA spends a lot of time on them for a reason.
Entrepreneurs are also humans, and we humans like to minimise our exposure to risk. It feels less risky to perfect an idea before we present it to anyone. In actual fact, talking to the people we want to serve sooner rather than later means that we’ll be in with a much higher chance of actually helping them solve a problem.
What did I learn developmentally?
In a nutshell: this was a home run.
With the benefit of hindsight, I see this as a grueling success story (if there is such a thing). Why? Because I spent ten months in the throes of aggressive imposter syndrome and pressed ‘publish’ anyway. Because I still felt like a fraud, but decided to take action regardless. Because I was courageous, and courage is critical to the kind of life I want to live.
So many of us waste months or even years sitting on the sidelines, waiting until we feel ready before we take action. And because we’re researching and preparing and polishing while we do so, we get to tell ourselves that we are investing in our dreams. We’ll simply take action – talk to the client, create the programme, launch the product – when we’re ready.
It’s a lie.
And it’s a lie that keeps a lot of us trapped.
If we’re serious about living a certain kind of life, and leaving a particular kind of impact, we owe it to ourselves to do courageous things.
In truth, I’m actually glad that Launch at Last went nowhere. It taught me that – even if my worst fears materialize – I can survive. (In fact, it was this very experience that gave me the guts to raise the stakes and do it again two years later – this time, with 100 x more visibility.)
It also made me a better coach. Launch at Last gave me much more insight into perfectionism and procrastination: the very challenges I was aiming to address in my clients. These weren’t new struggles for me, but until now the consequences had been much more private. My own story now supports me to serve my clients with more integrity, playfulness, challenge, and depth… and to take more risks in my creative work. It got very ugly at times … but it was worth it.
Something to chew on: How have your biggest failures been your biggest teachers?