Lessons I Learned From My First Product Launch

Oct. 08 Internet Marketing no comments

I want to tell you the story of my first product launch. I can guarantee you it will be packed with a ton of useful information for newbies who are just thinking about their first product launch and probably the more advanced marketers that have some experience in product launches could find some useful nuggets or at least reminders of good marketing practices.

Anyway, it all started when I met up with Isabel ( she’s now a good friend of mine ). We met through Skype and after sometime we decided to do a project together, a product launch to be more exact. We were trying to choose a niche, internet marketing sounded good, but we haven’t made any money back then so we thought we better don’t teach what we don’t know and what we did know about was self improvement and that’s how we settled on the niche.

Isabel made a chart of how many sales we should make each month and at the end of the year my share of the profits had to be $400,000+. This made me believe she really knew marketing and well I haven’t had any real success in sales back then so, I was pretty pessimistic and not really sure is this achievable.

The idea of earning that kind of money in a yer was awesome, I dreamed about the car I will buy etc.

Work has started, slowly, but started. We decided to make a product that teaches how to achieve your goals and sell it for $47 maybe have an additional $10/month. fee for a membership which would have been updated regularly.

Even though we have read a lot of self development books we didn’t have the knowledge to write our own content. So, we found free MRR and PLR self development ebooks and turned the content into videos.

Approximately 5 months later the content was done and we started gluing it all together, creating our protected membership area, which turns out is very difficult at one point we have almost settled on the idea to send out the passwords our selves for the members, because we couldn’t set them up correctly, but later we did manage to set it up pretty much correctly ( we later discovered that we didn’t ).

So, we were sitting with this crappy self improvement product that we wanted to sell for $47. Personally, I was clueless what to do next, but Isabel managed to get us a JV partner which I think got us ~3000 subscribers from one mailing. We got 6 sales. It was so exciting. We got some more affiliates to promote us and I think in total we got 8 sales. That would have been $376 of income, but everyone refunded.

Our product was really crappy not even sure were those eight lucky ones even able to get in. After a couple of weeks or so I had a honest talk with Isabel, I told her that I wouldn’t pay $47 for our product and guess what she told the same. The dreams of making almost half a million in a year were long gone before that. Actually we are at pretty much the same marketing level.

So, everyone refunded and we shut down the product, but we still had a list of 3000 and we started monetizing it, it is going pretty well, it’s my second biggest income source right now. We also started a self improvement blog to get some more subscribers.

This is the story of my first product launch, the product died, but the email list lives on and grows and keeps paying me again and again.

Here’s some key lessons that I learned from the 6 months experience:

Product launches are hard and they aren’t nothing magical.
You need a lot of experience to do a product launch, don’t expect miracles from your first one as I did.
Sell your product for a reasonable price. A price that you would easily pay for your product. You need to believe in your product and that belief can come from pricing it correctly. A good price for our product would have been $7 instead of $47.
Don’t spend 6 months creating your product, seriously don’t. Even though we weren’t working every day for 6 months on our product, but if it’s taking that long to finish it there is really something wrong with it. In our case it was probably inexperience.
Have a specialist to do your membership site. It’s crucial to not screw this over.
Have a plan for marketing before you even start creating the product.
Don’t over think the creation process, you can improve stuff while marketing. Money loves speed.
Be prepared to work hard.
Before creating a product think do you really need to create it, maybe you will be better of promoting affiliate products?

Hope you learned a few things from this blog post, if you have any comments leave them below I would like to hear your thoughts.

P.S. Just remembered that we also had a 7 day trial for $1 after that you had to pay $47, but can’t really remember the numbers how many people bought after the trial lol. I think it doesn’t really matter, because everyone refunded.