Ep. 66: How to Master Your Pre-Launch Strategy with Jay Clouse

00:00:00

Jay Clouse: I took extra time to build this anticipation. I historically have not done this multi-months lead-up to a product launch. At most in the past, I've done a pre-sale, which is good because that de-risks the creation of a product. You can basically validate whether people want it because they'll actually pay you for it or they will not. So I used to do pre-sales and then say, “By the way, this is now fully available.” But this anticipation was different because it really front-loaded the awareness and consideration, and decision steps before they had the opportunity to purchase.

00:00:33

Andrea Marquez: I am your host, Andrea Marquez, and This is Small Business, a podcast brought to you by Amazon. Today we're diving into a critical aspect of launching any product, the pre-launch strategy.  

Building excitement and anticipation before your product hits the market can make all the difference in its success. Whether you're launching your first product or adding a new one to your existing product lineup, understanding these strategies can give you a significant edge and drive sales.  

To help us explore this topic, we'll be talking to Jay Clouse, the founder of Creator Science, a media company dedicated to supporting professional creators. Jay is a powerhouse in the creator economy with more than 60,000 newsletter subscribers, 2 million podcast downloads, and over 4 million views on YouTube. And to stay consistent and organized, he built his own operating system to run his business.

00:01:32

Jay Clouse: And as I showed that system to people in my membership, the lab, and just other creators that I came across, people's eyes just got so big and they're like, “Can I have this?”

00:01:43

Andrea Marquez: It took Jay three years to build that operating system that he calls CreatorHQ, and within the first four days of its launch, he generated around five figures in sales. But of course, to get there, it took Jay a lot of preparation.

00:01:58

Jay Clouse: I started productizing my system in January of this year. I didn't launch the product until April. So for that four month period, even though there was part of that time that I was actually building the product, I was communicating with my audience about the product, telling them what it was going to be included, asking their opinion about what they would like to see as part of it to make sure that I wasn't missing anything totally critical.  

And at least on a weekly basis, I was talking about the product before it was even available, and I think that is probably the most important part of the pre-launch process for CreatorHQ was just months talking about it before it was available. Because if you think about any purchasing decision, you have to be aware that it exists. You have to understand what it does, you have to consider whether you want to purchase it, and then you actually have to take action.

And a lot of creators will try to compress all of those steps for the consumer on one launch email or something. And really you can front load three of the four of those things. You can front load awareness, you can front load the education of what it does for them. You can front load the opportunity for them to consider whether they want to buy it or not, so that when you actually go to launch, you can say, “This is available now, would you like to purchase it?” And it's actually a very short consideration period because they've already convinced themselves, “When this is available, I would like to purchase it.”

00:03:19

Andrea Marquez: A big part of Jay's pre-launch strategy is his email list. We've talked about the power of email lists with Jenna Kutcher in our last season, so check that episode out if you want to dig into them. But instead of sending emails about his upcoming product to his entire list, Jay decided to target only those who were interested in it.

00:03:37

Jay Clouse: Every time I would talk about the product, I would say, “ By the way, if you want to be the first to know about this, click here to join the wait list.” And so that list, that was what I was watching most closely during that pre-launch period to see is that number growing? Because one, that's validation that people want this, and two, that's going to be actually the most likely segment of your list to purchase the product.  

So during the launch, I sent 10 total emails about the product, and seven of those I sent to the wait list segment, three I sent to the rest of the list.If you have people opt in to being sold to, rather than just constantly blanket selling to everybody on the list, people are going to have a better experience opening your emails. So of those segments, the majority of purchases came from that wait list while also being a minority of the total subscribers on the list.  

So it's a great way to maintain high quality relationships and email hygiene. It's basically say, “ I'm making a thing, I'm going to tell you about it. If I piqued your interest, click here and you'll be the first to know about it. Basically click here and I'll tell you when you can buy it. And if not, no harm, no foul. I won't bug you as much with it.”

00:04:51

Andrea Marquez: Jay already had a platform and an engaged audience when he was working on launching CreatorHQ. But if you're still in the early stages of building an engaged audience, you're probably scrambling around to figure out what medium and platforms to use. To simplify that decision, here's how Jay breaks down the different options.

00:05:10

Jay Clouse: I broadly put them into two camps. One camp is discovery platforms. These are platforms that have a built-in mechanism for new audience to discover your content through it. Usually it's an algorithm. These platforms are usually ad-supported and they're free to use. These have built-in discovery algorithms, a great way to get in front of new people. The risk is the rules of those platforms change all the time, and you are not guaranteed to actually reach the people who have said, “I want to hear from you.” The second bucket are relationship platforms.  

These are platforms where there is no third party intermediary between you and the end consumer. They're more decentralized, and your ability to communicate with those people is more consistent and reliable. This would be email, podcasting, SMS and private communities. So I recommend folks start with one discovery platform and one relationship platform.  

So for me, my goal is to get as many people over to email as possible, and everything I do on the discovery side is for the goal of getting people to be aware that my newsletter exists and to give it a shot. And then email is really where I do my best writing. It's where I share everything first and the most in depth, but it's a higher commitment to read it and engage with it. Whereas on social media, these are just little sound bites. It's like an audition.

00:06:34

Andrea Marquez: But whatever platforms you decide to use, make sure you stay consistent.

00:06:40

Jay Clouse: Just the act of saying, “You can expect to hear from me every Sunday at 9: 00 AM,” and then fulfilling that week after week, after week after week. People have, in some cases, several years worth of cycles of me fulfilling promises that I've made to them. It's huge for building trust to basically tell your people what they can expect from you and then deliver that even as simply as, “I'm going to publish something on this day at this time,” and doing that over and over and over again.  

So it's been this incremental effort of publishing more and more, and more for the same type of person. That consistency, not just in how often I'm publishing, but what I'm talking about, what I'm helping you do, who this is for, that has been consistent as well.Because we're humans and we contain multitudes, and we have various interests, we'll publish things on all these different interests, which makes it really difficult to attract an audience that you truly understand because now the audience is really fragmented, and now it's actually hard to serve that audience week after week because topic A and topic B, and topic C aren't even related, so which one do you talk about? Whatever one you talk about, you're going to alienate the people who are not interested in that at all. It's very challenging.  

So being consistent, not just in how frequently you're publishing, but what you're talking about and how you're helping people who you're helping is a big, big part of attracting an audience that knows who you are, likes what you have to say, and trusts you to follow through on whatever it is that you're promising.

00:08:10

Andrea Marquez: Jay also set up a special incentive to give people a little extra nudge when CreatorHQ launched.

00:08:17

Jay Clouse: I used the first four days of the launch to have some fast action bonus, basically saying, “If you purchase in the next four days, you'll get these bonuses on top of it,” so a little bit of an incentive there. A lot of people will use the inverse of that tactic and say, “For the first four days, we'll give you this discount,” and there's a time and place for discounts. People who opted into the wait list for the product, they had a 10% discount as a thank you for taking the action of saying, “I want to learn more about this.” But a lot of times are used as a crutch, and over time devalue the product that you have. So I instead like to have a positive addition on top of the base product during a window of time rather than saying, “This thing, but for a lower price.”

00:09:01

Andrea Marquez: And that work doesn't end when you launch, so how do you maintain that growth even after the incentive expires?

00:09:10

Jay Clouse: The sustained growth, we have to define what growth is in terms of what growth do we care about. And most creators would define the growth they care about as probably a following number or a number of views, or a number of impressions. So they're literally saying, “ I want to see growth in attention.” My point of view is you need to get a return on that attention, and you want to see growth in your return on that attention.  

There are some beautiful businesses that have a much smaller means of distribution that are revenue machines. They're so efficient at turning the attention they're getting into very viable, very safe, very scalable businesses, and then you have the inverse of huge scale in terms of number of people that you're reaching and driving almost no revenue. So revenue is a great metric for your return on attention. I think that's what I would optimize for growth for.

So if you are currently attracting a lot of attention on one of these platforms, and the goal is, “How do I sustain? How do I continue to grow?” And I'm flipping the switch and you're saying, “How do I grow revenue?” You need to start building your own means of distribution. You need to say, “Okay, let's figure out what email as a part of my strategy looks like,” or, “let's figure out what podcasting or even SMS. So how do these relationship platforms fit the model? How do I drive people from my discovery platforms to my relationship platform, and then sell from their relationship platform?”

Because it's easier to sell from a relationship platform. It's easier to make the leap from a hyperlink in an email or a hyperlink in a text to a purchase page. So that's the strategy that I would really have people think about. Think about your discovery platform as the very top of the funnel. It's where you're auditioning for a new audience. It's where you're reaching new people. That platform exists to help you build your own system of distribution in email, SMS, podcasting, or private communities. And then that is where you develop trust that you need to lead to a transaction.

00:11:07

Andrea Marquez: And whether you're measuring the attention on your product or your revenue, if that number isn't as high as you'd like it to be, keep going. You'll get there.

00:11:16

Jay Clouse: Our tendency as human beings is to look at other people's numbers to benchmark how we are doing relative to our peers or other people. We want to see that our progress is good or our thing is working. Just look at the most important numbers to you and consistently try to move that in a positive direction. Because if you do that and you ignore everybody else's numbers, you're going to get the results you're looking for just by focusing on your own baseline and moving that in a positive direction.

00:11:45

Andrea Marquez: That was Jay Clouse, the founder of Creator Science. We covered a lot in this episode. If you missed anything, don't worry. We've taken notes for you. You can find them at www. smallbusiness. amazon/ podcast.  

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Thank you, Amy. I can't wait to speak to you again. And if you haven't already, make sure to go check out Amy's podcast, the Online Marketing Made Easy Podcast. That's it for this episode of This is Small Business brought to you by Amazon. Until next time, I'm your host, Andrea Marquez. Hasta luego, and thanks for listening. This is Small Business is brought to you by Amazon with technical and story production by JAR Audio.