#315: Breaking Down Our $101,666 Launch: The Mechanics And Lessons Learned From Our Virtual Summit

Jay Clouse [00:00:14]:
Hello, my friend. Welcome back to another episode of Creator Science. Today we're taking you behind the scenes of the Creator Science business. I'm talking with Anna Reich, the integrator here on the Creator Science team. Hi, I'm Anna Reich. We're talking about the 6-figure launch we pulled off this summer, our first ever 6-figure launch. And it all started with a virtual event called the Membership Summit, a free 3-day live summit on building memberships. This was a joint effort with a third-party team called After Harvest.

Jay Clouse [00:00:43]:
And this whole thing was the idea of this guy named Sean who runs After Harvest, and his team really supported us in making this summit a reality. The summit was June 23rd through the 25th. It was just me teaching Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday for 90 minutes. We didn't have a bunch of speakers. We had one guest who came in and did a fireside for about 20 minutes, and it led into a launch campaign for Build a Beloved Membership. This is a 4-week live course on building memberships. If you missed it, I'll include a link in the show notes for 50% off the self-paced version of Build a Beloved Membership. That is the same price, the same offer we made during the launch campaign.

Jay Clouse [00:01:20]:
So if you missed it, and you're interested in building a membership, that is in the show notes. This whole effort was a massive lift. And for my team, 2 members of which were brand new at the beginning of May, it was really a trial by fire. During this period of time, I spoke at Press Publish LA in late May. We hosted our offline event for the Lab in Boise at the beginning of June. I spoke at a virtual summit right after that, and then ultimately hosting this event June 23rd to the 25th before running a 4-week cohort All through July. It was a brutal couple of months and I certainly experienced more burnout than I have in a very long time, but it was a massive success in many ways. And I wanted to do a full recap with Ana for you to learn from as well.

Jay Clouse [00:02:04]:
So in this episode, we'll run through all the numbers of the event, the timeline of how and when this all came together, things we do the same way again, things we would do a little bit differently, and what an 80/20 approach to this strategy looks like. If you enjoy this episode, tag me on social media @jklaus. Let me know that you're listening. I'd love to see it. We'll get to that full episode with Anna right after this. Anna, first time on the podcast. Been in the business now for 3 months, 4 months?

Anna Reich [00:02:38]:
3 and a half months.

Jay Clouse [00:02:39]:
It's mid-August. I'm looking at my phone right now and I'm looking at the date and it says August 13th and I'm just like, what? How? That sounds like a long time since May.

Anna Reich [00:02:49]:
At the same time, a long time and a short time. It feels like I've been in the business forever and also it flew by so quickly.

Jay Clouse [00:02:57]:
So we're going to talk about the Membership Summit today, which was kind of the first project that I basically just threw you into and you had no say in whether we do it or not. But I feel like you took to it incredibly well. I told you on a recent call, I was like, I don't know what would have happened if I didn't hire you in May. Would I have just died? Like, what could I have done on my own with this? I pulled all of the numbers as best as I could and the timeline details. So I'll run through that quickly. The Membership Summit, this is a 3-day live event on building memberships. We had an optional 4th day for VIPs, and here were the numbers. We had a goal, a registration goal of 3,000, and the most recent figure I could find that we posted in Slack, the registrations were at 3,145.

Jay Clouse [00:03:44]:
So we hit our stretch goal. Actually, I think our initial goal was 2,000 and we said stretch goal is 3,000. So 3,000 people who registered. I actually couldn't get a firm figure on live attendees. I probably could have logged into WebinarJam to find this, but I loathe the idea of logging into WebinarJam ever again. So what I did see was on day 1, we had more than 1,000 unique people show up. So I'm going to guess that we had somewhere between 1,500 and 2,000 live attendees through the course of the 3 days. Probably not quite 2,000.

Jay Clouse [00:04:18]:
Do you have a guess, or did you ever see a number on this? This is one thing I wasn't totally sure of.

Anna Reich [00:04:22]:
The only thing I saw was we pretty consistently had about 300 people live at any one time, except for a few peaks that were up to 600 people at once.

Jay Clouse [00:04:34]:
Yeah, I think those peaks all happened when we sent emails saying like, hey, Jay's live now, and I'm not even sure if those are real people. So I think we had 300 to 400 concurrent viewers at a real human peak. And the total for revenue of this summit, or I guess the, the follow-on of this summit, was $101,666, which is an oddly evil and ominous final 3 digits of that figure, but almost $102,000. Our costs were about $23,300, which made our margin about $78,400. I'm rounding some numbers here, but that's the total. So if we break down the actual sales for the event, we had 74 people join our live cohort that was responsible for $63,739. 9 people upgraded on the upsell version of the cohort. So that's an extra $9,000.

Jay Clouse [00:05:36]:
During the downsell portion of the event, uh, of the launch, I should say, we had 97 purchases of the self-paced course for $17,752 and VIP tickets for the summit itself, 238 ticket sales, a total of just over $11,000, which was about a 7.5% conversion rate of registrations to VIP tickets. So those are the, the cold hard numbers. And I thought the financial side of this performed very well. I mean, we've never had a launch this large in the business. The second largest launch we ever had was $61,000 for Creator HQ in 2024. And this is a much larger launch than that, even if you take out some pretty high expenses. But I don't know if we ever really explicitly talked on, uh, like how this performed relative to your expectations. How did you feel about the end result?

Anna Reich [00:06:34]:
I mean, it was the first launch I've ever been a part of, so I didn't have any reference point.

Jay Clouse [00:06:41]:
Every launch Anna does is a 6-figure launch.

Anna Reich [00:06:43]:
Exactly.

Jay Clouse [00:06:45]:
Wow.

Anna Reich [00:06:46]:
I just really wanted to impress you during that time, so I was not sure if I was doing that. And so I was just pushing the whole time. And I remember that at some point we had thrown out a higher number. And so I was like, oh no, we're, we're not doing as well as that number. I think it was like $200K that maybe the Summit team had told us as what they set as a target.

Jay Clouse [00:07:12]:
Yeah. The first estimate. So the very first cold email, we'll get into the timeline here in a second, but the very first cold email I received from the team we ended up hiring to work on this with. He was like, I think you can make $600,000 from this launch. And I was like, okay, hold on. I love the enthusiasm and I know this is like a pitch, but let's temper this a little bit. We did technically have a floor in the contract for $150,000 as like, if this launch does not perform here, that we wouldn't even need to pay the Summit team their fee, which I was never going to hold them do that. It just, they put in so much work.

Jay Clouse [00:07:51]:
We'll talk about the timeline and all of that. But I had in my mind, I was like, I would love to be able to say we had a 6-figure launch. And that really did kind of push me. I think, I think having goals like that is really important. One of the takeaways I had from the Creator HQ launch in 2024 was I didn't specify a goal to myself, but then through the launch, I felt a lot of disappointment, which meant that there was a like subconscious goal that I had set. But I hadn't made it explicit. And then therefore I almost didn't have like accountability or reason to push as hard as I probably could have. We certainly campaigned harder for this than any other launch I've done previously.

Jay Clouse [00:08:29]:
And before I forget about it, I mentioned the costs were about $23,000. So people are probably wondering, where did that come in? Those costs were 15% of total revenue went to the summit team that worked with us on this. They were hired on a performance basis, which I love that model. Super compelling pitch. I'll talk more about that here in a second. But basically they said, we'll do a lot of the lift. We'll keep 15% of what is sold with a, a floor guarantee. Incredible pitch.

Jay Clouse [00:08:54]:
So that was the biggest cost. Second cost was affiliates. We had an affiliate strategy and we offered those affiliates 15% of any referred revenue they had attributed to them. And that was about $1,800. The second largest cost was actually $7,800 for the domain membershipsummit.com. Did I need to buy membershipsummit.com for almost $8,000? I had the .co, I had the .org. I don't know. I probably overinvest and care about design and brand and legitimacy more than most people.

Jay Clouse [00:09:29]:
I think this investment makes a lot of sense if we use it again, which of course, like we'll talk about this and this is all still stuff we're deciding, but. I have paid more for domains. I have paid less for domains. That domain was actually listed at $13,500 and a GoDaddy broker actually did some good work on this. So would I do it again? I don't know. We'll talk about that here in a minute. All right, let's talk about our timeline. So the summit itself ran June 23rd through the 26th.

Jay Clouse [00:10:01]:
Let's start at the beginning. I first received a cold email from Sean from the AfterHarvest team on February 26th. with this idea, which I did not respond to. And then he followed up again on March 2nd, which I did not respond to. And then he followed up on March 3rd, and I did respond. And actually, I do believe I read the first 2 when I was doing this timeline. I didn't remember that there were 2 emails that I ignored. And each time he sent these emails, by the way, they were new threads.

Jay Clouse [00:10:29]:
So maybe a lesson for folks who are doing cold emailing out there. He wasn't just like following up incessantly on the same thread. He was basically trying again with a different approach in the body of the email. But what was really great about Sean's pitch was the email itself. Actually, maybe I should just pull this up. Okay. The subject line was Honest Question, which sounds a little AI written. That's fine.

Jay Clouse [00:10:52]:
But the body said, Jay, you have 200,000+ subscribers. That's a $641,044 opportunity sitting there. We already planned the entire strategy, $0 upfront, but you haven't watched the video yet. And then there was a link with an embedded Loom video and I can see the autoplay that there are screenshots of me and my website and a written, like, whiteboard strategy document. I like that. I like when I can tell there was proof of work. So I responded and said, thanks for your persistence. I appreciate that you've taken some personal risk here and the time to put together this idea.

Jay Clouse [00:11:27]:
So I'll bite and see more of what you're thinking. And then he sent another Loom video with more on the strategy. And so I was interested. So he got me on the hook on March 10th. We had our first call April 2nd. We signed the contract April 15th and initially planned the summit for May 12th through the 14th. I don't know if you knew that. Can you imagine if we would've tried to do this on May 12th?

Anna Reich [00:11:50]:
That would've been like my second week. Gosh.

Jay Clouse [00:11:53]:
No. Yeah, we planned to do it in May. And in my mind, everything he was saying, he was like, this is gonna be really easy. We're gonna do the whole lift. And I was like, okay, well, that sounds easy enough. I can do that. But glad we pushed it back. We pushed it back on April 23rd to late June because I was going to Press Publish LA.

Jay Clouse [00:12:13]:
And I was like, let's actually plan this for after our offline summit. Bought the domain on May 26th. Registration opened on June 2nd. So 3 weeks in advance of the summit. We finished testing the whole webinar experience on June 21st. I think we finished the slides for the presentation on June 22nd, the day before. Cart open was June 24th through July 1st. So a week for the cart open for the cohort.

Jay Clouse [00:12:41]:
We had a downsell option July 3rd through the 8th. And then the cohort itself ran July 3rd through August 3rd. Are there any other major dates here I'm missing?

Anna Reich [00:12:50]:
Besides all the other things that we had going on, no. Uh-huh.

Jay Clouse [00:12:53]:
Oh yeah. What were some of the other things we had going on? Maybe we should talk about this. Some of the other things that were happening during the same period of time.

Anna Reich [00:12:59]:
Well, earlier in June, I believe the lab offline.

Jay Clouse [00:13:02]:
Yep. First week of June, we're doing the lab offline. So like Mal and I are completely MIA, which was the week that registration opened.

Anna Reich [00:13:11]:
Then you were speaking at several different events, like Press Publish. And the IPO Summit.

Jay Clouse [00:13:17]:
Oh yeah, I forgot about that Chanel's event.

Anna Reich [00:13:19]:
Which we created its own lead magnet.

Jay Clouse [00:13:22]:
And also the presentation for Press Publish, the presentation for the IPO Summit, those were net new assets that we had to create, or at least I chose to create. Maybe I didn't have to create net new presentations, but I did. Yeah, I think the IPO Summit was after Boise and then we went right into the summit itself. So it was just bananas, bananas, bananas, bananas. Let's talk about things that went well that we would do the same way next time. And I think maybe we go one after another, back and forth here until we run out of ideas on our list. What was top of your list?

Anna Reich [00:13:56]:
I thought the launch was a great way. I mean, you could argue if it's the best way to onboard 2 new employees, but it felt like a great way to bring us together as a team to have this occasion to build a lot of hype around, have daily check-ins on how are we doing in terms of the targets, and also to push us a lot. It felt like we expanded our abilities because we had to.

Jay Clouse [00:14:25]:
Yeah, that's a really good point. I hadn't thought about that. That was our first sprint as a team, codenamed Biggest Launch Ever. So we had a very clear audacious goal for the team that everybody responded to so well. Definitely not like intentionally planned in this way. I mean, everything we're doing is intentionally planned, but it wasn't like, okay, we're gonna do this summit in June and I'm gonna hire people onto the team and then we're gonna do a brand new sprint cadence. And like all of that was happily organized from you. So that was great.

Jay Clouse [00:14:57]:
I would say what I would absolutely do again, was having a VIP ticket for this summit. This like blew me away. This is a free event. Anyone can register for free. But we had this VIP ticket that people could purchase and it was $47. The benefits of the VIP ticket were that you had permanent replays of the summit. You had an optional Q&A on Friday. It was an additional Q&A that was only for VIP ticket holders.

Jay Clouse [00:15:25]:
We had a 2-way Telegram group for VIPs. I think that was it for the VIP ticket. But we had 238 people purchase that. Not a single refund. Everybody seemed to like think it was a huge value add. And we were netting sales every day, which you've been in the business now for 3 and a half months. You've seen that in our sales channel in Slack. We don't have daily sales in this business.

Jay Clouse [00:15:52]:
This business is like pretty predicated on memberships, on sponsorship, on affiliates, but we don't have daily digital product sales right now. And having that in the business was such a comforting, exciting, and like obviously missing piece that we need to focus on. But that was one of my biggest takeaways.

Anna Reich [00:16:12]:
I also had that on my list, not only for that reason, although that, that too, but also this really identified the most enthusiastic summit attendees. A lot of them ended up buying the upsell of the cohort. I remember all the faces and seeing them again in the premium experience of the cohort. So I thought that was a great way to show more love to the people who are more into it.

Jay Clouse [00:16:42]:
Yeah, the pop-up Telegram for that group was really active and people seemed to really like it too. So that was surprising to me. Okay, what was next on your list?

Anna Reich [00:16:51]:
I have creating posts with the vibe of my socials team is making me do this.

Jay Clouse [00:16:58]:
Okay, I love this.

Anna Reich [00:17:01]:
I think we only did this once where I said, I sat down with Ritzy, our socials guy, before our one-on-one and decided with him that we were going to force you to record something during our one-on-one call. And then I just told you what to say, and you picked up your phone and just recorded it and posted it right away. And so I feel like that's very on brand because you don't like to do a lot of self-promotion. And we are a little bit, as a team, a little bit more removed from that, right? We don't have that emotional burden. So we can just force you to do it. And I think it's— It's It's very fun for us as well.

Jay Clouse [00:17:42]:
That was fun. Okay.

Anna Reich [00:17:42]:
Yeah.

Jay Clouse [00:17:43]:
Good note. Good note. I'm open to this. I do need those pushes sometimes. So always open to that. Thanks for that idea, Ritzy. My next item that I said we would definitely do again is I thought the web work that the After Harvest team did was phenomenal. It like really pushed me to think about custom webpages for these standalone events and how far you can push this to be compelling.

Jay Clouse [00:18:09]:
They were great at making compelling marketing pages for the free event, for the VIP upsell, for the cohort itself. Everything related to web that this team did was incredible and got a lot of attention and a lot of feedback from my audience. I mean, we had folks in the Lab, there was a post that was like, this is the greatest summit website I've ever seen, which is, sounds a little bit like hyperbole, but it was really, really good.

Anna Reich [00:18:33]:
It was so impressive.

Jay Clouse [00:18:35]:
And I think a 7.5% conversion rate from free attendees to VIP is really high. I also think that number is skewed downwards because a lot of those registrations were one-click registrations from Kit, which may not have even been like totally purposeful. Some of those might have been like false positives, which means that the actual conversion rate of registration to VIP sales is higher than 7.5%. At one point it was about 10%. So I was Yeah, I thought their web work was fantastic.

Anna Reich [00:19:04]:
I have emails, sending a lot of emails I would do again or push you to do again.

Jay Clouse [00:19:10]:
I had that on my list as well, as uncomfortable as it was.

Anna Reich [00:19:13]:
Along with the email checklist I made for you after it felt like we were just drowning in too many emails that had to get sent out and weren't keeping track. So I made this like Notion doc and then it felt like everything Was a little bit more calm and structured. So I would do that again.

Jay Clouse [00:19:32]:
Oh, that was great. That email tracking matrix that you basically gave me, because the Summit team, they created so many assets around this, and I'll expand on this in the what we do differently section, but they created so many assets, including just like the number of emails they created for us to send, the number of messages they wanted us to send in Telegram. I would say we probably sent a third of the emails they suggested, certainly less than half. They wanted us to be sending emails like multiple times a day, every day for over a week, which if you think about a spectrum from like zero to Hormozi's $100 million book launch, I've never been to the right of center. And we definitely were the right of center of that spectrum this time around, which I think was net positive, good stretching, but still like a third of what this summit team wanted us to do. So we just had a lot and your document sharing, okay, here's what needs to be sent this day to these 4 different segments was super helpful to help me proofread, revise, and get out the door. I said that I would definitely continue doing a live pitch in the summit. With a bonus for people purchasing live.

Jay Clouse [00:20:54]:
We had a pitch for the cohort in day 2 at the end of that session, and we also did it on day 3, but we had far more people purchase in the first live session than in the second. And I think part of that is due to having a bonus on day 2 for purchasing live, which I'm not even sure was the most compelling bonus. I think we could do better with the bonus on day 2, but I think having a bonus on day 2 was good. I had never sat in a live pitch personally on a webinar for that long. I think I probably like was pitching for 30 minutes. But people also didn't drop off. Like the concurrent viewership dropped fewer than 10 people during that period I remember watching, which is crazy. And that was all again thanks to the Summit team's structure of the pitch and their slide design.

Jay Clouse [00:21:46]:
So yeah, I'd never pitched that hard, but I would do it the same way and I would do it again.

Anna Reich [00:21:52]:
Agree. The pitch was great and got so much positive feedback as well from people either in the chat or afterwards on the VIP call saying, even though they knew this was a pitch, they felt like it was so authentic and they bought instantly because of it. So Yeah, it worked really well.

Jay Clouse [00:22:14]:
It was really good for breaking some of my inner narratives around sales and marketing. That was great.

Anna Reich [00:22:21]:
The last thing I have on my list is around the offers or the offer stack that we had. We had a core offer, we had an upsell, we had a downsell, and every time we switched to one of them, we made more money. So that's what I would do again.

Jay Clouse [00:22:37]:
This is the last thing on my list for this section too. I was like, this is the most thorough offer architecture that I've ever done. Having like, okay, here's the core offer. And if this makes sense, here's the add-on for it. And after that cart closes, if that didn't make sense for you, here's the downsell. It was wildly uncomfortable the whole way through every bit of it. But you're right. Like every piece of that campaign just performed better and better.

Jay Clouse [00:23:05]:
I remember being a little disappointed at one point during the launch, cuz I was like, I don't think we're gonna get to 6 figures on this thing. Because before the downsell, we were at like $80,000 to $85,000 in launch revenue. And then the downsell, the self-paced course did almost $18,000, which was just shocking to me because that's as good as like a new workshop launch historically that I've— I mean, I haven't done this in the business for a couple years, but it used to be I would launch a workshop for $49 to $99. And that would do somewhere between like $15,000 and $25,000. And so for a self-paced course that has existed for a few years to do that in a couple of days was surprising to me. And also a good reminder that like, oh, I have assets in this business that we could be selling. Maybe we should do that. Before we get into what we do differently, we're gonna take a quick break for our sponsors, but then we're gonna get into what we'll do differently the next time around and how we would 80/20 this whole summit thing.

Jay Clouse [00:24:10]:
So don't go anywhere. We'll be right back. All right, back. And now we're talking about what we would do differently the next time around if we were to do this summit again. What's top of your list? I have a feeling we might have the same item at the top of our list, but we'll see.

Anna Reich [00:24:30]:
Top of my list is I would keep it a lot more simple. To me, the launch felt very complex, especially as someone who hasn't launched before, but even I assume if you have, there were so many elements that we could perfect that it was hard to figure out what dials we need to turn to really make this successful. There were people that we're trying to get still from socials. Like we were still building top of funnel and getting those people on our list, getting those people to attend the summit, then trying to convert email subscribers to 2 summit attendees, 2 VIPs, 2 cohort buyers, and 2 self-paced course buyers. Just so many conversion points. I'm— I would want us to build a capability of running a simple launch where we know, okay, this is a killer email, this is a killer landing page, this is how many sales we can expect if we have this many people.

Jay Clouse [00:25:32]:
Yeah. Okay. I have follow-up questions, but I feel like this is probably going to inform the 80/20 part of the conversation. So we'll dive into that here in a second. My first item of what we would do differently is I would use a different webinar provider. We used WebinarJam. This is actually a 2-point thing. We used WebinarJam for the webinar platform, but we didn't use it for registration.

Jay Clouse [00:25:55]:
And so we didn't actually have a great mechanism at launch for getting the literal call-in information for the webinar on people's calendar. Like we had a Google Calendar hold and we said, we'll send you the calendar information the morning of. There's no reason that we couldn't have set that information up and had it as a calendar hold immediately on confirmation. Because I think this is actually one of the biggest levers to how this whole thing could have performed better. Was to make sure that it was on people's calendar with the right link from day one. WebinarJam as a platform was pretty buggy. People didn't love that. So I'd probably use maybe just Zoom.

Jay Clouse [00:26:35]:
I really think we could just use Zoom. Riverside has a new webinar platform that is probably pretty good, especially if you're trying to create assets out of the webinar itself. And Circle also might work for this too. The thing I don't know about Circle, and I probably should know this better, I'm pretty sure you can set it up so that people don't need to have a, like, member account in your community to show up to a webinar. And if that is true, then Circle Webinars is probably pretty good.

Anna Reich [00:27:00]:
I did also write this down as never again WebinarJam. Use Zoom or Circle.

Jay Clouse [00:27:07]:
I mean, you always, you always get the people in the chat saying, like, is this going to be recorded? And, like, of course, of course the webinar is going to be recorded. But people are really struggling with just the tech itself having some, like, looping issues and lag issues. I haven't personally used WebinarJam in a very, very, very long time as a user. There's a bunch of different platforms out there. For a long time, Demio was the big player in the space, but that seems like needlessly expensive. I really think that you could just use Zoom. Their webinar tooling seems a little expensive also, but I don't know, reliability matters more than anything else. We want it to be easy for people to show up and to like attend and have a good experience.

Jay Clouse [00:27:43]:
And I feel like WebinarJam was not that.

Anna Reich [00:27:45]:
Agree. I probably had the worst experience of everyone because I had to keep jumping out of the window to like reply to emails of people who couldn't get in or who had that issue. So I, at some point, I switched to the YouTube livestream and just watched that audio instead because that was reliable.

Jay Clouse [00:28:03]:
I did like that it connected to YouTube on the livestream, and I actually kind of enjoyed just livestreaming on YouTube generally. I feel like that's an unexplored strategy that maybe we'll talk about as a team in the coming months. figuring out if we want to do more of that on the channel.

Anna Reich [00:28:16]:
I don't know if you're going to agree with me on this, but I would try to build a launch capability as a core capability of us as a team rather than outsourcing this.

Jay Clouse [00:28:30]:
Okay. Say more about what you think that would require.

Anna Reich [00:28:33]:
There's a few things that the Summit team did for us that we would never have been able to do or wouldn't have done. One was just pushing us to send more and more emails and think of all the other places we could be promoting the summit. Just the daily reminders. That is something we can do, I believe.

Jay Clouse [00:28:54]:
Yeah.

Anna Reich [00:28:55]:
Especially if it's someone else other than you who's pushing to do more, send more emails. There is the kind of launch psychology side of they were telling us these are all the emails you need to send, and they had already planned out the function that email needs to fulfill. Because we didn't use their emails, we were kind of reverse engineering what the email is probably supposed to do, and then you were writing a new email with the same function. So we could probably skip that part and just have a list of— I'm sure there's some best practices or people we can turn to to learn. what are the different points you need to hit or the emotions you need to hit during a launch. Then there's a website. I mean, obviously that's the key thing that they did really well.

Jay Clouse [00:29:42]:
I think that's the hardest thing to replicate. If we were to bring this all in-house, that would definitely be the hardest thing to replicate. I think we could do it. And they've been very generous with the assets they created. Like, here it is, here's the GitHub repo. We built it as its own custom Vercel app and here's how you can whatever. And like, I'm comfortable with all that. I can handle that.

Jay Clouse [00:30:00]:
But I don't know what prompt they used to build some of this because it's, it was in conversation with all of our existing brand elements, but almost inverted. Like in our actual brand guidelines, we specify that the red in the Creator Science brand guidelines should be used extremely rarely, just as an accent and mostly blue. And they pretty much inverted that and they said, we're actually gonna use a lot of the red and we're gonna make the blue. a very rare accent. And I kind of liked it. I was like, this actually works. This is very different. They had a very modern feel to the brand as a whole.

Jay Clouse [00:30:36]:
So I'm taking inspiration from that. I actually want to pull more of those brand elements into what we do as a whole. But it is the hardest thing for me to wrap my head around how they did it. And like the literal just legwork of getting it done. If that's me chatting with Tubi, our AI assistant, who is also just great at code now, That's like an all-day thing to build one of those pages. And they built many, many pages for this whole process. So there was real, very real labor that this team provided that if we brought it in-house, those are like net new hours we would have to carve out somewhere. That said, one of the things on my list was that I would choose a more repeatable summit topic because obviously like, okay, we have all these emails.

Jay Clouse [00:31:22]:
And we sent these and we know which ones performed better than others. We have these assets now. Like we could just run it back and do this same summit into the same offer. But I don't know if strategically that's like actually the summit and offer I want to run. I don't know. But we talk about this all the time now. There's just no reason that we should be doing so many like single serving projects in this business. And so I would've been more thoughtful about what the topic was.

Jay Clouse [00:31:50]:
In the beginning, Sean was just like, you have a big audience and you could make money from doing a summit. What do you want to make a summit about? Our first thought was that we were going to do a summit that led into the lab. And we changed that because the lab is application-based with a pretty tight filter, which is tightening all the time. And it just didn't seem like to make sense with this format to try and maximize registrations for an offer that was inherently exclusive. You know, so we shifted to this cohort model around the course that I had built. I think that was probably a good enough solution, but it was a short-term solution, short-term plan as a whole. I think if you're going to do this, like you should really want to do it multiple times and reuse all of these assets multiple times. And will that be true for us? I don't know.

Anna Reich [00:32:43]:
I will do my best to push us there because that's very much on my list.

Jay Clouse [00:32:47]:
We bought the domain. We have a $7,800 domain. We've got to do it again.

Anna Reich [00:32:53]:
A small one, I would let people opt out of all launch emails.

Jay Clouse [00:32:57]:
Yeah, we did that too late. But the problem is you get so many false negatives.

Anna Reich [00:33:02]:
Yeah.

Jay Clouse [00:33:03]:
So it's hard. Like, okay, so to do this opt-out strategy in Kit, you have a link trigger, and if people click it, you remove a tag or add a tag or update a custom field to say like, okay, filter out from this campaign. But we just know that inboxes click on links and buttons automatically to test for malware before people even really open it as human beings. So you run the risk of doing that, that you're, you're gonna accidentally filter out people who would be a good fit prematurely. So that's tough, but I think we should have done it earlier. And even when we did do it, I don't know if you knew this, when we did put that link trigger in, it was broken. I had set it up incorrectly. So people who clicked it actually didn't get filtered out immediately.

Jay Clouse [00:33:47]:
They actually got like 1 or 2 extra emails that they shouldn't have, and I had to go and fix it and like manually do it.

Anna Reich [00:33:52]:
I did not know that. But people were pretty understanding.

Jay Clouse [00:33:57]:
People were understanding, for sure, for sure. We only got, I'm gonna say, less than 5 emails that I received of people saying, you should let me opt out of this. And I did. And then I got 2 emails saying, hey, I opted out of this. Why am I still getting this? And then I realized it was broken. My next topic of things I would do differently, I would, oh, I heard this from Joe Casabona in the lab. He proposed a VIP bonus of the recordings as a private podcast, which I think is a great idea as an extra bonus for the VIP group is not only having lifetime recordings, but you can listen to the summit in audio form through a private podcast feed. I think that's a great, great, great bonus.

Anna Reich [00:34:36]:
I love that. Yeah. I would try to launch without a live event. Without the summit.

Jay Clouse [00:34:42]:
Oh, wow. Spicy.

Anna Reich [00:34:44]:
I mean, it comes back to doing a simpler launch. But there's really 2 parts that felt like a lot. It was, we had the launch period, then we had the 3 days of the summit, or really was 4 days because of the VIP bonus. And then we had another 1-week launch. I believe it was about 1 week launching the cohort. And then after that, we kicked off the cohort and we also did another launch of the downsell offer. And so it was just basically 2 months of this one launch. It's just a lot to build up all the hype to launch something and then you're doing the work of launching it and then you're after that again delivering a 4-week cohort.

Jay Clouse [00:35:32]:
Yes. That was one of my biggest notes was whether we do the full, like, virtual summit mechanism or not, I don't think I would do it into an offer that has new, very hands-on fulfillment on the backend. Like, I think it probably makes more sense to do a summit around improving your operations as a creator. And then on the backend, it's like, here's Creator HQ. And on day 3, we're showing you how to use it or something. But there's ultimately no net new fulfillment on the back end of that. That would be so much better because by the end of the summit itself, I was so exhausted. And then it was like, and by the way, you're now going to run a cohort for 4 weeks and be live on calls for 4 hours a week and responding to homework in circle multiple days per week.

Jay Clouse [00:36:24]:
It was a lot. So that's definitely something I would change. I would also change the order in which we prepared for this. The way that this worked with the After Harvest team, early on in the process, they said, hey, here is a super gnarly, really long prompt that we want you to copy into Claude so we can learn your method of teaching memberships. And I did this and Claude asked me one question at a time for like 2 hours. It was me talking to Claude for like 2 hours. One night on the couch. And out of that, they got so much specificity and insight that they built all of our assets out of this.

Jay Clouse [00:37:08]:
They created like, God, I don't know, 50 emails, a bunch of Telegram messages, the websites, the structure for the 3 days of presentation, all of the interactive web elements that attendees could do. Like there was a virtual worksheet based on this. And so what I realized once I finally got their slide decks that they created for us, I rebuilt their slide decks from zero because it extrapolated too far from my initial interview, I guess, call it, with Claude and started creating some concepts that weren't my concepts. And the design also didn't feel like us. So we literally rebuilt all 3 days of presentation from ground zero. Because ultimately, like, this whole event centered around me presenting for 3 days. And if it's not actually how I would teach things, then to me, this is like a complete backwards project and non-starter. But that was the most exhausting part of the whole process for me because there was already so much material created around some of these extrapolations, including the worksheet, including language on the sales pages.

Jay Clouse [00:38:19]:
So really, I would change the order of operations here to start with the 3 days of presentations and then build all the web work, all the emails, all the messaging out of that. Because we ended up having to go and like revise and undo a bunch of stuff because the team actually genuinely worked with AI in a very impressive way to create so many things. But when you're revising material, the pure amount of material that had to be rewritten was just enormous. So I would just back this up. From the presentation first.

Anna Reich [00:38:54]:
Yeah, totally. It was a lot of going back and checking what do we promise here. And maybe we even promised slightly different things in the video compared to the VSL, compared to the landing page, compared to an email, because a lot of it was drafted with AI at least. And comparing that to our very high standards of we always want to under-promise, over-deliver. We want to be super trustworthy and stick to our promises as a brand. That doesn't go well with having this massive AI input that we need to review with not that many people.

Jay Clouse [00:39:39]:
Yeah. Yeah.

Anna Reich [00:39:41]:
I have one from our socials team. Yeah, we had a little debrief the other day about the summit and the launch with the socials team, and they said they wouldn't do any polished Instagram story graphics anymore. They only would do very organic, like a picture of you or a picture of something that you took and then some text on it. They would not do anything that's too polished or too prepared, too designed. To promote because it didn't work as well.

Jay Clouse [00:40:14]:
I honestly feel like this is true of our entire Instagram strategy right now, but that's a topic for another team meeting. Okay. I did have one more. We use Telegram for this, which I've never used Telegram in this capacity before. I understand why he did it. It was basically, it was kind of like having an SMS component to your launch without needing to deal with SMS or. The compliance challenges that come with SMS. So every attendee was allowed to join a broadcast Telegram group that only I could communicate with.

Jay Clouse [00:40:45]:
And then the VIP group had a 2-way Telegram with me where we could respond. And in the beginning I was like, I don't really get why we're doing this. Like people are registered. Why do I need to be messaging them before the event? But after we opened the doors, I understood, oh, this is a, another touchpoint for me to promote the cohort. and talk about its benefits and try to get this in front of people. And I think that had a disproportionately positive outcome in the VIP group versus the non-VIP group. But the problem with Telegram as a whole is they really have a spam problem. And if you don't pay for premium Telegram, you end up getting just like a whole bunch of garbage messages from bad accounts.

Jay Clouse [00:41:31]:
And so I would probably, if I was going to do that strategy again, I'd probably try WhatsApp next time instead of Telegram because it's better for that. I think one challenge with WhatsApp is they expose phone numbers, and I know people don't really want that in a group setting, so we'd have to look into that. But the Telegram SMS-esque experience, I think, was net positive, but I'd probably only do it for the VIP group, and I would try WhatsApp next time. All right, are we ready for the 80/20?

Anna Reich [00:42:00]:
Oh yeah, I'm very excited for this.

Jay Clouse [00:42:02]:
Okay, I kind of want to hear your, your brain work on this, and we can just run through your like whole design of this, and I'll fill in whatever gaps I think makes sense.

Anna Reich [00:42:10]:
Okay, sounds great. I split this into the prep work and then during the launch. So in terms of prep, very first thing I would do is launching after a period of top of funnel and list growth. Which I don't think there was necessarily a period before that where you deliberately tried to expand your list.

Jay Clouse [00:42:33]:
No, I think this is actually like the most list-expanding activity we've done in a very long time. I think we churned a fair number of those same people out and some other folks who were just like not into this subject, but this was the best period of list growth that we've manufactured in a very long time.

Anna Reich [00:42:53]:
Then there's a few things I would try to get in place basically as early as possible because we were doing all these at the same time as we were already launching. So the first one is having a killer offer stack of a core offer, upsell, and downsell, and that we all know as a team what we're selling.

Jay Clouse [00:43:12]:
I agree. I think adding on to that bonuses for those things, because like I think it's beneficial to say, okay, here is the downsell, which is a self-paced course, and we have a discount on it during this period. But also we gave the permanent summit recordings. So for people who didn't buy the VIP ticket but wanted that and wanted those recordings, that was a bonus for it. It's hard to say like how much of an impact does that have, but I think the bonus had a material impact on the live pitch on day 2. I think the upsell was great too. So yeah, I 100% agree with you having locked in the offer itself. And I would say that offer should be more scalable than the cohort inherently is, because actually that offer kind of breaks at a point.

Jay Clouse [00:43:57]:
There's a certain point where we have too many people that I don't even feel comfortable delivering on it or would need to hire a third party to help. And is that the experience that I even wanna sell? I don't know. So I think the offer itself should be more scalable and more aligned with the type of person we're trying to draw towards the lab anyway.

Anna Reich [00:44:17]:
Yeah. To add to the bonus point, we basically had a bonus on day 2, which is the day you pitched, and quite a few people bought during the session because of the bonus. And then we didn't have it on day 3 and nobody bought during the session because there was no reason to. They might as well just buy 3 days later, 4 days later. I thought, oh no, this could have been such a great day 2 of the launch if we had only had a bonus.

Jay Clouse [00:44:46]:
Totally. Okay, keep going. I want to hear, hear what else you have in your plan.

Anna Reich [00:44:51]:
I have one landing page that converts because we had a lot of landing pages. We had even 2 landing pages just for the cohort, I believe.

Jay Clouse [00:45:01]:
Yeah, the offer.

Anna Reich [00:45:03]:
Yeah, I would outsource this part. Probably because it's a lot to build a landing page, but I would try to have it locked down before because I think it was maybe the day before, maybe the day of, they were still changing things and we were behind on revising those changes so that they still sound like you and fit our brand. And that was adding a lot of stress.

Jay Clouse [00:45:27]:
I agree. I had in my notes, For like order of operations, I said presentation comes first, then the web stuff. So registration on the web, upsell on the web, offer on the web, sales copy for the web and emails. Then we open registration. Then everything else is like fun stuff on top, trying to drive people in. But we, we were building too much of the plane as it was flying here.

Anna Reich [00:45:52]:
That's a good way to put it. Then another thing I think we need to have in place before is a compelling launch story. It's not that we didn't have this, but I think it's a key element, a reason why we're launching. In this case, there was a big event and there was your paternity leave, which we used as a reason of why we're not going to do this again this year. Some way of having natural urgency and scarcity.

Jay Clouse [00:46:20]:
I like that idea.

Anna Reich [00:46:21]:
Then I have a simple email plan. I say simple because we had quite a complex email plan that we got from the Summit team with so many different segments. And it was all one big Google Doc, or in the end we had like 5 different Google Docs with updated things. And I was trying to feed all these things into Kit and then get you to rewrite them. So I think a simple email plan would've done where we maybe have some triggers for if we have this many signups, then we send more emails. And then I just tell you, you have to write another email today, Jay. But not the massive complex plan. And same for socials.

Anna Reich [00:47:01]:
I would probably do less on socials and I would focus it more on followers rather than pitching everywhere. So let's say on Instagram, I wouldn't do reels or carousels. I would just do stories, which reach your followers.

Jay Clouse [00:47:18]:
The single story PSA format, shout out Gannon Meyer. Labmate, he has shared this on his Instagram a couple times. If you take a selfie photo and then have an on-screen caption that basically says, PSA, here's the thing I wanna tell you, and now here's the keyword to comment for the ManyChat thing to kick in. If you do that single story and leave it alone for 24 hours, that just performs so well. That was definitely the best needle mover on Instagram for us was doing that, getting in front of existing followers. More closely. I agree with you.

Anna Reich [00:47:50]:
And then the last thing I think to get in place during the launch is a waitlist email sequence that gets people really hyped up.

Jay Clouse [00:47:59]:
So I registered, but the event hasn't happened yet, a sequence for that?

Anna Reich [00:48:03]:
Yeah, I mean, in this case, we didn't even have a waitlist. That was something we were gonna have, and then it was too late to still implement it. So I would, first of all, put in place a waitlist. Either we don't tell them what it is or it's just not possible to sign up yet, but it's like based on the topic they're interested in and they sign up and then they receive a sequence to get them really hyped. And all of that happens whether or not we manage to do all the other emails during the launch.

Jay Clouse [00:48:34]:
Okay. I like it. I had a lot of the same. I think the things I would add, I would have a stronger confirmation page with an add event link. post-registration. I said this earlier, but it's like so important to me that I'm gonna say it again. Like, you should get the right call-in information held on people's calendar as soon as they register. I think I would only have one Telegram/WhatsApp group and it would just be for VIPs and it would be two-way.

Jay Clouse [00:49:00]:
I wouldn't do the broadcast one again because I just didn't love the experience of like talking to the ether and like people didn't have a chance or like an ability to respond. They could just react to it. So I don't know. I just don't think that was really that necessary. I thought about, do we even need the 3rd day? Like, the format of the 3-day summit was basically day 1 was, here's why you should care. Day 2 was, here's how to do this really well. And that started the pitch. If you made it to day 2, it means that you crossed through the filter of you care.

Jay Clouse [00:49:30]:
Here's how to do it really well. And yeah, it's kind of a lot of work. If you want guidance, we'll help you to do that. Day 3 was, here's the plan that you can go and put this into action over the next 12 months. But if you wanna do it faster and skip some of the potholes, here's how we can help you with that as well. So the format makes sense, and I don't know if I'm undervaluing day 3 because we didn't have any purchases live on the presentation, but I'm questioning whether you fully need 3 days. I think I would still do the VIP Q&A, so that would be 3 days instead of 4, but I'm questioning the 3rd day of material. What do you think?

Anna Reich [00:50:07]:
It's hard to know the impact of trust building that day potentially did, especially because it didn't really have a pitch. So it felt like, like you already pitched us. What more do you want?

Jay Clouse [00:50:20]:
It did have a pitch though. It's interesting that you say that because it did have a pitch and it was probably 2/3 as long as the second day, but I was personally kind of tired and also like just felt weird going through the whole pitch again. And so I don't think I delivered it nearly as well. As the day before. So I think part of this is on me that I did not have the same energy or follow-through on day 3 as I did on day 2.

Anna Reich [00:50:46]:
I guess to me it felt more like a Q&A session, almost like I'm answering some questions about the offer, but it didn't feel as pitchy because of that.

Jay Clouse [00:50:56]:
Yeah. And I think I either removed some of that in the pre-design or might've even skipped over some of it because it's just so hard for me to like lean into that, but The proof is in the pudding. Like day 2 was great. Day 3 was not as strong. So yeah, I think either remove day 3 or be way more comfortable going through the full pitch process on day 3 that we did on day 2. Like it probably needs to be slightly different so it doesn't seem like I'm revealing this for the first time because obviously I'm not. This is the second day I'm doing it. But I don't know if I wanted to simplify this.

Jay Clouse [00:51:30]:
I think you could cut out day 3. have 2 great days of teaching and I don't know what the impact would be, but I think it would cut out a third of the design work. I could tell you that.

Anna Reich [00:51:41]:
I mean, if you want to simplify, I wrote down as like a backup option, I would go to just individual webinars. Chris Donnelly does them.

Jay Clouse [00:51:51]:
Oh, just one-off webinars.

Anna Reich [00:51:54]:
He will do like 4 in a row. So every Thursday, I believe. for 4 weeks, he'll be running a webinar and then give people a special code to sign up to his cohort. And then there's also a reason to join his cohort because there's like a warm-up party. So the sooner you join, the sooner you get to be part of the warm-up crew. But they're not like, no shade on Chris, but there's, they're not teaching that super in-depth stuff. They're still valuable, but there is also a good amount of pitch. in that webinar.

Jay Clouse [00:52:28]:
That was good feedback we got from this group. They were like, I knew you're gonna pitch, but there was so much that you taught. And I don't know, some people, some webinar folks might say that we gave too much, but I don't know, it felt right to me. The other thing I added as part of an 80/20 effort was, well, actually 2 things. I think we could skip affiliates. I think we drove something like 300 to 500 registrations from affiliates, which isn't nothing, and that's good as a list building strategy. But I think for a high-ticket offer, as this was, this is a $1,000 investment. I think we had maybe 1 or 2 affiliate-referred people purchase.

Jay Clouse [00:53:07]:
I think it's a tall ask to say you're new to me, even if I was warmly referred by someone you already trust, to make that big of a purchase, I don't know, is super plausible. So if we wanted to carve out some time and space, I don't know that we need affiliates if you're doing a high-ticket offer. I do think it's good for overall list building if that's the strategy and if you're selling a lower ticket thing. But if we were selling this again, I don't know that it, the juice was necessarily worth the squeeze.

Anna Reich [00:53:35]:
I agree both for us and for them as well, because we also want our affiliates to see the benefits of promoting us and I don't think they saw them as much as we would have liked.

Jay Clouse [00:53:46]:
Yeah. If I look at the sheet here, we paid $1,800 out in affiliates and The top was 591. So they had 3 buyers of the cohort and 5 buyers of the self-paced. So we did have some folks who did buy the cohort. I don't know. It's not, it's not nothing. We had $7,000 in value created from the launch from affiliates, but how much work went into that versus could have gone elsewhere for the launch? Hard to say. The last point I had is I think I would skip one-click opt-ins for registrations in the future.

Jay Clouse [00:54:21]:
Because I think what this effectively did was create a bunch of false positives that then got a bunch of launch materials from us that they didn't actually want. If you can't be bothered to go and do like a registration button click on a web page to verify that it's a real human, I don't know that you're gonna be someone who shows up live or makes a purchase. I think we're probably just gonna bug you with extra emails.

Anna Reich [00:54:48]:
Yeah. So what I had written down for what I would do during the launch, there's basically just 2 activities that in an ideal world we would be doing, which is writing emails. And that would be your main job during the whole launch is just writing great emails and learning what works and then adjusting. And then the other one would be social posts that convert and tracking the success of those and improving them. And making them organic, as we said. Yeah.

Jay Clouse [00:55:18]:
And everything else is done before then.

Anna Reich [00:55:20]:
Yes.

Jay Clouse [00:55:22]:
I agree. I agree. A lot of net new assets, which if we were to repeat this summit, there's a lot of stuff that we wouldn't have to create net new. We could use like the same decks and things. So we'll see. We will see. All right. Onto our next sprint, Anna.

Jay Clouse [00:55:36]:
Well, actually onto a couple of well-earned vacations and then our next sprint.

Anna Reich [00:55:40]:
Yes. Very excited. for the next sprint, then it's also going to be one massive sprint of getting ready for your paternity leave.

Jay Clouse [00:55:48]:
Yes, yes, yes, yes. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving a rating or review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify and letting me know. The show is climbing the charts again. Love to see it. Thank you for listening. Thank you for supporting the show. Those reviews go a long, long way, further than you probably realize. If you wanna learn more about Sean and the After Harvest team, potentially work with them, there's an affiliate link in the show notes to get the conversation started.

Jay Clouse [00:56:16]:
And again, if you missed the Build a Beloved membership offer, if you want the self-paced course, there's a link to 50% off in the show notes buried there just for people listening closely, people like you. Thank you for listening. I'll talk to you next week.