A big launch could be the worst thing to ever happen to you or your business

That Big Launch You've Been Dreaming Of
Could Be the WORST THINGE EVER
To Happen To Your Business

So I'm sure at this point you think I've lost my marbles, but bear with me a bit and you'll be glad you did.

When I was a little boy I used to get “growing pains” late at night from time to time. I can still remember them, I think that aside from when I was in pain from lymphoma and flesh eating bacteria, it might be the most pain I've ever experienced.

I really do have the best mom in the world! Two years ago when I was in the hospital fighting for my life I was not supposed to have any visitors because I was so contagious, and the infection I had was not to be messed with. My odds of living at that point were not good at all, and I was scared. My mom fought tooth and nail with the doctors and nurses, and in the end they let her stay with me.

When I experienced these growing pains as a child, it was most often late at night, well after midnight I'm sure. I can remember waking up crying, and I'd try to be quit because I did not want to wake up the entire house. Mom always seemed to hear me though, and she'd come in and talk to me, telling me funny stories about her childhood – or just let me talk about my day or plans for the future (I always had big dreams). It never mattered how long it took, even if it was hours, Mom would stay with me until I was able to fall back to sleep.

Nobody knows for certain what causes “growing pains”, but 25 to 40% of all children will experience them. It used to be thought that the cause was bones having a sudden spurt of rapid growth, although no evidence exists to show that is actually the case. In business though, growing pains are real, and can in fact be deadly!

So far this year I have created nearly $10million in extra value for online and offline business. I have done this with direct mail campaigns, follow up campaigns, past client reactivations, traffic strategies, and my favorite – product launches.

In the stock market and Forex niche, I've become something of a “go to” guy as word of my successful launches gets around, and to a lesser extent in Internet Marketing and Real Estate as well. Because I've developed a reputation for “bringing the goods” - I get a lot of launch offerings coming my way. I have to turn down the vast majority of them, but not all of them for the reasons you might think.

One of the most common reasons I'm starting to turn down launches is simply that I don't think the company is prepared to deal with the logistical and core management issues that are going to occur after the successful launch.

On Thursday I was talking to a guy who is a raising star in the Options Trading business. He has created a $500,000 per year business, has great list, 3500 facebook friends, 19,000 Twitter Followers (he's only following 134 people himself, so it's not a case of twitter spam). His email list has nearly 40,000 people on it, and his open and clickthrough rates are the 3rd best I've ever seen. He has supported some of the top trading launches over the last 5 months (and been on the leader board), so he's not going to have any problems at all getting the top names in the industry to support him. Between his connections and mine, it's pretty much a slam duck in terms of getting JV's.

All in all, this is as close to a “sure thing” $2million + launch I've ever had come across my desk. In fact I'd go so far as to say if I couldn't manage at least a $2million launch for this product (which is also one of the better products I've seen), I should be taken out back and beaten.

He had no problem paying my outrageously expensive five figure retainer, nor with giving me a handsome % of the profits, and I really liked him. Frankly, this launch probably would have paid for that “weekend getaway/vacation” condo I'm wanting to buy for myself in Tampa.

So at this point your probably thinking that one of those high fevers I ran a few years back did some pretty serious damage, and in fact I kinda wondered the same thing for a little bit...but in the end I said no because I did not think this guy was ready for the huge growth that a launch would create in his business.

Like I said above, I fully expect that this launch could do AT LEAST $2million – and overall it's not uncommon at all for me to see clients make as much from a successful launch that I put together for them as they would have otherwise made all year. Not too bad for about 6 to 8 weeks worth of work.

He was not ready because I simply could not get him to understand the HUGE support issues he would face, both from his buyers and from his partners. He was not prepared for the logistical nightmare's of product fulfillment – and he did not seem to understand how to leverage the power of one launch to do “bigger and better”things with his business.

Very often you will see someone run a successful ($1million +) launch, and then you never hear from them again. Sadly, in most cases it's not because they took that money and retired to a life of cold and colorful drinks in a warm exotic place. In many cases it's because the instant success they experienced as a result of the launch created huge problems for them.

They are forced to rapidly build up their infrastructure to support a company that is now at least twice as big as it had been, sometimes 10 times or more. In the process of this build up, often times customer support is lacking, and communication with partners is horrible. This causes you to have a “bad” reputation, making it very hard to get support in the future.

Suddenly, you find yourself with the expenses of a $2million company, but your back to being a $500,000 company. All of the sudden every bit of profit you had from your successful launch has been eaten up by a monster – and what had looked like the best thing to ever happen to you has suddenly become one of the worst.

This is a side of rapid growth in a business that people often don't think of, and people selling “make money from home” products have no real interest in telling you that making a million dollars can cause just as many problems as being broke (and often lead right back to brokesville..but with more debt)

Brandon
PS. I know that all of you marketing people have a lot of "marketing friends". It's the whole birds of a feather stick together concept :) If you found this little rant helpful, please spread the word and tell your friends about it. Feel free to share it on your own page.

My first taste of what you just explained was with a $18,000 launch promotion.

It wasn't a launch by any means.

I thought up and developed the product and pages/funnel in roughly 3 weeks.

I got everything live.

Then I got in touch with about 10 friends (no more) and told them about it. I was aiming to make $2000 from sales and figured I could do that on my own... and I had no experience with event-based launches back then.

The thing went live.

And it was a complete surprise big hit (very low ticket, very high conversion on front and the upsell).

The 6 days that followed more than doubled my past client base. Probably tripled it.

And this certainly wasn't the $2mill + monster you're talking about... but it was enough of a large tidal wave to rock me.

Support did fall behind.

Emails to affiliates partners fell behind.

My social life disappeared for 2 days.

Sleep didn't really exist for the first 2-3 days.

As for actually executing a snowball strategy or motivating affiliates to promote even more or over-delivering to customers or to upselling the leads etc... none of that was happening.

Of course, by the following week, everything was caught up and all was well.

And yes this was back in my earlier days.

But the point is the concept that you're talking about...

If the # of customers, leads, affiliates etc doubles, triples or grows by 10X etc over the course of a month or a week... you better be prepared for it.

Great post!

Well worth remembering.

Presumably there are some good outsourcing options out there that can help?

Haven't got to the stage of doing a big product launch yet but when I do sounds like you may well be the go-to guy!

Great article! But if you fail to plan you plan to fail... There are ways to prepare yourself for things like this, but not to the extent you are talking about. Like 1,000 customers or something could be managed with a few people.

I will take these things into mind when releasing a big product launch, so far I'm basically just "rolling" out products softly instead of big launches.

To piggyback on this, think about these issues when recruiting JV partners--there are 2 lessons here:

1) You need to work out the kinks and make sure you can put on a good launch before you approach big JVs because the worst thing you can do is finally convince someone to promote and then they make no money. You'll struggle to get them to promote again... And the same goes if they DO make money but because of "growing pains" you fail in fulfillment and end up with a ton of returns.

2) There is a lot of value in working your way up gradually--with progressively larger launches and bigger partners, you can learn the lessons at each stage you need with burning people or having launch disasters. Then when you get your "A" partners you'll be ready!

-Brett