166 - Spring launch recap: All the juicy details!

Caroline: Welcome to What Is It All For? A podcast designed to help you grow your online business and pursue a spacious, satisfying life at the same time. We're your hosts, Jason and Caroline Zook, and we run Wandering Aimfully, an unboring business coaching program. Every week, we bring you advice and conversations to return you to your most intentional self and to help you examine every aspect of your life and business by asking, What is it all for? Thanks for listening. And now let's get into the show.

Jason: And I'm here, too.

Jason: Hello and welcome to our podcast with our brand new gear.

Caroline: Can you tell the difference? Probably not.

Jason: I would say I was reminded recently by one of our listeners.

Caroline: Yes.

Jason: We have like 19 listeners of this show. This is a joke we haven't really...

Caroline: Brought back in a while. You think we're up to 19 now?

Jason: That's what she said.

Caroline: She said that she felt she was number 19.

Jason: And I do think we got to a place where we said like in the early 20s or like 22, 23, 24 maybe.

Caroline: Did we lose a few though along the way?

Jason: Oh, that's a good question.

Caroline: Maybe 19 is accurate.

Jason: Anyway, let's go with the 24 of you. Let's be optimistic in our numbers here because this is a big numbers episode. We're going to go a lot of numbers. Of the 24 people, I would guess six of them will notice that there's a pretty big sound difference.

Caroline: A quarter.

Jason: I'm one of those just out of the 24. So it's one. You won't notice. Yeah, you won't notice whatsoever.

Caroline: I mean, I love you.

Jason: Right.

Caroline: And I respect your desire to have great audio.

Jason: I appreciate that you respect my desires.

Caroline: Yeah, I respect your desires.

Jason: For those of you who don't know, haven't heard, we have had this mobile setup and it's a little handheld microphone set up. This did us extremely well during the entire travel year last year. It's a very small, minimal setup. Doesn't take up a lot of room. But now that we're in a home and we want to podcast, that's what we do every single week. We just wanted a more podcasty setup is the only best way I can describe it.

Caroline: Very podcasty. And really Jason didn't want to hold a microphone.

Jason: I really didn't because my hands are gigantic and you hear it and then it's also uncomfortable for me and I have to hold it with my fingers. My fingers are out.

Caroline: So now we have arms. We're those people now.

Jason: We have two boom arms. We have two boom mics.

Caroline: We have all the booms.

Jason: We have an audio interface. We're recording directly into my computer, which we've never done before.

Caroline: Be honest. Do you just feel a little cooler?

Jason: I mean, I feel like there's a lot more going on, which means...

Caroline: A little bit cooler.

Jason: There's a lot more that can go wrong.

Caroline: Yeah, no, I am prepared for something to be wrong.

Jason: Yes.

Caroline: This is just our first time recording. We'll get the levels right.

Jason: I'm looking at you and it looks like you're having to lean in a little bit. Do you need to adjust to be more comfortable?

Caroline: It's a new setup, man.

Jason: Yeah. I don't want you to feel like you have to engage your core the entire time you're recording. Recording. Hey, three of the six people who hear the difference.

Caroline: I'm trying to engage my diaphragm because I am now self conscious about the fact that I have vocal fry, which I didn't know what that is.

Jason: Yeah, don't bring it up. Don't bring too much attention.

Caroline: Okay. I'm self conscious about it now.

Jason: It's a thing that you're not supposed to have to worry about because this is just who you are. But apparently you don't bring enough air into your face, which I think you should do more of.

Caroline: I don't know that that's the technical, but yeah, I don't bring enough air into my face.

Jason: Right, exactly. Let's get into some preamble here and let's chat about some of the fun things that happened.

Caroline: That was a preamble ramble.

Jason: Well, because you got new gear, so you got to set the stage for everybody. We had a pretty interesting chain of events on a Saturday.

Caroline: We did. And so we realized that quite often, we come here in the preamble and we share with you all the most just perfect bits of living here in Portugal. And I'm going to be honest, 90% of it is just what you would imagine.

Jason: It's great.

Caroline: Delightful. We love it. And so it's not like we're trying to polish it up for you. It's just like we're very happy here. However, the second that we had a little snafu happen on a Saturday morning, and I said, as soon as it happened, I said, we got to tell the podcast.

Jason: This is for the podcast.

Caroline: Because...

Jason: We only talk about so much...

Caroline: We only talk about all the good stuff. And so this was definitely one of those challenges that you're not going to get in a country that you grew up in, and specifically for us, the United States, which is where we're from. So tell the people what happened.

Jason: So the Saturday started off with we had this plan to go to a tiny arts market, which we'll get to. And just like this little you can imagine a farmers market, but just artists and very small. We'll get to it, but we said, hey, this is an arts market. They're probably not going to take credit card because it's like a local artist making things. Let's go get some Euros out of our Portuguese bank account that we have had for six months, but we have yet to have to pull euros out of it. If we've needed Euros, we've typically just used our US bank account. We've just paid whatever the stupid fee is.

Caroline: Which is a lot by the way.

Jason: Yeah, just out of convenience, because getting an ATM card was also a bit of a struggle.

Caroline: There was a back and forth with the ATM card.

Jason: We need to get a pin mailed to us, and it didn't show up.

Caroline: They finally mailed the card to us, and so this was going to be our first attempt at using the ATM of our bank in our local town. We were going to get out some Euros and it was all going to be fine and dandy.

Jason: Yeah, so we're at the ATM. It's like 09:00 on a Saturday morning. Maybe not that early, a little bit later. But anyway, we're both standing there. We realized very quickly, oh, this ATM doesn't offer English, which is very interesting because most ATMs that we've interacted with...

Caroline: You can choose your language.

Jason: Do offer English.

Caroline: Yes.

Jason: So just the bank that we chose apparently it doesn't do this. So we're like, okay, I bust out my phone. I got Google Translate to take photos. We're kind of working through it. You know a couple more words than I do. So you're like, I think I got this. Obviously, it's an ATM too. So it's like very clear. You put your pin in, you pick withdrawal, you pick number.

Caroline: You'd think it'd be great.

Jason: So anyway, we get pretty quickly through this, and then we get this green screen. And it's all green. It has one sentence, and then it says, "Sim or não?" Which is yes or no. I translate the sentence and it basically says, like, go green. And like...

Caroline: Think twice before you print...

Jason: Before you print a receipt. And so we're like, okay, well, we don't want a receipt that would make sense. Like, we're going to go não.

Caroline: So clearly we thought this was the confirmation. Well, no, we thought that it was the decline the receipt screen.

Jason: Yeah, that's what made but it was...

Caroline: Actually the transaction confirmation screen. So we pressed não for no receipt, but it was actually, No, we don't. It was like cancel. And so then we were like, Oh, no, we messed up. It became very clear that we canceled our...

Jason: It went back to the first screen. It was like, okay, you didn't want that.

Caroline: And we were like, oh, man. But okay, a little inconvenient. We just have to start over. And we'll just know next time we'll press yes, right? So we reenter the pin.

Jason: Right.

Caroline: Something got messed up of...

Jason: There was really no text on screen either. The pin was blinking.

Caroline: Yeah, the pin was blinking.

Jason: We're like, what?

Caroline: Anyway, long story short, we try to enter the pin and then all of a sudden, it's like we translate this sentence in Portuguese that's basically like, you have tried to enter your pin incorrectly three times.

Jason: Which we hadn't.

Caroline: Which we hadn't. And so therefore, you're a thief and we can't... You can't continue. And then we were like, okay, well, that sucks. And we were like, we'll just take our card out and we'll go down the street, and we'll use our card, and we'll get it out, and then we go, Wait.

Jason: Hey.

Caroline: It's not giving us our card back.

Jason: Excuse me, Mr. ATM machine. ATM machine, which is redundant.

Caroline: Excuse me.

Jason: Can we have our card back?

Caroline: And so it ate our card.

Jason: It ate our card. And then we were left standing there, kind of looking around. There was no one else there, thankfully. And we were...

Caroline: Never in my life.

Jason: What do we do?

Caroline: At an ATM in the US. I don't know if they do this. Have I ever heard of someone's card getting eaten.

Jason: Getting sucked into the machine. Now, the good news is that was frustrating, and we were like, well, this is not a fun way to start the Saturday, but we collectively gathered our wits. We were standing outside. You called our bank right away just to make sure because we wanted to know that no one could possibly get our card out of there.

Caroline: Exactly. I didn't want to somehow spit it back out. And they were like, oh, no. Yeah, it ate it.

Jason: Yeah. So they basically said, you can come back in the next business day, which would have been that Monday, which we did. It was a very easy process to sit down with a gentleman who actually didn't speak that much English, but we were able to point and say a couple of things, and he literally walked around the wall, got our card, and then came back and was like, If it doesn't work 48 hours, you have a new pin. Now it'll work again. And then we were like, to confirm, the ATM can't be translated to English? And he was like, no. We're like, okay, just want to make sure. So now we'll know we'll be a little bit slower we're translating.

Caroline: Next time, we should just come in here and ask someone to just come with us and be those people, and we're just not above it.

Jason: Well, also because there's another machine next to what looks like a standard ATM machine, but this looks like a more, like, futuristic machine.

Caroline: Right.

Jason: And I've seen people go up to it, but I also saw a little icon that said it didn't have cash. So I don't know what people are doing at that machine, but maybe that's how they're paying their phone bills and things. Maybe that's what that one's more...

Caroline: Well, we're going to learn some stuff next time.

Jason: Anyway.

Caroline: This is the saga, but we just had to share that because, again, that is a challenge that you're not going to probably get at your...

Jason: No.

Caroline: Home country.

Jason: In a Wells Fargo in the US, never once had my card sucked in in 30 years.

Caroline: The good news is it didn't ruin our Saturday. We eventually did get cash, went to the arts market. It was adorable. We went to this area that we've been to a few times because there are a couple of restaurants that are there.

Jason: There's a good Mexican restaurant which we've talked about before in our preamble.

Caroline: So the area is called Ferrão, and we're realizing now that it's a cute sort of a lot of, like, surfers.

Jason: Very surf focused.

Caroline: Very surf focused area. And then there's also an area near Ferrão that is called Baleal. And it is basically this kind of peninsula that juts out into the ocean. Tiny, tiny. Almost an island, really. And it has this cool beach.

Jason: Let's talk about the arts market real quick. So the arts market we showed up to, and I think it's fun to share these things because we were both excited to go, but we're also nervous because Portuguese isn't our language. And you don't know with this thing, like, is it going to be, like, locals only? We're going to be kind of like not outcast or like whatever, but it's just like, you're going to feel kind of uncomfortable. So we show up. It's very tiny. Like, imagine a backyard of your neighbor, that's the size of the backyard of this place. But there's a ceramicist, there's a map maker, there's a baker, there's an Italian chef who's doing...

Caroline: A screen printer.

Jason: Bruschetta and some soup. And then there's, like, the hilarious business to me that's in that little backyard area was the sports business, but it's literally just like...

Caroline: It's like a sports club, like a community sports club.

Jason: Yeah. I just have never seen anything like it before where there's just, like, all the equipment just kind of, like, laying around.

Caroline: I just love that also the two sports are capoeira and volleyball. I was like, all right.

Jason: And that's what I was saying. That's what was so weird. I was like, I would understand if it was like a local football. Like, we all go here, meet up, and then we go play. But anyway, the food was delicious. The Italian chef was making just a couple of little things, but they were really good. The map maker was incredibly talented and her, like, detailed, hand drawn maps.

Caroline: Yeah. Had a great chat with her. Yeah. And it was really fun. I mean, we just had a nice couple of lovely conversations with creative people, which felt really good. I think we'll definitely go back there. And I think the more we go back, the more friends we'll meet.

Jason: You know why we're definitely going back?

Caroline: To get bread?

Jason: Because the baker, she had cinnamon rolls, and I'm pretty sure those went quickly. And we got there kind of like a little bit later.

Caroline: We were fashionably late.

Jason: So I want to get cinnamon rolls and I want to get, like, whatever her sourdough loaf of the week is. She had a tomato, and I didn't get to try it because we got there late. But I did get her spelt loaf, which was very, very good.

Caroline: It was just delightful. But the part that I do want to share is I told Jason the other day, I feel like we're very squarely in this friend dating phase of our lives right now because we are...

Jason: We're just trying it out.

Caroline: Seeking a mate.

Jason: We are swiping left, we are swiping right.

Caroline: And it feels like we're doing all these interactions and we're meeting lovely people, but we just haven't found that perfect fit yet in terms of, oh, this is a person that I could really see being like fully best friends. To be fair, you don't know that right away, right? So there are definitely some people we've met who they could become that for sure.

Jason: But they're also trying to feel us out as well. Not physically, obviously, but yeah, I was telling Caroline, too, because we've been talking about this a lot. We've been here for six months and it feels like we've met a good amount of people more than we would like in California when we moved to a place in six months because we're just trying to put ourselves out there a little bit more and thinking back to our lives in California, it took us three years to find our really close, good friends.

Caroline: Right.

Jason: And so I think we're just trying to give ourselves permission that it's going to take time, but let's keep putting ourselves out there.

Caroline: And that's the thing I wanted to highlight as well, is if you want... just like in dating, if you want to find someone...

Jason: You want that partner. You go get them.

Caroline: You do have to put yourself out there and you have to be vulnerable, like walking into that backyard place where everyone knows each other and we don't know anyone. And you really do kind of have to go out on a limb, start up conversation.

Jason: Also, I was going to say pretty much the entire time we were there, we were there for like an hour and a half ish, English was the language we heard the whole time, which was really I mean, again, we know we live in a country that that's not their native language. So whenever we're in that situation, I was like, oh, we got to come back because this is... We feel more comfortable there, as opposed to going to, say, the flea market where no one spoke English. Also, it was the flea market. So who wants to go back to that? I know you do, but I don't. But yeah, it was just kind of like, okay, we can go back next time and feel more comfortable right away and not have to feel it out. We can just kind of feel like we've been here before. So anyway, just thought we'd share that.

Caroline: We also met new Swedish friends that are in our neighborhood. They don't live here full time, but we had a lovely time. They invited us over to their house, so they're definitely on the friend docket. We're just feeling it out.

Jason: Yeah. Also, for those of you who have been listening along through our friend journeys, we know that some of you have heard us talk about the DJs who moved in across the street. We've yet to mingle with them.

Caroline: We will keep you updated.

Jason: But I think we've also realized we were talking about on a walk this morning. We're like, we'll see other couples or other people we're like, Are you cool? And now that we're here a little bit longer, I think the question is, are you guys goofballs? Because that's really what we're looking for because the DJ couple is cool. But I think to them, they go, Are you cool? And we're not.

Caroline: And we're not cool. Yeah.

Jason: It's okay.

Caroline: No, I know, but whenever we ask ourselves, like, are you cool? Really just that means, like, are you on our wavelength?

Jason: Yeah.

Caroline: It doesn't mean, like, are you actually cool? It just means, like, will you be cool with us?

Jason: And honestly, I think the answer we would want it to be is, like, you're not cool, but you're goofballs. You want to be silly and joke around.

Caroline: This is what we need to look for someone who's not cool.

Jason: Okay, let's get into the episode here. I'm also realizing that I'm recording directly into GarageBand for this, the way this is set up, and there's not a, like, minutes and seconds like I'm used to. So all I can tell you is that we've been recording for 517 bars so far, so I'm going to probably have to figure out how to switch that into minutes.

Caroline: It seems like a setting that you could probably switch.

Jason: That'd be nice because I have no idea. I mean, we're up to 425 bar or 525 bars now, which is cool. Okay, let's get into this Spring 2023 WAIM Unlimited launch recap.

Caroline: You know nobody listened to the preamble because they...

Jason: Were just like, plus 30, plus 30, plus 30. Hold on. Did they get the ATM card? No, they didn't. Okay. Plus 30, plus 30.

Caroline: Get me to the good stuff.

Jason: So why do we share these launch recaps, Carol?

Caroline: Well, first of all, selfishly, it's our favorite type of content, which is kind of the nitty gritty, behind the scenes.

Jason: Case study.

Caroline: Case study, numbers. What'd you do, how'd it play out. Like, we were actually talking to a friend recently about this of ironically, sometimes I like content that is universal because I can apply it to my own life. But there's something about some content that is highly specific to someone else's business that somehow is more useful because I have the ability to sift through what they're doing and apply it to my own business. But there's something about specificity that just makes it, like, hit different. And so we love these launch recap episodes because they're specific. It's like, here's what we did for the launch. Here's how many sales we got, those types of things.

Jason: Yeah, and I think just a little caveat here, as we try and say very often, everyone's business is different. So take what's helpful, take what's not. Also realize we're two people. So if you're thinking about your business and it might be similar to ours, you're not two people. So there are a bunch of different things we have going for us that you might not have going. Also, you may operate a business that you don't want to look like our business at all. And that's cool too. So we just want to caveat with that. And as we share this stuff, it's really not meant to be boastful or braggadocious in any way because if you want to know how our journey started, we have our journey to enough post that we talked about many times where you can see we were making $1,500 a month.

Caroline: We started it at the very beginning with transparency.

Jason: We've been sharing that whole journey. This isn't like we started our launch recaps at the finish line here.

Caroline: Yeah. Also, you said, Take what's helpful, take what's not, and I just wanted to put an asterisk, take what's helpful, leave what's not. You don't have to take what's not.

Jason: I think take the stuff that's not helpful, but then you get to decide what to do with it. It's like you're the ATM of this information, so you can either give the card back, or you can just keep it for yourself. Okay, just a little reminder of how our WAIM Unlimited program is sold. So we do biannual launches, so that means Spring and Fall of every year. So twice the doors are open, and this has been going for now, I think, three or four years. I think we're going our fourth year of doing this. We have a whole episode about our hybrid launch model and kind of how we figured this out and got to this point. It wasn't the intentional choice from the beginning, although this was how things were sold before WAIM was WAIM when it used to be Buy Our Future.

Caroline: There was a brief period of time where we went to a more kind of evergreen thing, where we were doing launch windows once a month, and we experimented with it. And it became clear to us that we really like being in build mode, like, 90% of the time, and then being in sort of sales mode for basically four weeks out of the year.

Jason: So we also have lifetime pricing models.

Caroline: Yes. So this is what I wanted to share, because this is pretty unique, I think, compared to most businesses out there. We do have an entire podcast episode about lifetime pricing as well. And this is something that we wouldn't recommend to everyone, but we very intentionally have this. What we mean by lifetime pricing is once you pay for WAIM Unlimited, let's say you do the plan that's 20 months at $100 a month. After your 20 month, your 20th payment, you do not pay us again, and you continue to get access to WAIM Unlimited. So at that point, you have a lifetime membership. And for as long as we're around, you are going to have access to what the content is inside of WAIM. That doesn't necessarily mean that people will always get access to us or the community or any of those long term things, but the training itself and anything that we continue to create, we will always give access to. And some people are like, Wait, really? And it's like, no, really.

Jason: No. And I think one of the things to share is that with a lifetime pricing model, our revenue dips.

Caroline: Exactly.

Jason: So when people's payments end, we have a natural dip in our revenue, which, if you were to look at our revenue chart, it's a spiky chart, so it goes up and down and up and down. But the good news is we have done the due diligence on this lifetime pricing model and figured out that it continues to go up and to the right at a nice, steady pace. But that requires having our two launches per year, and it requires growing our audience, and it requires working with our affiliates, which we'll talk a ton more about, but it's not something where we can just have a couple of hundred people sign up for WAIM and then we're just good forever. We have the natural kind of fall off of those payments in the revenue.

Caroline: Yeah. And that's a trade off that we're happy to make because, again, like I said, the lifetime pricing is not for everyone, but for us, it brings us such a tremendous amount of joy to be able to offer something that people would even describe as this feels like it's too good to be true. We love over delivering. We love doing things differently, providing value that most businesses would not provide because we just like the human element of business. And the fact that I don't want to keep extracting from someone over the course of their life. I would like to at some point kind of in the exchange of you gave us money. I would like to deliver more value. Like just trying to give more than you get. And that's just how we run our business. And so we love that about the pricing model.

Jason: Okay, so we always set low and high goals for launches. This is a pro tip. If you are listening to this and you do any type of selling of anything, especially in a launch format, the low goal we always set as the we are almost 99% certain without any extra circumstances that we can't control, we will hit this number. So this really helps us to go. This we're confident in because we have past experience and we know based on our email size and all the other things that we'll hit this number. Then we have a high goal, which is not like, whoa, this would be amazing if we had 700 people sign up.

Caroline: Yeah, it's not magical thinking. It's not like, oh, there's something very wild would have to happen or banking on virality or something like that. It's more of like, okay, if we really implemented some of these tactics that we know, move the needle, what could we...?

Jason: And stuff went a little bit better than maybe we thought.

Caroline: Exactly.

Jason: So our low goal was 80 folks for this launch, and our high goal was 120. And for context, we have never sold and had more than 107 people sign up before in a launch. But we'll get to why we went for that slightly higher number as we move forward. A couple of other little caveat things. We do not do any paid ads during our launches. We are not using social media, namely Instagram, anymore, and we don't use any social media, but Instagram was our only one. And then we do have one little tactic related to Instagram, which we'll share, but I don't think it really affected the launch. And then let's talk about some feelings before we get into some of the nitty gritty.

Caroline: Yeah. So just going into the launch, I wanted to share what was our mindset, how are we feeling going into it, what was kind of our overall strategy going into this Spring launch? Because it's a little bit unique. We were coming off of the last year's traveling, and just to be quite frank, by design, last year, we were not business focused. Right. We were traveling, and we still did two launches last year. But you could really see the lack of, I don't want to say effort, because we're always putting effort into our membership, like we're always delivering for our members. But as far as lack of effort towards outward marketing, you could really see that reflected in the two launches last year of just...

Jason: Yeah, we didn't have the capacity to do...

Caroline: Exactly, we weren't giving our full focus. And so going into this launch, I was definitely feeling... Well, first of all, I was just on like a business high, which we've talked about several times in the past episodes. Being stationary again, being able to have a routine again, it just made me feel like I was thriving when it comes to business. However, I will say a lot of the projects we were working on in the first quarter of this year were sort of internal foundation projects.

Jason: I mean, all of them.

Caroline: Yeah, all of them. So it's like we did a whole refresh on a little bit of a brand refresh. We had a new structure for our coaching sessions, so that took some work into formatting those and coming up with a new system.

Jason: We came up with a new accountability game that we had...

Caroline: Came up with a new accountability game.

Jason: For our members.

Caroline: We did the Behind the Build Live, which was an experiment for our new homepage. And then the big thing was the WAIM dashboard. So I designed the whole new WAIM dashboard. So those are all things that don't have anything to do with outward marketing and getting new people or like big pushes to our newsletter or things like that, right? And so there came a point which still all of that strategy was for a purpose. You have to at some point reinvest in your foundation. But we were kind of six weeks out from the launch, and I remember we had a conversation where I was like, we just need to be very realistic with ourselves that there's nothing that's really changed between this launch and last launch in the Fall in terms of from the outside looking in. So this is a tactic we do often as we go. Let's look at our business from the outside as though we were a person in our ecosystem looking in and does anything feel different? Have we been doing anything different? And it's like, no, we do the podcast, we do the newsletter. That's our same marketing method. Go ahead, you were going to say something.

Jason: Oh, I was going to say and just to put the kind of like the goal numbers into context, when we started the year in January 1 and we did our yearly planning, we were like, okay, we have our two launches. Let's see if we can get our high goals up to like 150 people. But then when we got to the six weeks outpoint, we were like, hey us, we haven't done any outward marketing. We haven't had time for it. So we have to adjust those goals because now that's not realistic.

Caroline: Because now it is magical.

Jason: Exactly.

Caroline: You take a step back and you go, great, we set those goals based on what our financial goals were for the year, but on a quarter by quarter basis, we're always adjusting those.

Jason: Exactly.

Caroline: Because you look at what is happening in reality. And you go, oh, I'm setting myself up for disappointment if I just think magically, I'm going to do nothing basically different between last Fall and this Spring and I'm going to almost double my sales.

Jason: Well, the thing that you did different was you dreamed that it would happen. So it's like brass tacks.

Caroline: So that's where we made 120 our high goal. And so that was about six weeks out. And then we looked and said, okay, well, what is the one thing that within six weeks, what's one lever that we can pull? It can't be articles because articles are going to take... Articles meaning trying to boost our traffic to our site. That's going to take months to pay off. Okay, we could do a big social push, but we're not trying to be on social right now.

Jason: We could do something with YouTube, but that just takes so much time.

Caroline: As a business owner, you look at your arsenal of what channels do I have at my disposal? And for us, affiliates is the one channel that has worked really well for us and is super aligned for us because we are already so predisposed to pour energy into our offer and into our program. And every ounce of energy you pour into your program further empowers your affiliates to want to sell on your behalf because they believe in it and they trust you, and they know that this can help people, so they're more empowered to go sell it. So we said, let's just make the focus this Spring. Let's do a little bit more with our affiliates.

Jason: Yeah, and I'll give you a lot of credit because this is also just a hypothesis, right? Which is, like, we've had our affiliate program for the past, I think it's three or four launches. Our affiliate program is only members, so you can't be someone who's not a member to be able to promote WAIM. Even though we get people that ask, we just would rather it be people who have seen WAIM, have experienced our coaching live, like they know what we're doing.

Caroline: More authentic.

Jason: Exactly. Have had change in their business because of us, and they can talk about that. They're not just, like, making stuff up. So the past three launches that we've done with our affiliates, an average of 70% of our sales have come in. So if we've had 100 people buy WAIM, 70 of those people came from affiliates. Now, that doesn't mean that all those people had never heard of us because we've found that maybe half of those, at a minimum, are already on our email list. They're just also on other people's email lists as well.

Caroline: And of course, if an affiliate is offering a bonus or something.

Jason: Sweet bonus.

Caroline: You got to get that sweet, sweet bonus.

Jason: Sweet, sweet bonus, which we always recommend affiliates to do because that sweetens the deal for someone else to join. But with the focus on affiliates, we decided there would be three things that we would do a bit more of this time around. So we would create an affiliate hub. So this was using Teachery to create a course that just was for our WAIM members. And it basically brought in all these disparate Google Docs and PDFs and all this other stuff we would had to link to in all these different places. And you designed like, a beautiful affiliate hub, which is a great way to use a Teachery course in a different way that had some lessons. It had a bunch of email swipe copy. It had social images, everything in one place.

Caroline: Yeah. So it's things like, okay, here are the details of the upcoming launch. What are the dates? How does it work? Here's all of the information that you need to know about payouts and links and how we do that and when you get paid. Here's some messaging points in just terms of you don't have to start from scratch. Here are some of the messaging things that we think communicate the value of WAIM. Use those in your emails. We actually even did swipe files for emails that people could customize, and then we had some social graphics. Even though we're not on social, we want to make that easier for people. And so it just brought all that under one roof. And I think that, again, putting myself in the shoes of if I'm an affiliate, what is going to make it easier, less friction for them to talk about WAIM? That was the intention behind the affiliate hub.

Jason: I will just say as the person who's always responding to people's questions via email or Slack, it was so nice to be able to say, oh, it's right here in the affiliate hub in like lesson two. And I could just drop a direct link. That was so much better than like, open up Google Doc number seven, scroll down three quarters of the way. If you pass the divider that's got the squiggly in it, you've gone too far.

Caroline: So just a practical tip, if you're someone who also utilizes affiliates to sell, maybe think about...

Jason: Build a hub.

Caroline: Build a hub.

Jason: Build a hub that's easy to kind of organize everything. So the second thing that we did was we did an affiliate Q and A call, which we had not done before. So this was just a chance to join us live on Zoom, ask any questions, and then we would basically present for first time affiliates just the overarching idea of our program...

Caroline: And by the way.

Jason: And what they can get out of it.

Caroline: We have done this in our what we call Field Notes of coaching sessions leading up to launches. Field Notes is the tail end of our coaching sessions where we share some behind the scenes of what we're doing in our business or different announcements and things like that. And so that's where that has typically lived. And again, putting ourselves in the shoes of what's going to make it frictionless and easy, a dedicated thing where they can show up. It's a shorter call.

Jason: And what would get them excited too.

Caroline: Less than an hour. Exactly.

Jason: Because there's a lot of people who don't hang around for 2 hours of our coaching session to then watch the Field Notes part.

Caroline: Exactly.

Jason: So this is like, hey, if you're interested in being affiliate, show up. We'll chat about this. And I think we had about 100 people register and maybe like a third of those showed up live. But a good amount of the people who showed up live actually were the ones who ended up referring people to WAIM. And so the affiliate call went well. The third thing that we did was we sent more affiliate emails. So typically in a launch leading up, we would send four emails that mentioned the affiliate program, but they weren't all dedicated. Usually it was like two dedicated emails and then otherwise it was like, hey, sign up for this one's coaching. And here's a little shout out to the affiliates.

Caroline: Right.

Jason: This time we sent eight affiliate emails, five of which were fully dedicated just to affiliate stuff. And we always give people the option to opt out of those. So if you're a WAIM member who's not going to be an affiliate, you don't care about it, you can opt out of those and then you won't get the future ones. And then I just thought it would be fun to mention before we tell you the numbers of all of our sales, which we'll get to in a few minutes, 18 total affiliates brought in new WAIMers.

Caroline: Which I feel like people would think maybe it's more.

Jason: I would have thought it was more too because I was thinking about it, especially when you hear the number of total sales brought in by affiliates, but also hearing that number 18 will show you the power of affiliates, too, when we get into more numbers.

Caroline: So now let's talk about the numbers in terms of what were our marketing channels.

Jason: Yeah, so our email list size as of this Spring enrollment was 10,538 people. Hilariously enough, in our Fall 2022, our email list size was 10,528 people. It was a difference of ten. But what's funny is we've had probably like 400 people sign up for the newsletter and 400 people unsubscribe in that time. Well, 390. So we net gained ten people, which was funny. But it is new people, which is important because as long as you're getting new people in, even if people are unsubscribing, you're getting people who are interested.

Caroline: Definitely.

Jason: We sent nine sales emails during the launch. We rewrote every single email except for the final day ones, which are very standard for us, and just kind of like no one's really reading those or just like, oh, I got to go sign up for this.

Caroline: Yes, it is a two week launch, so it's from a Monday to future Mondays. And then I'm going to give you a little overview of what those sales emails subjects were.

Jason: Nice.

Caroline: I added that because I thought that would be valuable.

Jason: Cool.

Caroline: So in case you're wondering, well, what are your topics for your sales emails? After we get over the numbers, I will share that with you.

Jason: Okay, cool. And then we do podcast mentions. So we use our own podcast here as a channel to market and promote WAIM. So two episodes before the launch happens, we're doing the pre roll ads. These are our silly little jokey things that we do, our sponsor, which is just us, and then we do two podcasts during the launch that are more tactical. They're more, hey, if you're someone who's going to be tuning into this, we want you to hear that we can give business knowledge and not just talk about my favorite ways to make cinnamon rolls.

Caroline: Right. Both are important because people also want to understand your personality if they're going to be learning from you. But this is a little bit of strategic of if we're saying that WAIM Unlimited is going to help you reach your business goals and help you run a calm business. How are we going to help you do that? So we do podcast topics that are more geared towards kind of problem solving and business related things. So that's another practical takeaway. If you're going to be selling something, really think about what are the problems that your ideal customer is dealing with? How can you solve these kind of provide many solutions in the form of content in order to really get someone in the mindset of, I would finally really like to do X, Y and Z with my business. And the second thing I wanted to share there was you would not believe how long it took us to actually do sort of preroll ads for our podcast.

Jason: Oh yeah.

Caroline: And it was because we never I think years ago, we just didn't even have a content calendar. So we believed in the power of a podcast, but we would just record week of and it had no planning whatsoever. And that always meant that when we were recording, we just hadn't planned ahead. And then we were like, well, what are we going to say? So we would just kind of throw it away in the podcast episode itself. So that's another takeaway, is if you can give yourself the ability to be think ahead just a little bit, give yourself a content calendar and go, these are going to be the episodes that go live during my launch window. Let me just record a short reminder to people of the fact that they can check out my sales page and see what my offer is.

Jason: And how that relates to sales. By the way, just out of a quick little note here, 11% of our buyers, we do an immediate post purchase survey right on the thank you page after people buy that's embedded. 11% of the people who say that they found WAIM through the podcast. 11% of people say they found WAIM through the podcast.

Caroline: Great job, babe.

Jason: So that's not a small number. And it's great for us to know that our podcast does drive revenue, which is very helpful because otherwise why would we do this thing?

Caroline: So another thing, going into a launch, we always ask ourselves, what are our main messaging points going to be for this launch? We have sort of our basic messaging points that are always going to be what's valuable about WAIM? What problems are we solving? Those types of things. But sometimes there are kind of highlights that are unique to each and every launch. So going into this Spring launch, there were a few kind of selling points, I guess you could say, this time around. The first and most important being that we at the top of the year made the decision to raise the price of WAIM. We haven't raised the price at all in five years, so it's always been just an even $2,000 program. And the reason behind why we decided to finally raise it was a couple of different things. First and foremost, over five years, the value of what you get inside of WAIM.

Jason: It's quintupled.

Caroline: Quintupled.

Jason: So many more times. I just wanted to say too, that raising the price for us was not an easy decision.

Caroline: Definitely.

Jason: Because we care so much about just being a place in the online business world that's not gouging people for money based on fears and other things. So we're always just trying to be honest. We're trying not to do fear based in sales and we're also trying not to gouge people for a price that just seems too much, to be honest. We see other people selling programs for like $8,000 and we're like...

Caroline: And for me, it's not that I don't think that the information itself is valuable. I have to also balance that with I also understand that I can't hold somebody's hand and guarantee that they're going to get a result by the nature of our program. They really have to take the information, use the accountability to get those results, right? And so if we're not doing some type of small group, I'm working with you every week, I can more highly guarantee you're going to get results. I do think that that value is worth it, right? But it's a little bit of also understanding what level of handholding you're going to get in our program. So I'm balancing that as well.

Jason: Yeah, the other thing is that our costs have just increased in general. So as you have more members, your cost of things goes up. And we actually saw it at the beginning of this launch. Our website broke because we have basically gotten to this point where we have over I think it's 1,400 now total users on our back end. And we're pushing the limits of kind of our back end system we built that's very custom. It does a lot of querying and a lot of nerdy technical things, but we're basically hitting the limit of that. And so that's a reality. Like we have to pay for more hosting space. We have to pay for someone to help us rebuild this entire infrastructure.

Caroline: That is a partial trade off of the lifetime model because you're keeping people on, but they're no longer paying you, which is fine. To me, it's costs associated with making our coaching sessions accessible. We pay someone to do transcripts to basically create our coaching materials in different ways so that people can consume them in the way that is best suited to their brain.

Jason: And it's also like the people who bought WAIM at the beginning, they just bought a pair of pants and it's just a normal pair of pants. Two pockets in the front, two pockets in the back. You got legs. But the people who bought like a year later, they have like a belt loop. It's like, oh, I could wear a belt. That's kind of cool. People bought it for that. They have cargo shorts. The people who bought it for that, they have the secret pocket. They have a side zipper pocket.

Caroline: Wow.

Jason: And they can also roll up or down with a new pattern at the bottom of the pants.

Caroline: And the material is waterproof.

Jason: It's waterproof, it's water resistant, it's water repellent, and it's made of water, which is really cool. Like we do all that. So that's how WAIM has changed. It's a pair of pants. But truthfully, that is kind of how you think about it too. If you're raising a price of like, it's always getting better. So the people, if you're using a pricing model like ours, the people who are paying for it most recently are going to get more anyway, and then inflation. And that's just being realistic with about the economy, the way things are going, things are costing more. We've seen the price increase of every single service that we used to run our business.

Caroline: Which is why we also made the decision that if we are going to raise the price, we're going to give people a full year to let them know that.

Jason: Exactly.

Caroline: To give them an opportunity to get it at the lower price point because also the way that inflation works right, is like, it's a little bit of a game of chicken, of like, okay, this is getting more expensive. And then everyone's like, okay, everything's getting more expensive. And then before, you know, we're all just driving the prices up. So it's a little bit of trying to hedge against that by giving people a lead in time. So that was a lot. But we like to explain our decisions and let you know we're thinking about business decisions.

Jason: So that was selling point number one of three. Number two was we are creating this Client Off-Ramp Operating System (OS) in Notion. So this is really trying to help folks who are transitioning from clients to digital products and giving them a system in Notion that will help them track the entire process of transitioning from those clients into building a digital product and kind of going hand in hand with some of our other materials.

Caroline: And so we're always thinking about when we do a launch, what is something that would be fun for us to build that is also going to help make our WAIMers lives easier and their business more calm. And so this is one of those things. And that is something that we talk about during the launch. And just adding something to a program, you don't necessarily always have to be adding, adding, adding, because you don't want to bloat it, your offer, and you don't want to make it confusing. But in this case, we felt like it was a really well aligned new thing that we were already thinking about building for our members. And so we wanted to play that up in our messaging for the launch.

Jason: Yes. And then kind of the last thing and then there's kind of like one more little bonus thing which will make sense when we share it, is that focusing a lot more on WAIM's benefits and not its features. And I do think this is actually something that becomes easier to do as a program evolves more and you kind of more clearly know what the benefits are.

Caroline: Exactly.

Jason: And so early on in WAIM, like 2018, 2019, even 2020, the first three years of the business, the benefits were not clear.

Caroline: Well, you're taking that kind of a stab in the dark and saying like, here's what my intention is.

Jason: Which just let that be a permission slip to someone who might be listening to this. If you're in the first three years of your business, you may not know what the core benefits are yet, but you are providing value and you are solving problems. So you can highlight those things and people can pay you for those things, which people paid us for those things, but now we're more aligned with understanding what those benefits are, which you can share.

Caroline: Yes, because it's like, what does someone actually get out of this? And you know that by talking to your customers. And so for many years, and I think this is sort of the mentality of online business that was like probably like six, seven, eight years ago. It was all about the features and it was, here's my thing, and I have 40 hours of training. And it's like all of the features instead of just now, people are like, well, what am I going to get out of it? What is the core?

Jason: I've already bought 900 things that give me 40 hours.

Caroline: Yeah.

Jason: I don't have any more 40 hours to put in. Like, tell me what I'm going to get.

Caroline: Exactly. So a big part of our messaging was connecting, what are the things that you get inside of WAIM, but what actually is that going to do for you, right? So we kind of boiled it down into clarity, which is really what our roadmap does, is knowing what to work on when. Focus, which is what our monthly coaching session topics give you, is like just the permission slip to focus on one thing at a time. Ease, which is like Teachery and a lot of our templates. It's going to make whatever you're building inside of your online business easier by giving you tools to do that. Accountability. We have a new accountability game called WAIM of Stones.

Jason: It's been very fun.

Caroline: And then community and just like feeling less alone in your business journey as well as fun, which is just the kind of overarching bridge that we bring to everything, which is, do you want to feel reinspired with your business? Like, join a community that's fun. And so we just really played that up in our messaging.

Jason: So those were the three big selling points this time around. The price increasing in 2024. So two launches away. The Client Off-Ramp OS Notion System and then focusing on those benefits. And then a fourth thing that was kind of we weren't sure if we were going to need to do it or not. So we basically call this a JICLI. And a JICLI stands for a Just In Case Launch Idea.

Caroline: And it's different than Gigli.

Jason: Which is a movie that we haven't watched in classic movie nights, but I think maybe we should? Let's look up and see if it's problematic, and then we decide if we want to watch or not. But our JICLI, this again, Just In Case Launch Idea, was on the second Friday of the launch with basically just three days left, we would send an email offering to do a done for you course in Teachery. And basically what we said was, okay, this is the idea. But if we hit 72 buyers by the Wednesday before that email was going to go out, then we don't need to do it because we've reached close to our low goal and we don't need to put more work on our plate.

Caroline: And just to let you know, we've had a JICLI, which is not always the done for you Teachery course. Sometimes it's like we'll do a webinar or we'll do X Y. It's a launch idea.

Jason: We'll bake cinnamon rolls and send you photos of them.

Caroline: It's something that you know will move the needle a little bit. And we've had them. I don't think we've had to do one in the... We definitely didn't do them last year because we just didn't have the time. But even the year before that, in 2021, we had them, but we just...

Jason: We didn't need to do them. The Fall of 2021 was our biggest launch.

Caroline: To date.

Jason: Until this one.

Caroline: To date.

Jason: So we didn't need it because we actually had one set up for that. And I remember we were like, okay, we don't need it. We hit the number of people we were going for.

Caroline: But the difference is this time around also, we set our bar for our JICLI a little higher than we might because we thought we have the energy, we have the business motivation at this time, again, if it was last year, we didn't. If it was the year before that, it was enough, and we didn't need to. This is really where the enough framework comes into mindset of what is your goal?

Jason: And I'll say that this specific idea, Teachery done for you courses, is kind of a two pronged experiment for us.

Caroline: It's a two pronged experiment.

Jason: One, does it help move the sales of WAIM? Spoiler alert, yes. Two, how long does it actually take to do this, and how much do you like the work? Because this could be a tactic we use to sell Teachery itself moving forward. So let's see how people like it and how they respond to it because if it works, interesting, now we can use this moving forward in a whole separate way. So those are the things that were our selling points. And then you wanted to talk about our...?

Caroline: And we'll talk about did that move the needle?

Jason: We will. We are going to get to the numbers here in a moment, but we've got so much to go over that...

Caroline: Well, let's just get them to the numbers and then we'll circle back on the emails.

Jason: No, let's get through the emails. Come on.

Caroline: If I'm listening to this, I'm just like...

Jason: No, but I think if you're listening to this, no, I think if you're the type of person who likes a lot, you're okay with it.

Caroline: Okay. Alright. By this point, you're strapped in for...

Jason: Exactly. And for me, when I listen to launch recaps and someone's like, okay, I did my Facebook ad strategy and I'm like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. What do you mean you did your Facebook ad strategy? What did you design the ads in? What size were they?

Caroline: Okay, fair enough, you've convinced me.

Jason: So one of the things we mentioned earlier that we're just going to talk through is we rewrite these sales emails pretty much every single time. So the nine emails that we write, the last two are pretty much the only two we don't touch because they're just last day emails. And those ones can be like... They could literally just be... the email could just say this is an email letting you know there's 6 hours left.

Caroline: Here's a button.

Jason: Click the link.

Caroline: Yeah.

Jason: They don't say that they're more involved, but we've kind of just kept them the same because we've just seen they do the same thing. So of those nine, seven get fully rewritten and you want to talk about what we did on those?

Caroline: Sure. In case you're curious, and this is just from like, I don't know, trial and error. And also thinking through what do we think are the things that we want to highlight about our program. The point is why I'm struggling to say the words is just... the point I wanted to make was we're not following some magical formula. It's common sense of what are the things that I would need to know in order to make a decision to join this program.

Jason: And we really don't like sending the same sales emails over and over. It's totally fine if you do that. And we have no judgment of people who reuse very...

Caroline: If it works, it works.

Jason: Well to do emails. But for us, we just like knowing like, someone's going to read this and be like, I haven't read that email from them again. Interesting.

Caroline: Which I love.

Jason: Okay, go ahead.

Caroline: So I'm going to kind of just go over these. But the first email, the day of email, that's our announcement email. And it's also we tried something last... So we do track our emails and the performance of them. And in the Fall launch, we switched up this email completely, like a totally different approach. And we got less sales on the first day. So we went back to the one that had worked the best for us and yet the first sales numbers were not as good. And so I'm realizing what we learned from that experiment is probably this email, it still works fine, we still get sales.

Jason: Yeah.

Caroline: But I think it's actually the pre marketing. So I don't think the dip in sales when we changed the first email was a reflection of the email itself. I think it was a reflection of the pre marketing. And so we have more things we can do for that in the future.

Jason: And that email was a six month plan to give you kind of a if you're going to join WAIM, here's exactly what we would do in the next six months. So that you could just follow this basically like a mini roadmap from our whole roadmap that's in our program.

Caroline: And so the strategy there is pluck out one of your benefits. So for us it's clarity, right, is that people want to join WAIM because they're overwhelmed by all the different things that they can do in their business and they want someone to help them provide a clear path forward. So by plucking that desire out and it's a value that it's a benefit of our program, what is an email form that you can get that kind of delivers a little tip of the iceberg of that benefit? So that's what that is. And then also it does a double duty, which is we're giving them a six month plan, not a six day plan.

Jason: Exactly.

Caroline: And so the type of person who resonates with and is not scared by the fact of, like, oh, if someone likes the fact that we've given them a plan for the next six months, they're probably going to be a good fit for WAIM because they're not looking for silver bullets or overnight fixes. They're willing to put in the time and go at a slower pace. And so also be thinking what's a benefit I can highlight and then what type of person, what's a character trait, what's a specific mindset that I'm trying to attract and how can I speak to that and attract that type of person?

Jason: Yes. Just so you know, we're at 1532 bars.

Caroline: Great.

Jason: The second day's email was the six benefits emails. So the benefits that you just talked about.

Caroline: Yeah, everything that we listed off, we just basically did a fun way of communicating those benefits and talking about our features within the container of the benefits that they give you. So pluck out a couple of features of your offer and then think what is the actual emotional, intangible benefit that it gets someone and then find a fun way to communicate that.

Jason: Yes. So then the day after that. So we send emails Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, back to back to back. This is our roadmap preview. So we give a 48 hours no limit preview to our biggest, basically cornerstone product within WAIM Unlimited. That's our unboring business roadmap. And you get to basically see exactly how we teach. You get to watch live recorded coaching sessions, you get to see our workbooks, all the different things.

Caroline: And I'm going to call this your Assure tactic because we just did our April coaching was all about marketing. And we talked about this notion that we've talked about on this podcast many times of your marketing bridge. And the thing that we shared with our members is there are these guideposts between each marketing stage that you're trying to kind of send your potential customer through. And there's this crucial stage at the very end between when someone is considering buying from you and then they actually decide to buy from you. And there's this crucial in between stage where what you're trying to do is assure them that if they hand over their hard earned dollars that they are actually going to get the value out of it that you're promising, right? And so it's a little bit of thinking through what are the different ways that I can assure someone that their money is going to be worth it. And so for us, the best way we can do that is by giving someone a 48 hours preview of our sessions, how we organize them, our roadmap preview. It gives them a little bit of an idea of the clarity that they're going to get inside of our program.

Jason: And I think the overall quality of what we create. So getting into that roadmap, you can feel like, oh wow, this is pretty in depth, this is very well branded, everything's very well thought of. There's lots of little videos all over the place to lead you through it. So I think it's the absolute best thing that we can do to show people. Like recording a dashboard walkthrough video doesn't really help that much, but giving someone access to go through all of our resources does help.

Caroline: Yeah. So for you it could be a webinar or it could be whatever that is, but it's some type of way that you can communicate that you can actually solve someone's problem. What are the creative ways you could do that? So that's what that email is for.

Jason: So no email on Thursday we do our podcast episode that day and then Friday we had an email about not using social media. And so this was really just try to draw a line in the sand saying like, hey, you can build a business without using social media. Here's how we think about it. And also being realistic with folks like if you're at the very beginning of your journey, you may need to use social as we did.

Caroline: But this is an opportunity to go back to what we said about the six month plan, which is attract the type of person that you want inside your program. The type of person is probably someone who maybe they're tired of social media. They don't want the quick virality, they want something that is tried and true that they can pour their energy into that will support them for the long term.

Jason: Yes. And then the second Monday, this was a week after the launch starts, this was our pricing increase email. So this was really focusing on WAIM's value, how someone will get a return from that investment and giving them a basically year's advance notice on our price increasing so that they felt like, oh, this was a very thoughtful decision, not a this launch you have to join because the price is going to go up.

Caroline: Right. And then the Tuesday after that, we did a long in depth case study email. So sometimes we do these testimonial emails where it's a lot of different people's stories. And I think we did sprinkle that in throughout. But we thought especially for this launch, we were really trying to attract client based business owners who had moved to more scalable digital products and had kind of created a more calm business for themselves because of that transition that WAIM helped them with. So we decided to highlight one particular WAIMer, Jen Carrington, who is wonderful and has gotten a lot and has gotten a lot of value out of WAIM. And so we just...

Jason: I actually think Jen told us if we ever need an in depth testimonial, she would love to give it, which is just amazing. It's one of those things like, we and I don't know if you all can relate to this, we're so bad at asking for testimonials, we don't think about it. It's not something that's even in our planning. And so when someone brings that up, we're like, oh yeah, we should do that. That's very helpful.

Caroline: We go through periods where we're better at it, where I'm like screenshot that.

Jason: Well, yeah, but that's different than just like asking someone to say anything. So that's just a little call out to you of maybe send an email asking your folks if they want to write two to three sentences of a nice thing about you because it could be really helpful.

Caroline: Definitely.

Jason: So then no email on that next Wednesday. Thursday is a second podcast episode. And then that Friday was the JICLI. So that was just explaining the done for you bonus, 24 hours to buy, you get the bonus, and then after that the bonus goes away. We all know how bonuses work. And then I think we can just say it right here. That day was our second highest day of sales. So just to put it in context, the first day we had seven sales, the second day we had seven sales. And then it kind of goes down from there. That Friday, the JICLI bonus was 16 sales, which is incredible. So that was a really good day. And then like we said on the final Monday, we have those two last call emails. So we send an email in the morning, and then we send an email later on in the day as well, giving people the last call. And that last 48 hours is nuts. We'll get to that in a second here. But let's break down the whole launch. The first week accounted for 26% of our sales. So the first seven days, so that was 30 sales. The second week was 42% of our sales. Thank you to the JICLI Day, that was 48 of our sales. So if you didn't have the JICLI in there, that would have been like 32 again. So it would have been smaller. So that was a big bump that we don't normally have. And then the last 48 hours was 32% of our sales. So 35 people bought.

Caroline: Which did you notice that it's so close to what we always say? Which is a third, a third and a third, usually.

Jason: For a two week launch, that's very typical for us. I don't know if it would hold up as much for a shorter period of a launch, but we have just seen that over time, and I do think the first week has kind of been a little bit longer. Like it used to be the first 48 hours was that first 30%. But that has stretched out a little.

Caroline: And I think also, as you see, more affiliates, too, because...

Jason: People are also waiting. We even got emails like, I'm waiting to see who's offering the best bonus. I think people are a little smart to that. So, yeah, our total numbers, overall sales reminder, our goals were 80, low goal, 120, high goal. 113.

Caroline: New WAIMers.

Jason: Joined WAIM. Amazing. Sound the party horn. Don't have that built into this new setup, but I will at some point.

Caroline: We will. We were so happy with that.

Jason: Very happy with that number. Again, that's our biggest launch ever. Previous to that was Fall of 2021 when it was 107 people. The percentage from affiliates was 76%. So that was 86 people from affiliates, which is amazing. And so just to compare it to our previous three launches, Fall of 2021 was 107 people total. Spring of 2022 was 86. Fall of 2022 was 67. So quite a big turnaround from one of our lowest launches in the Fall to our biggest launch ever this Spring.

Caroline: Which I think is what made it feel so great, is I was really preparing myself for this idea that, listen, it's okay. Last year was more of a maintenance year. And so if you're not pouring energy back into your business, you can't expect things especially if you don't have a team and things like that, you can't expect things to just keep growing, right? And so especially with Spring, I was like, listen, if it takes a while, if it takes some months for us to kind of get things going again, that's absolutely okay. I was preparing myself for that. But then to I think that revelation, the six weeks out and going, okay, it's not just a foregone conclusion that we have to wait around for some of our other tactics to see some results. There are very real things that we can put effort towards today in order to have a better outcome. And those efforts that we put towards affiliates, I think really showed that they contributed to results. And so it's just a reminder of we have more power than we think we do. And that results in our business don't just come from the heavens. If you do put an effort, you can see results. And I hope that's an empowering thought. It just continues to show me how grateful we are that we've built our business in this way where we show up for our members. We create an experience that I think shows the love and care that we put into the training materials that we create and how much we want them to succeed in their businesses, how much we want to provide a comfortable place for them to grow. And every ounce of energy that we put towards that, I think pays back to us and pays back to the community.

Jason: Yeah. And then just to give you some more numbers here, so specifically revenue numbers to see how those buyer numbers break down. So our total monthly recurring revenue, that's MRR, for those of you who know that acronym, is $18,200 added. So that is on top of what we were already making in monthly recurring revenue. Our total affiliate cost added, because there was cost with that 76% of people coming from affiliates was $5,680. So $5,680. So our total net revenue added after affiliate costs being paid out will be $12,520 per month, which is just fantastic. So if everyone paid in full all the way through through all of their payments, because we sell WAIM via two payment plans, the total revenue would be $226,000, which is just incredible. But you have to remember, we'll pay out $68,000 to affiliates. So that is our acquisition cost of this launch in total. So our complete net revenue after affiliates being paid out, all said and done, money to us in our bank account over the time of all payments being paid will be $158,000 for this enrollment period. Which is amazing.

Caroline: Yeah. And also just as a caveat there, of course, again, that's not taking into consideration operating expenses and taxes and things like that. So that's not just like pure profit that is going straight into our bank account.

Jason: I actually feel really great. I mean, we feel really great about this launch because it was our biggest launch ever. But I feel even better because we basically did no outward growth in the past six months. And really, you could argue in the past like 18 months because we've been traveling, so we haven't been able to do any of that. So it's going to be very interesting to see how things go between now and our next launch and then moving into 2024.

Caroline: Yeah, and we do have some things that we want to do for outward marketing, but also, as you know, because we've talked about it on this podcast, our focus is also diverting to Teachery as well right now. And yeah, so you'll be able to come along with us on the journey and what are we going to change for Fall's launch and how are we going to do things differently? And we'll be able to share all of that with you.

Jason: Last thoughts and feelings about this launch from my side. It's just so much gratitude for our existing WAIMers and for our new customers who join us. And if you're a brand new WAIMer listening to this podcast, we hope that you had fun buying WAIM. I just think that's like a lost thing in the online business world is you buy a thing and then sometimes you regret it. And we don't hear that really ever from anybody who buys WAIM. And we love that because we want to be the thing that just feels like, wow, this did live up to all the hype.

Caroline: Exactly. It's like, I thought it was too good to be true and so I was waiting for the other shoe to drop and it just never did. And love that. Yeah. And my overall feeling, too, is how much gratitude not only for our WAIMers and for our affiliates, but also gratitude for the early years where we really had those messy in between moments of trying to switch out the puzzle pieces until we got a business model that worked until we found an offer that worked until we found a sales message that worked. Those of you who maybe are newer to the podcast or newer to Wandering Aimfully are probably showing up and hearing this and just going, wow, it just works like that. And it's, I think because you didn't see the messy beginnings of when we weren't sure that it was working or we would do a launch and the sales would be down and we would go, what are we missing? And so we'd have to change the messaging and we'd have to... and it took us a while to reconfigure coaching into a way that worked really well. And remember when we had the six month plan and then the WAIM Unlimited plan? And I remember we hung out with a friend this weekend and she asked, you've done coaching now for 40 months. Do you ever feel kind of the creative burnout where you just go like, what are we even going to talk about? Or do you not look forward to creating it? And I had to be honest with her and say there were times last year for sure when we were traveling where I just didn't have the mental energy, but I was never, ever upset that I had to do coaching, and it's because we have just found the right model for us. It aligns with our skills, it aligns with our passions. And I feel so like to be able to answer that question in a way where I go, no, I still love coaching every month. I love putting together the training, and I love talking about business, and I love trying to apply it to all of our WAIMers' businesses, and I love empowering them to set goals that are not based on anybody else's expectations of them except for themselves. And I want to create a place where people who deal with chronic illness or deal with mental health struggles or deal with just life circumstances can find supportive business communities that are going to push them towards their goals, but also in a way that's loving and flexible and compassionate. And I believe in that vision so much. So, yeah, it's just gratitude towards those years where we didn't have it figured out to be able to get to this place where it is repeatable. We do know what we're doing a little bit, yeah.

Jason: All right, well, I want to end this thing before we get to 2000 bars, because we're at 1968 bars, and I don't know what that means because I don't know anything about music, but I can see that we've kept a tempo of 120 the whole time, so that's good. And I feel great about those numbers as we're doing a numbers podcast.

Caroline: Yeah. Thank you.

Jason: So, yeah, we got 15 bars left, so if there's anything else you want to say.

Caroline: I think we end it.

Jason: I hope you enjoyed this recap episode. We love doing these. Like we said, they're a very fun look and things that we like to create.

Caroline: If you ever have any tactical nitty gritty questions about the business, we're pretty transparent, so feel free to always email us those, and it'll give us ideas of things that we can share with you behind the scenes.

Jason: Yeah. All right. We'll be back with another episode next week. We appreciate. We hope the gear setup sounds good. You can feel free to send us any feedback, hello@wanderingaimfully.com. Only good feedback, though. Like, if it sounds terrible, don't tell me. I don't want to know. Actually, I do want to know because I want to see if I can make it or whatever. All right. Those are all the bars we have.

Caroline: Have a great day.

Jason: That's it.

Caroline: Okay, bye.