201 - We fell short of our launch goals. What did we learn?

[00:00:00] Caroline: Welcome to Growing Steady, the show where we help online creators like you build a Calm Business, one that's predictable, profitable, and peaceful. We're your hosts, Jason and Caroline Zook, and we run Wandering Aimfully, an unboring business coaching program and Teachery, an online course platform for designers. Join us each week as we help you reach your business goals without sacrificing your well being in the process. Slow and steady is the way we do things around here, baby.

[00:00:29] Jason: All right, cinnamon rollers, that's you. Let's get into the show. Let's do a launch recap episode. Here we are. Welcome to the podcast.

[00:00:42] Caroline: Are these your favorite episodes?

[00:00:43] Jason: I love a launch recap. Even though, as you've read the title of this episode, it was not one of our best launches we've ever had. It was very different is the word we were using, but a ton of lessons learned. I don't even want to faff about. I don't even want to spend three minutes talking about the two loaves of sourdough that I baked this morning.

[00:01:02] Caroline: They're so.

[00:01:02] Jason: I did a 48 hours ferment and a cold ferment in the fridge.

[00:01:06] Caroline: First time you've done that?

[00:01:07] Jason: And. No, no, I've done that a couple times, but I wasn't feeling the sourdough tang. And again, I don't want to talk for three full minutes about this.

[00:01:13] Caroline: Maybe we should just dive into it. Just a little bit.

[00:01:14] Jason: I wasn't getting the sourdough tang from the past couple loaves. And it's because I'm put the dough together and then it sits overnight in the fridge, and then I bake it the next morning. Cause I'm so excited to have it. But that doesn't develop the core sour flavor.

[00:01:29] Caroline: And so do you feel like these loaves this morning were more tangy?

[00:01:31] Jason: That's a better question for you. Do you feel like this?

[00:01:34] Caroline: I was doing something when you came and brought me the taste.

[00:01:36] Jason: I saw an Instagram reel that was. It was the opposite. It was like how I want my husband to react every time I bake a new loaf of sourdough.

[00:01:43] Caroline: Yeah.

[00:01:44] Jason: And it was like someone, like, running and screaming was like, "This is amazing," and it's like, how they react. It's like, that was good, you know? And it's like, that's how I feel pretty much every time I bake one.

[00:01:54] Caroline: I do hype you up. I'm a pretty good, like, baker hype man.

[00:01:56] Jason: Sure. You have glitter all over your face, and it's so distracting.

[00:02:01] Caroline: I was getting ready for coaching yesterday. And I use this eyeshadow palette that I use. I'm, like, such a millennial woman who does not care about her appearance very much. I use the same eyeshadow shade. I'm just gonna sort of, like, wipe it across. And I don't know. In this moment, I just saw the glitter one, and I just needed, like, a little bit of glitter in my life. And I was just like, sure.

[00:02:19] Jason: Yeah.

[00:02:19] Caroline: And immediately regretted it. Immediately regretted it. I was like, oh. It was like, it's like, chunks of glitter.

[00:02:25] Jason: It's everywhere.

[00:02:26] Caroline: I'm like, this could scratch a cornea. You know what I mean?

[00:02:28] Jason: Honestly, I walked by you in the kitchen, and, like, it was on the back of your neck, and I'm like, how did it get there?

[00:02:33] Caroline: Because it's glitter.

[00:02:36] Jason: Anyway, the sourdough loaves turned out fantastic. 40 hours cold ferment. Highly recommend it. And I just, you know, the llama sourdough. Also put together a batch of cookies that just, gosh, need to open this bakery. But I don't want to own a bakery. Let's talk about launches. You want to talk about that?

[00:02:50] Caroline: Are you okay?

[00:02:51] Jason: Yeah. Fantastic. I'm getting over.

[00:02:53] Caroline: Yeah, you can stop talking. Like, just take a pause.

[00:02:56] Jason: I'm getting over a cold. And so I'm finally feeling a human again. And, like, I have lots of things that I want to just, like, be more than a couch sneezer, you know? Like, I want to be more than that.

[00:03:05] Caroline: You were a couch sneezer for a few days.

[00:03:07] Jason: Okay, let's talk about this launch recap. So just to set the top. Set the scene.

[00:03:12] Caroline: We love to set the scene.

[00:03:14] Jason: We did not hit our goals. This is the first time in eleven launches of WAIM Unlimited that we did not hit. We didn't hit our high goal, but we also didn't hit our low goal. And I just, we both want to start out just by saying, first of all, we're immensely grateful that we've had all these other fantastic launches. Last year was the biggest year for WAIM Unlimited. We'll talk more about that and why that happened. But also, we're still so grateful for the WAIMers that we did gain this launch.

[00:03:41] Caroline: Exactly. I told Jason, I'm like, listen, I love a launch recap, and I also think if we're going to come on here for the past eleven launches and tell you when we do hit our goals and when it goes really well, one of our values is transparency. We better also come on here and tell you when we don't meet our goals, like, we could easily just kind of, like, be, like, brush past it and just not do a recap. It's very important that we show you both sides. That being said, what I don't want is to come on here and talk about our launch that "didn't meet our goals" and somehow give the impression that we're not A, immensely grateful for every single new WAIMer that did join. B, that we're somehow deluded into thinking that a six figure launch is somehow a disappointment.

[00:04:22] Jason: Because that's... We still did do a six figure launch.

[00:04:24] Caroline: Yeah. Just to be clear, at the top here, like, the revenue from this launch, it's in the six figure. So, like, there's no way that I'm gonna come on here and be act disappointed by that. There's just, like, you gotta have some perspective here. So I'm trying to walk the balance of being honest about the emotions that happen when you have a launch that doesn't meet your goals and that is lower than maybe your previous one when you thought you kind of had it figured out. We're gonna share all of the nitty gritty of what that felt like. Cause we value being transparent and honest about that business journey. On the flip side of that, just know that we're also extremely grateful and are not here to complain in any way, shape, or form.

[00:05:04] Jason: Yeah, for sure.

[00:05:04] Caroline: That's my caveat.

[00:05:05] Jason: We don't have it in the notes, but we did talk about it in our coaching session yesterday for our awesome WAIM Unlimited members. But the Luck Surface Area kind of idea with attributed to Jason Roberts, it's not in our notes, but I want to come back to it later on because I think it is a really helpful for me, it's been very helpful to think about it. So I'm just. I want to put that as a note for us mentally. Okay, so let's get into to this launch. The other thing that I think we wanted to talk about is, like, it would have been real easy just to skip the recap episode.

[00:05:34] Caroline: I know.

[00:05:34] Jason: It would have been really easy just to be like, well, if you just look around, no one's going to notice if we don't do one because they only happen twice per year. We have 40 other podcast episodes that happen throughout the year. People would probably not even notice. And I think that us, as people who really value transparency and honesty in online business, we don't want to pretend that everything is going perfectly all the time. We don't want to pretend that you have the answers to every single question when it comes to online business. And so we wanted to get on here and share, like, yeah, our past launches, especially in 2023, were really good. They were the biggest we'd ever had.

[00:06:06] Caroline: Some might even say inflated.

[00:06:08] Jason: Some might even say inflated. But we also wanted to share this one because it's also, it's a good time for us to see, okay, what we've been resting on in our business has kind of run out of its, you know, the battery charge that had...

[00:06:24] Caroline: Exactly, like, we filled up this reservoir for years and then we enjoyed that reservoir. We went off social media because we could. We took a year off to travel because we could. We built this amazing reservoir of an audience and a business and a machine that was working really well. But to Jason's point, that doesn't mean that the flywheel that's going doesn't start to slow and eventually just completely stop if you don't give it a nice, like, push every once in a while, right?

[00:06:54] Jason: Yeah. So just to give you a background, for those of you who maybe this is one of your first episodes you're listening to, you don't have a full picture of what we sell. So we have an un-boring coaching program called WAIM Unlimited. We only open the doors twice per year. So that's in the spring and in the fall. We've been doing this now for... This is our fourth year of doing the enrollment periods. Maybe fifth year, actually.

[00:07:12] Caroline: Sixth, actually.

[00:07:13] Jason: Well, it's the 6th year of WAIM, but it's doing the two enrollment periods per year.

[00:07:17] Caroline: It's our fourth full year.

[00:07:19] Jason: Yeah. So we. And this is, this has worked really well for us. And actually, I think we have another coaching episode we want to do in the future of kind of like just the business model of what we've kind of figured out, especially as it relates to teaching content, whether you're a coach or a course creator or whatever. I think we want to dive more into, like, how we've set that up because it has worked really well. So we do typically like a lead up series, like four to six weeks before a launch. That's through our email list. We'll talk more about that, maybe some other content. Then we open the doors for two weeks. We don't really have any discounts at all. There's no, like, kind of early bird part of the launch. We do have what we call JICLI's, which we will just leave there as like a little teaser that we'll come back to.

[00:07:58] Caroline: What's a JICLI?

[00:07:59] Jason: And then we close the doors. So that's basically how it works. It's. It's a pretty simple, on its face way of selling what we sell. And it creates a Calm Business for us that's very predictable, profitable, and peaceful, as we like to talk about. And what started in the beginning is like a launch is very pressure filled because it feels like there's so much weight on it working.

[00:08:18] Caroline: Yeah.

[00:08:18] Jason: Once you do get it working and you find out who your ideal audience is and the pain points that you solve and the things that you offer people and how you position it, and getting case studies from existing members, then having them become affiliates. As we've talked about in a previous episode, we have a whole episode in our, how we set up our affiliate program for WAIM. It just started to work. And so it has been very predictable.

[00:08:37] Caroline: Really became this repeatable system that was like a well oiled machine. And we would change things up. We would do, you know, a different pre marketing here or a different idea there of something that we were going to promote during the launch. So we did change up things.

[00:08:51] Jason: Slightly different positioning, too.

[00:08:52] Caroline: Slightly different positioning time to time. There was a point where then we introduced the un-boring business roadmap. So there had been some tweaks, but for the most part, it was very predictable. A pattern that you will hear us come back to that we talk about often on this podcast and everywhere we teach content is online business is a puzzle. And it's not like a jigsaw puzzle. It's like a Rubik's cube. There's like three dimensions to it, there's twelve dimensions to it. And every time you twist one aspect of your business, you start to see, well, maybe that helped align these certain elements, but it kind of misaligned these other elements. And so that's just the way that I think about businesses. It's a Rubik's cube. You're constantly trying to twist sides until you can line up the colors, and it kind of feels like everything is working. And so leading up to. Well, do you want to tell them kind of the big change that... the big Rubik's cube part that we changed this year.

[00:09:43] Jason: For sure. I like your Rubik's cube. But the thing I just wanted to share because it sounded, it seemed funny to me when I thought about it, was, it is a puzzle. So business is a puzzle, but it's like you're doing it at a drafting table that's on a 45 degree slant, so the puzzle is slowly sliding and you're like, constantly, like, hold on, hold on, hold on. You're like, sliding it back up and like, pieces are falling off. It doesn't feel that bad, but it is kind of a funny metaphor of, like, the angle is just ever so slightly difficult.

[00:10:08] Caroline: I also wait just to build on that metaphor.

[00:10:10] Jason: Okay, sure. Let's just.

[00:10:11] Caroline: I like that the drafting table is like a posturepedic bed where it's changing the angle and it's changing the angle and you don't know what it's gonna, what angle, like, is gonna happen.

[00:10:23] Jason: Yeah, it's all over the place.

[00:10:24] Caroline: And I view that as kind of like the market. Like, you don't know what, where people's attention is going. You don't know what people are gonna care about. You don't know all these external cultural factors, economic factors, things in the world that are impacting the angle of your drafting table. And so you're like, I gotta put pieces up.

[00:10:41] Jason: Exactly. So, yes, you were asking me kind of the big thing that we did this, this launch for spring 2024 was we changed the price for the first time. So for the very first time, basically, since the inception of Wandering Aimfully, we had always charged $2,000 lifetime price. So it's essentially, you pay $2,000, you're done paying us forever. You keep access forever, and you keep getting new things forever. We find it to be a very healthy way of selling digital products like we sell. It doesn't keep someone on the constant paying forever and rethinking about, oh, should I keep paying for this? Should I keep paying for this? It gives them a goal to be like, I'm going to finish paying for this. I'm going to continue to give value. And like, we have heard from members over and over and over again, you'll see it on our sales page, too, that WAIM becomes one of the best investments people make ever because it continues to give value over time and they don't have to keep paying for it.

[00:11:32] Caroline: Exactly.

[00:11:32] Jason: And we love that. We love that exchange. It feels really great. But we also, as business owners who included in WAIM are a bunch of different products and courses and things. We have made a bunch of new things. So we made the Notion Starter Pack. We made the Page Layout Library, the Client Off-Ramp OS. We just made a ton of stuff. Plus, not to mention the 55 coaching sessions.

[00:11:50] Caroline: It really is like from start to finish, every resource that you need in order to run a digital products business.

[00:11:56] Jason: Not to mention you get access to Teachery. And again, this is not to sell you on it. This is to explain the value of why we price things and why we raise the price. So the biggest value anchor part of Wandering Aimfully is having Teachery, our online course platform, which we have spent in the past three or four years, $300,000 on that platform. From developer fees to investing in redoing the UI completely, just to running the app itself over the course of multiple years, like it costs money to do that. And so we looked at all of that at the end, well, I guess at the end of 2022. And we essentially said we don't just want to raise the price because we want to make more money. We think that, like, it's time to raise the price because we've invested so much into it that it is worth more. And also, if we never raise the price of our product, the cost of living as a human being, the cost of goods, of running a business, all of those things are always increasing around you.

[00:12:48] Caroline: And that was the other big part of it too, was just as a business owner, you have to look at your profit margins and you have to look at. We were starting to have a lot of conversations about what does it look like to hire on some help because we know that as we enter into the next chapter of our lives where potentially children are on the horizon, we are going to have less time. And it doesn't mean we want to grow a team. I think you all know that we want to keep it very lean and very small. But it was becoming clear that we were going to need to have at least the option of hiring someone. And the profit margins that we were operating at with WAIM, which you would think are extremely high, except for when you don't have that content engine running anymore. And most new people are coming through affiliates and you're giving a 40% commission to affiliates. It is a thinner profit margin. And so we were having to reconfigure the economics of how our business is running. And so that's what we want you to think about too, as a business owner, is we always tell people to do this exercise that we call offer math, where you really want to look at what am I selling? What does it cost me to deliver the experience that I want to deliver to my customer? What are my affiliate fees, what are my paid ads? If you're doing that or whatever those like, part of being a business owner is also looking at profit margins. And so that was a part of this decision as well.

[00:14:01] Jason: Yeah. So we raised the price and we used all of 2023 to sell WAIM Unlimited with the last two launches that it would ever be $2,000. So we gave people basically a year in advance of notice of we were going to raise the price. So that kind of, like, leads us up to, setting our goals for this launch in the spring. So our low goal was 75 sales.

[00:14:24] Caroline: Well, I think. Sorry, just to fill in the blanks there. We did, like you were saying in the last two launches of 2023, we said that we were going to raise the price, but I think it's important to set the scene with what the sales numbers were for the.

[00:14:37] Jason: Yeah, I'm going to get to it. Yeah.

[00:14:38] Caroline: Well, because you were starting with the. The goals, and I think the goals were born out of the 2023 launches.

[00:14:44] Jason: Okay, cool. So in 2023, we did two launches. The first one was, I believe, like, 110 sales. I don't have the exact number here. The second one was 142 sales. That was our biggest launch we have ever had. And so based on those two launches, it kind of felt like we, like, reset the amount of people that would be joining WAIM, because in 2022, our average between the two launches was 70 people per launch.

[00:15:13] Caroline: Yep.

[00:15:13] Jason: So we basically jumped up over 100 for both launches in 2023.

[00:15:17] Caroline: Yeah. The spring was 113. The fall was 142.

[00:15:19] Jason: And so when we set the goals for spring of 2024, even with the increased price, we just basically looked at the past year, and we were like, well, we're over 100 in both launches. Like, let's use 100 as our high goal.

[00:15:30] Caroline: And we knew that it would be less. Right. So we weren't saying, like, 100. We weren't saying it's going to keep going up, like, 150. We were under no illusions that raising the price was going to mean more sales. We knew it would be less.

[00:15:41] Jason: Yeah. So that was our high goal was 100. And again, we always recommend, if you've heard us talk about launches before, setting a low and a high goal, the low is the number you really think you can hit just based on, like, previous experience, audience size, et cetera. So we set that at 75 because we felt like, listen, in 2022, we hit 70 people. In 2023, our average was, like, 120 between the two launches. That feels really doable. And so that's. That's kind of how we set those numbers. Now, when we talk about the fall 2023 launch, 142 sales was incredible. We do feel like now, in hindsight, what you realize is that was the last launch we would ever have at $2,000 price point. So anybody that was on the fence was essentially like, okay, I'm opting in because they have a very affordable payment plan. I'm just, I want to grab this program and be set at that price and never have to worry about the price going up. So we definitely think that was a huge decision. Also, we did a big content push, probably the biggest one we have ever done leading up to that launch. And that was intentional because we knew it would be the last launch at that price, which was our Calm Business Encyclopedia. So it was 26 pieces of YouTube content and written content leading up to the launch. So there was a bigger marketing push, a lot more touch points, people hearing about us. And so that all of that led to the biggest launch we'd ever had. But in the spring for this past launch that we just finished, no lead up. There was no, no new content created. There was no new product added to WAIM. The only thing that changed was the price went up. So, you know, if you take a step back and you just look at our business objectively, you're like, well, hey, guys, just so you know, looking at this, no new content, no new product, price going up, you should probably lower your expectations.

[00:17:26] Caroline: Yeah, we should have lowered our expectations. But I do want to talk about the intention behind that decision to do no lead up. We really, at this new price, we wanted to have a launch that was going to be what we call a baseline, meaning we wanted to see what would sales do just with our email list without a big content push. Because last fall, to be perfectly honest, you all that listened to those episodes, that was really hard, the content blitz that we did leading up to the last launch. And so what we didn't want to do was go into this new era at this new price, make all these assumptions about we have to do some extreme, you know, content project leading up to a launch because then we would never know if that was true or not. We would never, we would, we would be making that assumption and then we would kind of box ourselves into doing that every single launch to get the sales that we wanted. So we just thought it's a little bit of a risk to do a low key launch and just see what the new price does. A little bit of a risk is an understatement. I mean, not totally because it still did well, but I mean, you know, you do see that when you don't do stuff, you're going to have lower sales. But I still stand by that decision because it showed us what the baseline is. And so now if we do more of a push for content leading up to the fall launch, I know that that is time well spent, not just because I'm making an assumption, but because the data has shown me that it is necessary in order to sell.

[00:18:48] Jason: Yeah, absolutely. So we, we set that baseline. We started the launch. And I think this was the first launch. Well, I know this was the first launch in eleven launches of WAIM Unlimited, where by, like, day two, we were like.

[00:19:01] Caroline: We knew.

[00:19:02] Jason: Huh, this is interesting.

[00:19:03] Caroline: We knew.

[00:19:03] Jason: And then by day four, it was actually the first launch where we had one day of zero sales. We'd never had that before.

[00:19:09] Caroline: Yeah.

[00:19:10] Jason: And we were like, oh, you know, what's happening here? And so we kind of had all these emotional roller coasters that we had not had in a launch in quite a while.

[00:19:18] Caroline: Yeah.

[00:19:18] Jason: Because most of our launches have been very fluid, very predictable, very, like, okay, this is what happens. Like, we get a sale every single day, at least. And then there's just kind of these ebbs and flows, like beginning, middle, there's a little bit of a lull, and in the end, you have this big push.

[00:19:30] Caroline: But thank goodness that I do feel like that emotional muscle memory comes back because it put me right back into when we were at the very beginning of WAIM and things were not a well oiled machine, and we would try things and it wouldn't work. Or, you know, across my entire online entrepreneur career, I've launched things to crickets. I've launched things to no one. And so you do forget a little bit when things are working well. But thankfully, some, the lessons that you learn during those times do come back in muscle memory. And I was like, oh, yeah, you remind yourself, I've been through this before. It doesn't always work. It's okay. It is a puzzle. You just have to ask yourself, what's happening here? How can I tweak? How can I adjust on the fly? And so for any of you, I'm saying that for any of you who maybe, you know, you're earlier in your entrepreneurial journey when you encounter something like this, if you don't have that historical data, just remember you're building that resilience muscle. And so it is a good thing to know how you're going to adapt to maybe a launch that didn't meet your expectations.

[00:20:30] Jason: So what were the actual numbers now to, to bury the lead? Because this is, I'm sure, what, at this point, you're very interested in knowing the numbers. So we ended up with 45 sales.

[00:20:40] Caroline: Which is still incredible.

[00:20:41] Jason: Which is incredible because when you do the math at $2,800 in total revenue per sale. That is $128,800 in gross revenue. So we have nothing to complain about as business owners there. We are still very happy that we got to that number because again, by the end of the first week, we were like, what are we going to end up with? Like, we have no clue. And there was a little bit of a push at the end. We also did two bonuses throughout the launch. And we call these JICLI. So a JICLI is a Just In Case Launch Idea. And the whole thing with that is like when you're getting ready for a launch, you prepare something that if it's not necessarily going as well as you want, you have something that's going to create a little bit of extra effort for you. But you know, it's going to be an incentive for someone to buy and you do it like a weekend only bonus or like a 24 hours bonus or whatever. And so we, we typically only have one of these, but this time around we were kind of like, okay, we need two, and so let's just have them ready. And so we, we did two of these and they definitely moved the needle and it kind of took it from the launch, felt out of our control. And like, the sales were not coming to two periods in the launch when we boosted sales back up and kind of like showed people the interest and value in buying Wandering Aimfully.

[00:21:50] Caroline: And in case you're like, what were they? And what actually did move sales, they were both built around this idea of creating a personalized plan.

[00:21:56] Jason: Yeah.

[00:21:57] Caroline: So we know that one of the kind of biggest, not even objections, but kind of like things that...

[00:22:03] Jason: See ya, Airpods.

[00:22:04] Caroline: ...things that hold people back from WAIM is there's so much information and so many resources. And we do that on purpose because it's very customizable to whatever your business is. But someone doesn't want to do the hard work of going like, what should I, what should be my journey through these resources for my unique business goals? So both of these ideas were around this idea of fill out a survey, tell us what your specific goals are, and we will take the time to put together a personal plan for, for you so you know that you're not going to get lost right when you join WAIM.

[00:22:32] Jason: And, you know, it would be great if we had the time to be able to do that for every single person that joined, but those things take a lot of mental effort on our part.

[00:22:39] Caroline: An hour to 2 hours each.

[00:22:41] Jason: It's mental effort we want to give, but it's just, you only have so much to give. You know, it's, if you look at just an average, if we had 70 people join and we were going to do that for every single person, that's basically 100 plus hours of work, that would be almost three weeks, four weeks of work for us that we'd be never ending in doing a task. It's just not possible to offer that to everybody. But those two JICLI's that we had definitely helped us have little nudges back in control of the launch. And I wanted to share this little table. It's going to be a bunch of numbers I'm about to throw you, which I know doesn't work extremely well on a podcast, but you'll get the takeaway and I think it'll make itself very interesting here. So we're going to skip adding 2023 to this data because it was really just an outlier year. The, the price changing was a huge, you know, motivator for people to buy. So we're going to look at our average launches in 2022 because that's more representative of, like, where we were when we did this launch in 2022, our average launches were 70 new WAIMers per launch.

[00:23:40] Caroline: Yep.

[00:23:40] Jason: On average, the gross revenue of that at the $2,000 price point. So that's $140,000 per launch. Our affiliate costs, because our affiliates were at 40%, based on 70% of customers that join WAIM affiliates, they then get 40% of that. Again, I know all that MATTERS is our affiliate cost was basically around $39,000.

[00:24:03] Caroline: YEP.

[00:24:04] Jason: So for a launch in 2022, we make 140,000. We have to spend 39,000 on our affiliates. We walk away with a net profit of $100,000. So you get 70 buyers, it ends up with $100,000 in our pocket total. This launch that we just did was 45 people. So that's 25 less, which is pretty incredible. Our gross revenue, 128,000, as we just said. Now, we reduced our affiliate percentage commission to 30%, which we'll talk more about in a second. So that's only $27,000 out of our pocket, leaving us with a net profit of $101,000.

[00:24:39] Caroline: YEP.

[00:24:40] Jason: So what's really powerful about having the price increase and a lower affiliate percentage for us is we get a healthier net revenue as a business. And we're going to talk more in a second about, like, why we decided to reduce the affiliate percentage and how it actually doesn't net out to less money in our affiliate's pockets. But I think what's really important to look at there is, we actually need less customers per launch now at this price point, which when we were finishing up this launch, I think we both had this first thought of like, should we just roll back the pricing? Like, did we make a mistake raising the price? And seeing these numbers laid out like this proves to me that absolutely not. We have a more profitable business per customer and it's a healthier business that we can then hire people, like you said, to help us do things, especially as we're about to have kids. That's going to be something we need, and we need the profit to do that. We can't just keep relying on affiliates to generate sales for us at a price point that doesn't give us enough profit to run our business.

[00:25:32] Caroline: Definitely.

[00:25:33] Jason: So I did have some numbers in here, too, that I just, I thought it would be interesting to share. If we do a good content lead up into the next launch, if we increase our Luck Surface Area, which I want to talk more about after you do the affiliate, you know, 30% kind of thing, just to talk that over. If we get 70 people, we go back to our average. In the fall of this year, that launch will be almost $200,000 and our net profit would be $150,000, which would be absolutely incredible. So I just wanted to share, like, the difference between 70 customers at $100,000 launch or 70 customers at 150,000 is really great for us as business owners. So again, a lot of numbers that I just threw at you, the numbers geeks that are out there who love this type of stuff, were just like, oh yeah, give me more numbers. I love that. But I think it is very interesting just to see that data and know that. Did you want to just touch on the affiliate part?

[00:26:24] Caroline: Yeah, I did, because, you know, this was, again, very thoughtful, the way that we tried to approach this. When we started the WAIM affiliate program, we wanted to give an, an affiliate commission that was better than just about anyone out there, which is why we did it at 40%. A lot of businesses did it lower, you know, 20%, 25%, maybe 30%. And so we were like, let's just go for 40%. And I still really stand by that decision because we wanted to. Again, our thought was like, a lot of course businesses are paying for paid ads. I would rather pay people who are our customers and kind of return that advertising budget to them. And then they bring in really qualified people and they can talk very authentically about the experience of WAIM Unlimited if they love it, because they've been inside the program. So that was our thought, 40%. We did that for three or four years. The problem is when you are a couple years into that, what we started to realize as well was there's so much cross pollination between audiences in the online business space as well that we were starting to realize that people were, that, who were even coming from us. So, you know, may have found us first in their audience, but they were on other email lists of WAIMers who are in our audience. So of course, and I don't fault anyone for this, they're going to use their affiliate.

[00:27:45] Jason: Oh, yeah. I'd be looking for the person with the best bonus.

[00:27:48] Caroline: Exactly. So we kind of reached this point of like kind of market, not total saturation, but like more saturated in our affiliate promoters. And there's nothing wrong with that. But again, you're then realizing as you see this affiliate percentage of buyers go up, you're also realizing that you're just cutting, you know, 40% off the top of every single sale. And like Jason was saying, it got us to this place where I did start to feel like we weren't in a position to very healthily hire on a person if we wanted to. And so it just made sense. We said, okay, if we're going to lower the percentage to 30% now that we're in more mature stage of business, I want to do right by our affiliates. I don't want them to feel like suddenly they're making less money. And so as we were playing with the numbers of the price increase...

[00:28:33] Jason: And I give credit to our friend Caleb because he was here at that time. Do you remember?

[00:28:36] Caroline: Yeah.

[00:28:37] Jason: We were all, he was like, what if it went to like 30%? What would the math be? And we ran the numbers and 30% at 2800 is $840 total that you would get as an affiliate, 40% at 2000 is $800.

[00:28:49] Caroline: Right.

[00:28:50] Jason: So it's net more money in the pocket of an affiliate overall for referring someone for the same amount of work that they would do.

[00:28:56] Caroline: Right. Which then felt like, okay, then we're taking that marginal increase in revenue and now we can set that aside for a higher cost of business operations if we want to hire someone on.

[00:29:07] Jason: Yeah.

[00:29:08] Caroline: So that was our thinking behind that. And again, similar to letting our audience know that we were raising the price a year ahead of time, we also let our affiliates know we're going to be changing the affiliate commission. And so, so far everyone seems to be happy with that and again...

[00:29:22] Jason: I think it would have been a detriment had we said like, well, our price is going up and your overall commission is going down. Like that to me is like a, hey, that doesn't, that sounds like very capitalist of you, you know?

[00:29:32] Caroline: Yeah.

[00:29:32] Jason: But it's, hey, your overall commission is going up. Our rev. Our profit is going up. This is a win win. This works out well.

[00:29:39] Caroline: Yeah. And the value of the product has gone up as well. So.

[00:29:42] Jason: Anyway.

[00:29:43] Caroline: Those are decision making processes. These are some of the math things that I feel like you have to do as a business owner. And so now moving on to, I don't know, what do we think went, "wrong" with the launch? And I think unequivocally, we just know that there is a misalignment between. So in our coaching session, Offers That Sell, we talk a lot about this necessary... If you want to create an offer that is going to sell well during a launch, you need alignment between these three things. You need your audience, the solution that you're offering, and the price. Those three things have to be in alignment, meaning you need an audience that can pay the price of your solution. You need a price of your solution that actually matches the value of your solution, and you need a solution that matches the pain points of your audience. So, like, those three things have to match. And so what we kind of realized is, with our WAIM Unlimited solution. A lot of the place that our coaching actually offers a solution for is people who are a little bit more at the beginning of their business journey. They have an idea for a business, or they've already started their business, but they're really looking for how can I create a holistic, Calm Business marketing plan. Right. The difference is they're not far advanced to the point where they can easily spend, you know, the $140 a month that was our lowest payment plan for this for our latest launch. So we recognize that there's a little bit of a disconnect between audience and price. Now, that doesn't mean that we are going to lower the price back. It just means we need to, A, either shift our solution and our, like, our target audience to someone who's a little bit further along in their business journey or, B, create an offer that is maybe an on ramp offer that's a little bit more financially accessible for someone who's like, I just don't have that every month to take out of my business budget and pay for this program. So this was also confirmed. We did a post purchase survey. We recommend to everyone, after you do a launch, send a survey to people who clicked through to your sales page but didn't buy and ask a couple of simple questions about, hey, what held you back? Make it anonymous. And the thing that we heard over and over in those survey results was it wasn't about because we did have options that were like, oh, I didn't think the price was worth it for what I'd get. Nobody said that the things that we did here were, this is just out of my budget at this time, and this is just not the right time for me to buy. So that's a good indicator that the messaging is on point, the value is on point. It's just that the target audience matching the price is what is misaligned.

[00:32:24] Jason: Yeah, for sure. Can I talk about the Luck Surface Area?

[00:32:27] Caroline: Yeah.

[00:32:27] Jason: Kind of revelation now? So again, credit to Jason Roberts, who kind of coined this phrase, Luck Surface Area. The way I want to visually describe this to you all is imagine your business is like a little tuft of green grass in, like, a desert, right? And you can expand the size of your green grass for people to see your green grass area that they obviously want to go stand in with their cozy little toesies so that you can have your toes in the grass, because otherwise you're on like a crusty sandwich. And that's not. Doesn't feel good in your feet. It's too hot. So in the Luck Surface Area for Wandering Aimfully itself. A couple years ago, when we first started our Luck Surface Area, our grass was pretty big. You know, it's like the size of a football field because we're slinging YouTube videos. We're right in behind the scenes posts. We're on Instagram.

[00:33:13] Caroline: We're doing 30 reels in 30 days.

[00:33:14] Jason: We're doing all kinds of stuff. And I'm, you know, we're still doing interviews at that time on other podcasts. So our. Our Luck Surface Area is bigger. There are more touch points. There are more things out there that we're creating consistently that people can find publicly. So our grass field is the size of a football field. Well, what happened in 2021 is we decided we don't want to be on social media anymore. It doesn't feel good for our mental health. We're about to travel full time for a year. We don't want to do it. So our, our field starts to shrink because that, that surface area gets smaller as you don't continue to water that grass, it dries up.

[00:33:47] Caroline: And by the way, that's still a perfectly valid and wonderful decision. Wouldn't regret it at all.

[00:33:52] Jason: Absolutely.

[00:33:53] Caroline: So glad we did it.

[00:33:53] Jason: Our revenue ticked up the next two years, while we were the least publicly available content creating people at all. And so our surface area of luck, this grass starts to dry up.

[00:34:04] Caroline: Yep.

[00:34:04] Jason: And so you've, you've watered all these grass seeds for so many years, but guess what? When you're not continuing to water them, they dry up. They dry up. They dry up. So what this led to us is we get to this spring launch, and we tried to water it really quickly the end of fall last year. We, like, threw some water down. We got a little bit more grass with the Calm Business Encyclopedia. But guess what? Like, there's not a lot of value in that long term. And it's not, it didn't do well on YouTube, which is totally fine. We didn't think it needed to, but it, it helped with that launch. Our grass shrunk back down. So our surface area, our Luck Surface Area, is very small right now because we are not consistently creating content that doesn't just mean getting on Instagram and, like, posting, like, an update every day, and it means, like, tactical content for keywords based on our target customer, things that actually really matter. And so I bring this up because you may be someone listening to this where you're like, huh, has my Luck Surface Area shrunk because of x? Because I have stopped doing this, because I got off of social media, which, again, is totally fine, but if you're not replacing that with something else that's getting you in front of people to water your grass, to make that area bigger for people to find, that is why it's harder for people to find you. And also, there's just a natural encroachment on the growth of our, all of our grassy little gnolls because of the saturation of content on the Internet. So the reality is that what used to work five years ago, which was like, yeah, you can just post, like, every once in a while, and we hear it all, all the time. You got to post multiple times a week. Some people say, you got to post multiple times a day. Again, you know, whatever that content cadence is going to be best for your mental health and whatever. But for us, we're looking at our Luck Surface Area, our little patch of grass, and going, okay, we need to water this thing, and we need to consistently water for the next six months if we want to be able to grow to that example, 70 WAIMers in the fall launch that we're thinking about would be our goal for that next launch.

[00:35:49] Caroline: Exactly. And again, that doesn't mean that we have any interest in losing the peace of mind that we've gained by being off of social media, it just goes, the puzzle has now shifted to, is there a way to maintain that peace and grow our Luck Surface Area at the same time? That's going to be the question that we're exploring in the next chapter.

[00:36:10] Jason: Yeah, and we'll definitely be taking you along with that in these podcast episodes to share, like, okay, well, what does the content plan look like to get back on social media after being off for a couple of years? How do we keep our mental health intact? Do we hire someone who literally just posts for us? Like, they don't even have to run our account, they just need to post for us. Do we hire a service to edit videos, short form, long form, whatever it is, so that we don't have to constantly be in editing apps? And, like, what does that cost in 2024? Because what it used to cost was a lot more three or four years ago. But there are way more affordable services. There are AI tools that can do this stuff. Like, we want to share all that with you so that you can kind of follow along if you're in a similar place where you're like, I don't want to be on social media, but I know I need to be creating content of some sort that's helpful. What can that look like in a sustainable, calm fashion?

[00:36:56] Caroline: That's it. That's what we're gonna try to do. So we hope that you enjoy just going behind the scenes of all this. Again, we just want to reiterate, amazing launch. Like, feel so grateful that we have built a business that, you know, has not required social media for many, many years. And there's still so many seeds that we planted in the past that are still paying off. And that's what we try to share with our members as well, is challenging this notion that you have to, you know, create endless amounts of content. I don't think that's the takeaway here. The takeaway here is business is a Rubik's cube slash jigsaw puzzle on a drafting table, and it's always evolving. Your needs are always evolving. Your desires are always evolving for what you want out of your business. And that's the approach that we try to teach, is constantly checking in with yourself and going, is this approach serving me in this season of my life, or do I have new goals and I need a new strategy to go along with it?

[00:37:51] Jason: Fantastic. We hope you enjoyed this little launch recap. Also, I was just thinking, what if it's a Rubik's cube? When you solve it, like, you get it to the cube, it opens, and it has a puzzle inside. And then you can do the puzzle, and then you have a Rubik's cube and a puzzle in one.

[00:38:05] Caroline: But then.

[00:38:05] Jason: Puzzle cube.

[00:38:05] Caroline: It's a puzzle cube. And as soon as you do the inside puzzle on your drafting table, the Rubik's cube closes and scrambles again.

[00:38:13] Jason: And it's called a cuzzle.

[00:38:15] Caroline: Oh, I do not like that.

[00:38:19] Jason: Coming soon to you guys, our new. Actually, it's better if it's Kuzel. It's a kuzel.

[00:38:26] Caroline: A Cubesel.

[00:38:27] Jason: There's something here. I think maybe. Yeah, maybe we'll stick to our day jobs teaching people how to grow Calm Businesses.

[00:38:34] Caroline: I'll workshop it.

[00:38:35] Jason: Okay.

[00:38:35] Caroline: All right.

[00:38:35] Jason: We'll see you later. We hope you enjoyed this episode.

[00:38:37] Caroline: Thanks for listening.