255 - Our Final WAIM Launch: The FULL Recap...

[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. Okay, here we are, everybody. It's not just me.

[00:00:40] Caroline: I'm here as well. Back on the microphone. 

[00:00:44] Jason: You said before we were recording you are going to be sidekick this episode.

[00:00:50] Caroline: Yeah.

[00:00:50] Jason: So pick your favorite sidekick.

[00:00:52] Caroline: Oh, my gosh. My favorite sidekick. Jiminy Cricket just came to mind, which is not great.

[00:00:59] Jason: He's the sidekick of Pinocchio?

[00:01:02] Caroline: I don't know, really, like, any of the. First of all, I take it back, that's not.

[00:01:05] Jason: You don't want to be a cricket.

[00:01:06] Caroline: First one that came to mind. But I think because, when I think of a sidekick, I don't think superhero. I think of... there's always like an animal sidekick in every Disney movie. 

[00:01:15] Jason: Yeah.

[00:01:16] Caroline: So the one that comes to mind, I don't know his name off the top of my head, but that cute little raccoon in Pocahontas.

[00:01:21] Jason: Oh, yeah. I have no idea what his name is. I mean, obviously we have the power of the Internet, so... 

[00:01:26] Caroline: I was really enamored with him as a child.

[00:01:28] Jason: Raccoon in Pocahontas.

[00:01:30] Caroline: I had a real affinity for raccoons.

[00:01:32] Jason: His name is Miko.

[00:01:34] Caroline: Miko.

[00:01:35] Jason: That's Miko. I... Man, when did Pocahontas come out?

[00:01:39] Caroline: Let me guess. 1996?

[00:01:40] Jason: 95. 95. Yeah. I was 13. So I was squarely into, like, don't watch Disney.

[00:01:47] Caroline: Listen to what I'm saying.

[00:01:48] Jason: Yeah.

[00:01:48] Caroline: You know that when we go back to that era...

[00:01:51] Jason: It's like...

[00:01:52] Caroline: The age gap starts to become real problematic. So let's just. For those of you listening.

[00:01:57] Jason: I'm 22 years older.

[00:01:58] Caroline: For those of you listening, we're like six and a half years apart.

[00:02:00] Jason: Yeah.

[00:02:00] Caroline: Fine when you meet as adults.

[00:02:02] Jason: Yeah.

[00:02:02] Caroline: Gets real weird when you start mentioning your childhood and Jason's like, I was a full, like, almost.

[00:02:08] Jason: We didn't meet then and we didn't talk then.

[00:02:10] Caroline: We didn't.

[00:02:10] Jason: And I was only hanging out with people my age. 

[00:02:12] Caroline: And Jason was only hanging out...

[00:02:13] Jason: Anyway, let's move on. Getting into some squirrely territory. All right, Miko.

[00:02:20] Caroline: Isn't Miko a cute name?

[00:02:21] Jason: That's cute.

[00:02:21] Caroline: That's cute.

[00:02:23] Jason: Put it on the list.

[00:02:24] Caroline: Put it on the list.

[00:02:25] Jason: The baby name list.

[00:02:26] Caroline: Stick in the baby name list.

[00:02:27] Jason: How many baby names are on your list? Just total. Total that you've written in Apple note that I can like, out of the corner of my eyes see you adding things to.

[00:02:35] Caroline: Probably 100. 

[00:02:36] Jason: Just 100?

[00:02:38] Caroline: Boys and girls.

[00:02:39] Jason: Yeah.

[00:02:39] Caroline: Yeah, probably 100.

[00:02:40] Jason: Okay. Do you delete from it?

[00:02:41] Caroline: I... I never... Yes, I do delete. I do delete. I look back. This is...

[00:02:46] Jason: Chris. Like Crispix. If, like, that was the name.

[00:02:48] Caroline: I have to keep a list going because, like six months go by and you're like, I'm sorry, who said that?

[00:02:53] Jason: Right.

[00:02:54] Caroline: Which is really... starts to induce anxiety about naming a child because you're like, is that how I'm gonna feel about my child's name six years after doing this?

[00:03:00] Jason: It's true.

[00:03:01] Caroline: But I think when they're a person, you just choose hard. You know what I mean?

[00:03:03] Jason: For sure.

[00:03:04] Caroline: Yeah. 

[00:03:04] Jason: Okay. Well, we... I have been here fairly regularly, but you took a break. And for those of you who did not listen to any of the podcast episodes during our final launch, or maybe you just like missed a couple episodes, or your life has just been so busy, you even listen and you just like forgot what was going on. 

[00:03:22] Caroline: Yeah.

[00:03:22] Jason: We had a really tough three week stint and actually we... You and I was just here. It was, it was...

[00:03:29] Caroline: It was a week.

[00:03:30] Jason: But it was a lot.

[00:03:31] Caroline: You're in the trenches with...

[00:03:32] Jason: It was a lot for you.

[00:03:33] Caroline: We lost my dad earlier this or in June.

[00:03:38] Jason: Yeah.

[00:03:39] Caroline: And, yeah, I mean, it's just, I... There's not words really to describe how awful that is. And it's still really hard. But I am doing better day to day than I was doing, obviously, like that first week where you're just sort of like shocked in the grief, in the fog. But I told Jason I wanted to come back on the podcast just because, you know, it is sometimes my natural instinct to just isolate and kind of like process my feelings alone in things. But I'm always really grateful when people share out loud. I mean, not always. You know, like, everyone can process how they want to, but I'm grateful for people who do come and share kind of the messiness of these, like, human experiences because I... It gives you a reference point of like, how to navigate and how you want to navigate. So I told Jason I wanted to come back on. It also adds back in a sense of normalcy to my life. I think when you are going through something as kind of like earth shaking as losing a parent. At least for me personally, part of the really disorienting part amidst... It's like, it's just been a very confusing emotional time. But part of the disorientation comes from feeling like your whole reality is different now. And so anything you can do to feel a little bit normal just kind of like gives you a sturdiness and a baseline to kind of like work through your feelings. For me personally, when I feel... I go to this like place, emotional place of surreal when things feel really weird and when I'm just like in the thick of the fog and it doesn't actually help me because I just feel like I'm in some like alternate dimension. So doing things again like podcasting or trying to get a little bit of work done or just like our normal day to day life, to me that actually helps me process my grief because it gives me a baseline so that I'm just sharing that. And that's why I wanted to hop back on the podcast.

[00:05:32] Jason: Yeah.

[00:05:33] Caroline: And that's where I've been.

[00:05:34] Jason: Yeah. And I think, you know, it's, it's just, it was terrible timing of everything.

[00:05:39] Caroline: Do you want to tell everyone the worst week we've almost ever had?

[00:05:43] Jason: Sure. I think I, I think, yeah. I mean, we've talked about it a couple different places.

[00:05:46] Caroline: I honestly at this point, like find it. I find, I find comedy in it because it is, it is almost incomprehensible the amount of like when it rains, it pours. That happened to us in that one week.

[00:05:59] Jason: Yeah.

[00:05:59] Caroline: And, and I know that this is, some of it is like a psychological mechanism where your brain like sort of like latches onto all the negative. But some of these things are truly bizarre. Okay, so like I'm just gonna walk you through. And this is not to like complain. This is just to kind of like...

[00:06:13] Jason: Just to share.

[00:06:15] Caroline: Just to share. Just so you know, when you have a week like this in your life, it's not just you. We get the phone call on a Monday night, in the middle of the night that we have lost my dad. I'm not going to take you through the details of that, but...

[00:06:30] Jason: It's a shocking phone call.

[00:06:32] Caroline: It was, it was awful. So that was just, okay, now my whole world's different. I have to wake up the next day. I don't wake up because I don't go to sleep. I get the phone call at like 3:30 in the morning. And so we don't, we don't... both of us don't sleep. We have a doctor's appointment that we have to go to and we have to keep because again, we're at a high risk pregnancy. So I want to keep the appointment. So I have to gather myself together. We go to the hospital, we go see our OB. I have to just tell her, hey, like, we lost my dad last night. And she's wonderful as usual, but I have to like, gather my wits about me in order to like, take in information about our child and the pregnancy. In the haze of that, I don't realize it, but I have left what they call your livro de gravide. And it's like your pregnancy book with like all of your information.

[00:07:23] Jason: Your appointments. Like all the things.

[00:07:24] Caroline: I don't know that at the time, but I do leave that there in that appointment. Oh, also during that appointment, we're talking to our doctor about do, am I allowed to go back and fly back for that service? That's a hard decision to make. Like, I'm in tears over that because I don't know what to do. On the one hand, it's me not being there for my family and for my dad. And on the other, well, really, I mean, I understand my dad's gone at that point. It's really about being there for my family and having a sense of closure. On the other hand, I'm like, am I putting my child at risk? It's very difficult. That's Tuesday. We go home. Whatever. We try to like just chill. Wednesday, I have an appointment at our local health center that was already on the books to get this shot that you need to get in pregnancy for incompatible blood types with your baby. Anyway, look it up. The... shot. We had made this, this appointment several weeks prior with our local health center because it's covered under the public insurance here. We did make that appointment in Portuguese and my private hospital doctor was like, just go and tell them that you need this shot. It's your 28 week shot. They'll know what you're talking about. So we make the appoint, we think everything's fine. We go to the health clinic. It they we get in the office with the nurse who's about to shoot this into my arm and we realize it's the wrong shot. 

[00:08:38] Jason: Yeah.

[00:08:38] Caroline: It's a different shot that sometimes can be given 28 weeks to 32 weeks. There's a whole mix up. I'm like, oh, sorry, it's the other shot. They're like, we don't have it here. We're like, okay, we're sitting there, we. And the. I'm going to spare you the details of that. It ends in a five hour saga.

[00:08:56] Jason: Yeah.

[00:08:56] Caroline: Again, this is a day and a half after my dad has passed away.

[00:08:59] Jason: Yeah.

[00:08:59] Caroline: I. I'm doing everything I can to keep it together. You and I. I've never been more proud of our ability to, like, be resilient.

[00:09:05] Jason: Yeah.

[00:09:05] Caroline: Except for that day.

[00:09:06] Jason: And I'll just jump in because the end of the five hour saga is not like, oh, this just took a while. A lot of waiting. It was actually like, not racing is not the right word. But we had to get then back to our hospital that we go to by a certain time to be able to get a prescription before because our doctor wasn't there, another doctor could write us a prescription. And they were leaving. And so it was like...

[00:09:23] Caroline: You're racing against the clock.

[00:09:24] Jason: It's just as like. It's a comedy of errors in a day after you get this.

[00:09:29] Caroline: Part of that day, though, is we go through all of this. I mean, it's like nurses trying to help us. It's nurses calling hospitals in different cities. It's finally realizing we have to go back to the private hospital. We get this prescription from a doctor who's not ours. We have to get there in time. All this stuff, like, we're just problem solving for five hours. We finally get into the room where they're going to give us this shot. And I thought it was a shot in my arm. 

[00:09:51] Jason: Yeah.

[00:09:52] Caroline: It is a shot in my butt.

[00:09:55] Jason: And the nurse didn't speak any English, so. But she was super nice. And we were using Google Translate and so I had to awkwardly, like, tell Google Translate, say, like, is my wife's butt going to hurt tomorrow? And I don't remember what that translated to, but I just was like, wow, what a perfect end of the day. You getting this shot in the butt. And then me having to ask a nurse uncomfortably, in a language I don't speak if her butt's going to be sore just so we could mentally prepare.

[00:10:18] Caroline: I was so grateful.

[00:10:19] Jason: That's not where the week ends, though. Let's keep going.

[00:10:21] Caroline: Okay. Meanwhile, while we're racing during that whole saga, we get a notification on our Tesla. We bought it before Elon.

[00:10:29] Jason: Way before Elon.

[00:10:30] Caroline: Way before Elon. We're not. We're not proud of it. We don't like it, but we are trying to buy electric. Okay. We get a notification that something is wrong with the battery.

[00:10:38] Jason: The main car battery.

[00:10:39] Caroline: I'm going to fast forward on that. The battery died. The battery of our car. Not, like, the battery drained and we're down to zero. Like, the battery is dead.

[00:10:47] Jason: I had to do a... A, like, three hour driving escapade on Friday to drop our car off, and the car got to the Tesla center with, like, 9% battery left and was, like, screaming at me the whole way. It was like, you have to charge. You have to charge. And then, like, an arrow would come out. It was like, but your battery can't be charged. I'm like, buddy, I get it. Like, we're going so.

[00:11:04] Caroline: And again, I'm just reminding you here, the car battery is dead. It has been one and a half days since my father passed away. And, like. And I'm almost like, I don't know, maybe it's a blessing in disguise that, like, we had all of this, like, just, like, poured at us because it kept us distracted and trying to problem solve and whatever. But I. All I wanted was to go home, wrap myself in a blanket, and just, like, grieve. And I was just having to, like, compartmentalize and do all these different things. So we get the. The day that I get the shot, the butt shot. Then I have to go home and do my regular shot. Then I have to hop on a phone call with my siblings to talk about what to do because my father is still at the hospital and where do we send him? Anyway, all of that, that was a really hard day. Then the next morning, you have to get up and solve this problem with the car, drive to Lisbon, get the thing dropped off. The good news is they did end up getting us a loaner.

[00:12:00] Jason: Yeah. Which was extremely helpful. I mean, we could have just rented a car, but, yeah, it was just a mess.

[00:12:03] Caroline: That was like, would have been another wrinkle. Um, then on Friday, I get a text message from my mom that my uncle has passed away.

[00:12:10] Jason: Yeah.

[00:12:12] Caroline: When I tell you that I lost it.

[00:12:14] Jason: Yeah.

[00:12:14] Caroline: Actually Thursday night. I remember now because I didn't even respond to her because I just. I shut down. My brain was like, absolutely not. Absolutely not. And I just. Friday was a, was a bad day because I was just like, this is too much. Like, I don't. What's happening?

[00:12:30] Jason: Not to mention you're six months pregnant at the time and you were injured in the third trimester and you're super uncomfortable.

[00:12:36] Caroline: Yeah.

[00:12:37] Jason: So it's like... 

[00:12:37] Caroline: I didn't feel great. 

[00:12:38] Jason: It's like that on top of it. And you have to do a nightly injection for this blood thinner that you've had to do the entire pregnancy. And it's like, it's just.

[00:12:46] Caroline: And then. Do you remember what happened? Which was. I. Because I. I. Because of the week that we had. I cried so much on Friday and Saturday that my eyes got fritz.

[00:12:55] Jason: Because you have an eye condition.

[00:12:56] Caroline: Because I have an eye condition. And when my eyes get tired, I get basically vertigo. So I wake up on Sunday and I have vertigo.

[00:13:02] Jason: Yeah.

[00:13:02] Caroline: And I was just like... 

[00:13:05] Jason: Yeah, 'cause I remember it was like, like 6 o' clock in the morning or 5 o' clock in the morning in bed. And you... I felt you sit up. And I was like, why is she sitting up? And then you're like, the room is spinning. And I'm like, oh, man. Like, I know we've been through this a couple times before and... And it's just like, boy, listen, everybody is going through their own set of circumstances and everybody has difficulties, but, wow, this was really a week for the record books.

[00:13:27] Caroline: And I just want to share all of that, why it's applicable during this podcast episode. All of that is the second week of our launch.

[00:13:35] Jason: Our final launch ever of this program.

[00:13:36] Caroline: Final launch ever of this program that we have been building to for six weeks. And you know, there are... is war in the middle. I mean, there's wars going on all the time, but we're dropping bombs on Iran and things are happening. It was just like, it was just too much, though.

[00:13:54] Jason: We're not just like... 

[00:13:56] Caroline: No, no, Just be clear. We're not doing that. It was just a lot of... a lot to deal with. And I'm really proud of us for how we navigated it because we took it one tiny step at a time and we had to reprioritize a bunch of times. And I give you so much credit because you kept. You were so sturdy and you kept the whole thing.

[00:14:19] Jason: Did all the dishes. 

[00:14:19] Caroline: Moving along. You did all the dishes. You kept me calm. You let me cry when I needed to cry. You let me laugh when I needed to laugh. You were patient. You were just like, taking care of everything. And I know it was really stressful for you because it was like, I know it's the hardest thing for you is to watch me in pain. So to know that you were going through that at the same time as you're trying to, like, deal with the Tesla thing and do all this stuff. So.

[00:14:44] Jason: And not to mention running two business.

[00:14:46] Caroline: And running two businesses and finishing the launch without me, because I just checked out. I was like, we were gonna do all these, like, reels thing and DMS and whatever. I was like, buddy, I can't. And you were like, of course you can't. Like, I got it.

[00:14:56] Jason: Yeah.

[00:14:57] Caroline: You canceled my workouts. You did all the admin stuff. And I just want to say that I really appreciate it, and I think that you couldn't have handled that better that week.

[00:15:05] Jason: Fantastic. Do I have a trophy coming or what's up?

[00:15:07] Caroline: It's just a verbal trophy that I just gave you.

[00:15:08] Jason: It's a verbal trophy.

[00:15:09] Caroline: Do you have anyone you want to thank? The Academy?

[00:15:13] Jason: I mean. Yeah, I mean, I just, everyone for coming out, that's really who I want to thank.

[00:15:16] Caroline: So that... Anything compared to that first week is better. But it still obviously has been a hard road. But I think after that first week, we were just like. Like I said, shell shocked. The second week was a little bit easier because I could kind of come back to normalcy and I wasn't like, fielding these crazy problems every single day.

[00:15:37] Jason: Yeah. And it's just. I mean, I will say, from my perspective, obviously, there's the whole part of supporting you that's, like, very difficult. But then there's also, like, we just had multiple conversations, like, well, should we postpone the launch? Like, what should we do? Because it's like, you know, do we say anything in the sales emails? Cause we have all these sales emails we've already written, and it was just a really awkward place to be in because it's like, well, first of all, like, there's stuff going on in the world that's, like, distracting people from this. Our lives are super distracted from this. Like, this is the least important thing to worry about right now. But, like, the further we push it off, it's like...

[00:16:09] Caroline: Right.

[00:16:09] Jason: We have parental leave upcoming. Like, we, we want to move on to this, like, next chapter in our business, you know, kind of journey. And it's just like, the longer you, like, push things off or don't... don't do things. So it was just such a weird mental state to be in because you're trying to be like. Especially for any new WAIMers who are listening to this episode right now, it's like, I was trying so hard to be positive and helpful and, like, all the things that we want to be all the time for you all while also still just being a human being and just being like, listen, I. I hope this is at least relatable for you all to hear. Like, I don't know how to handle what we're doing right now in business and, like, how to finish this out.

[00:16:43] Caroline: And of course, I knew that we attract the type of people who would understand, but I also have enough knowledge to know, like, it's not a small investment to join WAIM Unlimited. And so it's like, I want your first impression to be one. Not just a good one, but one where you feel good about who you've invested in and who is going to be there for you. But it was really hard to do that during a time where this is not a normal time for us. This is not how we normally can show up, you know, so it's been really hard. I have been really blown away by all the new WAIMers who have just been really kind and really understanding.

[00:17:17] Jason: Yeah.

[00:17:18] Caroline: And of course, I give you credit for, like, still showing up as well, to just make sure that we don't go silent during this time.

[00:17:23] Jason: Yeah.

[00:17:24] Caroline: So, but I'm glad you shared that because, yeah, I think that's the realness of just running, like, a solo business or like, just a, a small business. It's just you, you are a person and you're going through stuff and you have to share that with your audience and...

[00:17:36] Jason: Yeah.

[00:17:37] Caroline: And you have to make hard decisions and, you know, there's no right or wrong answer, but you were right. Like, we couldn't have pushed it back because it would have been a ripple effect.

[00:17:46] Jason: Dominoes.

[00:17:47] Caroline: So, yeah, just to catch up to speed and wrap that up. That first week was the worst. Second week was a little bit better. There are, of course, moments where it hits really hard because I'll go through a lull, and then it's like, now we're planning his service, and that brings up a lot of emotions, but... And then sometimes I'll find myself where, you know, I can connect to, like, joy and, and I'm so grateful to live in a place where it's really peaceful here and, like, it... it brightens my spirits. But when I feel myself getting joyful or happy, there is this part of me that is like...

[00:18:19] Jason: There's some guilt.

[00:18:20] Caroline: There's some guilt there. And, but it's like, I know my dad wouldn't want me to... Like, my dad, of all people in the entire world would be like, please find your joy again. Please laugh again. Please do all these things again. He was incredibly funny, and his sense of humor is one of my favorite things about him. So I know that. But anyone who's experienced grief, I think, can relate to that feeling of feeling guilty for having just normal moments and... But I am reminding myself that this is life. Like, I don't know how else to say it. You know, we love people and we lose people and things are happy and things are sad and it's all just a mixture together. And so there's nothing wrong with how I'm feeling and there's nothing wrong with what's happening and there's no right way to navigate through it. You just have to have the perspective to go. This is... This is what the human experience is.

[00:19:12] Jason: Yeah, for sure. Okay. I think that's a good place to transition smoothly into recapping our launch.

[00:19:20] Caroline: We totally forgot. Sorry. During that, the week from hell, we also had our birth classes.

[00:19:26] Jason: Oh, we had nine hours of birth classes that week too. We sure did.

[00:19:31] Caroline: I totally forgot we had nine hours of birth classes. I was like, Friday. Feels like there was something on that Friday. Friday as well. No, yeah, we had. We had... 

[00:19:39] Jason: Three separate. Three separate three hour birth classes that week.

[00:19:42] Caroline: Which we couldn't postpone because our doula is going to Brazil. And we wanted to just get prepared. Anyway, long story.

[00:19:50] Jason: Yeah. All right, let's get into the recap. So what we kind of want to share is the kind of marketing strategy breakdown, this final launch, the channels that we would say kind of worked the best for this launch. We actually spent some money to kind of promote, slash, boost post in this launch. And do we think that was worth it? And then just like honest reflections and emotional takeaways on basically pivoting away from what has been our most successful thing we've ever done in business and kind of like, you know, are we idiots for shutting that down? Like, I think, you know, there's a lot to kind of unpack there. So let's get into part one and we'll steal this from one little Ryan Trahan. The game plan. 1, 2, 3. The game plan. Fantastic. If you're not watching Ryan's 50 States in 50 Days series on YouTube, you are missing out. It is absolutely fantastic. Must watch TV every night when you have dinner. Okay, so. 

[00:20:40] Caroline: I must watch tv. I mean, like, kind of boring in the best way.

[00:20:42] Jason: Absolutely. The overview, just very quickly to get everybody caught up. Final enrollment of WAIM Unlimited ever, our un-boring coaching program. But we kind of positioned it as past, present and future this time around because you get access to all of our previous coaching and everything else. You get access to some ongoing coaching that we're doing for the rest of this year and then every month, and then the community. And then in the future, we're planning on building either AI powered or just creator based tools. And you'll get access to those and what we're kind of guaranteeing as four tools that you'll get access to. So that was how we kind of positioned the launch. Now the kind of overview of the content and kind of, you know what, what we were doing for this launch, especially for the lead up, we used our Calm Launch Formula kind of recipe that we have in our  Calm Launch Formula which is a four week pre launch email series. And you created this kind of like future proof creator series and then...

[00:21:37] Caroline: We actually did a whole podcast episode about that, didn't we? Or like.

[00:21:40] Jason: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, we did that. And then we have a two week launch window when the launch is open with a launch email every single day. Except for literally one day in the launch. We took one day off. Then we have our podcast that went out every single week. We did.

[00:21:55] Caroline: You listened to those, didn't you?

[00:21:56] Jason: One episode a week. And then also we did the kind of like mid launch update episodes that I did.

[00:22:01] Caroline: Yeah.

[00:22:01] Jason: Talking about the sales and like how we're feeling. And then with our podcast hosts we have dynamic ads which is really awesome. Transistor's our podcast host. It's just, I think it's one of the most amazing features because you just record like a 30 second thing and you can say put it on every single episode of this podcast through the entire backlog and then just turn it off at this time. And so we do that for like a four week out, a three week out, a two week out. You kind of change it up. Then we have our affiliates. So those are our existing Wandering Aimfully members. It's, there are no affiliates outside of WAIM. And actually it was funny. We had like four or five people email us. They were like, hey, like I've been watching WAIM Unlimited, can I promote it as an affiliate? And we're like, I really appreciate that but no, it's only for our own members.

[00:22:39] Caroline: Yeah, we like people who can speak to.

[00:22:42] Jason: Yeah, specifically.

[00:22:43] Caroline: Specifically the experience. 

[00:22:44] Jason: Then we had a couple new add ons this time around that were different.

[00:22:48] Caroline: For the last launch ever, we were like, go big or go home, baby.

[00:22:51] Jason: Yeah.

[00:22:52] Caroline: So we.

[00:22:53] Jason: Miko, are you jumping in?

[00:22:54] Caroline: Miko? Miko's jumping in. So we decided to do a wait list. So kind of we wanted a place to capture kind of warm leads and like hot attention.

[00:23:04] Jason: Nice.

[00:23:04] Caroline: So. And really the only place we promoted that is the Instagram reels. But we also did put a banner on the site as well. But we. And we'll tell you how that kind of panned out. But we did a wait list and we did special emails to the wait list.

[00:23:18] Jason: Yeah.

[00:23:18] Caroline: So if you were on the waitlist, not only did you get the pre launch series from our newsletter list, but you also got special behind the scenes waitlist emails about how we were running this Instagram reels campaign, which is the next thing that we added on. We did a 40 day daily Instagram reels campaign of these diff... reels every single day. And kind of counting down to the launch. 

[00:23:41] Jason: In hindsight?

[00:23:42] Caroline: What?

[00:23:43] Jason: 21 days would have been.

[00:23:44] Caroline: We're going to talk about that.

[00:23:45] Jason: Okay, good.

[00:23:45] Caroline: We're talking about hindsight, but when we came up with the idea, we were just. We were exactly 40 days out from the launch. And I don't know, something about that, I think just.

[00:23:55] Jason: Just felt clean.

[00:23:56] Caroline: Just felt clean.

[00:23:56] Jason: We love a clean butt around here. We love the clean butt calendar.

[00:24:00] Caroline: Something about round numbers really gets to us. Like 40 days. We're like, that sounds perfect.

[00:24:04] Jason: Let's do it.

[00:24:04] Caroline: We didn't even think about it beyond that. We really should have. That was a mistake on our part. Um, and then near the end, you boosted a few of the reels just to, as a test to see what that would do. And we'll talk about that. Then you just got really jealous about me. This was not originally on the launch plan, but you got jealous of me recording all my cool content.

[00:24:24] Jason: Right.

[00:24:24] Caroline: And you... 

[00:24:25] Jason: With a K. 

[00:24:27] Caroline: Kewl content.

[00:24:28] Jason: With a K.

[00:24:28] Caroline: And you decided to just throw up some...

[00:24:32] Jason: Couple of random YouTube vids.

[00:24:33] Caroline: Couple YouTube vids, which ended up being a great decision because they almost garnered as many sales as my... Or maybe more. We'll get to that. And then, and then we did decide to do a new sales page. We wanted to do something different. We had had our current sales page, I think for like three or four launches since we moved over to Framer.

[00:24:54] Jason: Yeah. Longer.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[00:24:56] Caroline: Four launches probably. And so we knew that we wanted something fresh and interesting so that all the people who had been thinking about joining WAIM Unlimited for two years now would have a reason to check out the new page and really consider buying.

[00:25:09] Jason: Yeah.

[00:25:10] Caroline: And then Jason added the free chat support on the sales page, which is something that I would recommend to everyone. If you can do it during launch, if it's not going to make you feel too on because quite a few sales came through that as well.

[00:25:22] Jason: Yeah. Did you have any notes down here. In the chat? 

[00:25:26] Caroline: About the chat? No.

[00:25:27] Jason: Okay.

[00:25:27] Caroline: I. I don't.

[00:25:28] Jason: Cool. No worries. Um, yeah, the one thing I do remember, just to share with everybody a very quick stat on the chat. I think the website, I think I wrote this down. It had like something like 10,000 unique visitors to wanderingaimfully.com during the two week launch. Like overall. And I think in total I got like 40 chats. 40 people.

[00:25:49] Caroline: So that'll give you an idea of like volume.

[00:25:51] Jason: Yeah, like if you're worried that you're just going to get inundated with people just chatting, I don't think that worry is founded at all. And so I think it's just, it's an absolute, like easy thing to put on your site. And we used Crisp.chat. Like, ooh, that's a really crisp jacket you're wearing. Crisp.chat is the website. I don't know. It's what came in, right? 

[00:26:08] Caroline: Buddy, a crisp jacket?

[00:26:09] Jason: Yeah, it's crisp.

[00:26:11] Caroline: Okay.

[00:26:11] Jason: What do you go crisp?

[00:26:12] Caroline: A crisp fall morning. A crisp potato chip.

[00:26:16] Jason: It's summer.

[00:26:17] Caroline: A crisp seam on a jacket. 

[00:26:20] Jason: Nice. Nice. Fantastic. All right, so let's go over some quick hits on how each of these channels contributed and kind of talking a little bit about, you know, how it went. The first of all, I skipped over saying what our goals were for the launch. So it was 30 was our low goal, 70 was our high goal. And then we had a stretch goal of 120 were our three goals. So as you hear these numbers go through, you can kind of hear like how those impacted things. So of the VIP waitlist, we ended up with 116 subscribers. Then that was actually like our goal was 100 to get on that waitlist. Of those 12 people bought in the the waitlist window, they got like three days early access to buy. So we just can 100% attribute. The VIP waitlist brought in 12 buyers immediately. It could have been a couple more too who bought later on, but that was great. The Instagram reels. Our total views across all reels, 8,000 views. And we can attribute eight sales to people who said the Instagram reel series. Yeah.

[00:27:23] Caroline: All of it or significantly contributed to their purchase decision.

[00:27:27] Jason: Our email list an average of 35% open rate across all of our sales emails. Again, you can't really be a hundred percent confident in email open rate percentages anymore, but it's a good like, okay, that's fine. And we can attribute 20 sales to directly to our email list where people and where we get these numbers from is we have a post purchase survey that people fill out and so. 

[00:27:46] Caroline: Which we always recommend doing because this is how you understand what impact each of your marketing channels had so that you know what to spend time on for the next launch. 

[00:27:54] Jason: And what to cut. So yeah, 20 people said directly from our email list our affiliates. So we had 67 sales from our affiliates, which is amazing. And ended up being like, right at about 67%.

[00:28:08] Caroline: Here's the important note I want to say about the affiliates and the email list numbers, because you like, oh, our email list only brought in 20 sales. That seems low. I want to remind everyone, quite a few people who come through affiliates.

[00:28:19] Jason: Yeah.

[00:28:20] Caroline: Are also on our email.

[00:28:21] Jason: I would say it's over 50%.

[00:28:23] Caroline: Exactly. So it's not like those 67 sales are people coming from affiliates who've never heard of us before. It's like a clean channel.

[00:28:31] Jason: Yeah.

[00:28:31] Caroline: It's likely some combination of getting our prelaunch content being on our email list. So, so it's like a little bit. There's people who are going to straddle the line, but we do just, just attribute those to affiliates.

[00:28:41] Jason: Yeah. And then YouTube, we had about 5,000 total views across the. I think it was three longer form videos, like five minutes or longer. And then a couple of Instagram reels that I recorded for Instagram once you stopped recording those. And then I put up as YouTube shorts. So that was six sales on YouTube and then this podcast with just 1500 total downloads, essentially, like, in that time, seven sales. So that is kind of the breakdown of how all of the channels went, I think. Like, my very quick takeaway, I know we're going to do more on takeaways, but it's like, you still can't convince me that Instagram is worth it.

[00:29:20] Caroline: I, I, you, like, I...

[00:29:22] Jason: Look.

[00:29:22] Caroline: Convince me.

[00:29:22] Jason: I look at that number and I'm like, eight total sales for the amount of insane?

[00:29:27] Caroline: Well, we're gonna talk about it. We're gonna talk about it. Let's talk about the full sales numbers and then we'll, we'll talk about reflections.

[00:29:32] Jason: Okay.

[00:29:33] Caroline: Well, I have a note here that says, was IG worth it? Okay. So you can rub salt in my wounds.

[00:29:38] Jason: It's just like I'm, I. Okay, we'll talk about it.

[00:29:41] Caroline: We'll talk about it.

[00:29:41] Jason: All right, so sales numbers and recap here. So the final new customers who joined WAIM for our last launch is 105 new customers.

[00:29:52] Caroline: Applause.

[00:29:53] Jason: That is a, a fantastic number. Again, our high goal was 70.

[00:29:57] Caroline: Yep.

[00:29:58] Jason: Our stretch goal was 120.

[00:29:59] Caroline: Almost made it to our stretch goal, which is wild.

[00:30:01] Jason: What's crazy is in the last 48 hours. So I always say this because I like to set everybody's expectations. In the first, like, two to three days, you're going to get 30% of your sales. In the the like, last 48 hours, 72 hours, you're going to get like 30 to 40% of your sales.

[00:30:17] Caroline: Yep.

[00:30:17] Jason: In the entire middle of the launch, there are going to be moments when you feel like your launch is dead. You're going to get 30% of your sales over the entire.

[00:30:24] Caroline: Why you do bonuses and you do exactly launch events.

[00:30:27] Jason: So we had 38 of those 105 buyers in the last two days of our launch. 38. That is a lot of people coming in at the end. 

[00:30:37] Caroline: For the first time in like three launches, we had no.... zero.

[00:30:41] Jason: Yeah.

[00:30:41] Caroline: Zero purchase days.

[00:30:42] Jason: Yeah. We, we'd had a couple of launches there that we'd had zero launch or zero purchase days like you said. And boy, it doesn't feel great. Just you're aware. 

[00:30:50] Caroline: When you look at the day and you're like not a single sale.

[00:30:51] Jason: Even 14 launches into a program, it still hits you when you get a zero.

[00:30:56] Caroline: Yeah.

[00:30:56] Jason: So anyway, total revenue unrealized. But if everybody ends up paying, their full payment plans will be $210,000.

[00:31:04] Caroline: Very grateful.

[00:31:04] Jason: Our total added monthly recurring revenue is $16,200. That's every month. That is new revenue added to us, which is amazing. And then after our affiliate payouts, which are going to be $3,300 a month to our affiliates, we will net $12,900 as total revenue to us. And yeah, this is...

[00:31:26] Caroline: Remember, we lose revenue from previous launches as well. So that's not. That's not adding necessarily. Like, it's basically keeping us roughly...

[00:31:35] Jason: At 30,000 recurring.

[00:31:36] Caroline: Roughly 30,000.

[00:31:37] Jason: Yeah. For the next, I think six months.

[00:31:39] Caroline: Yeah.

[00:31:40] Jason: And then our revenue.

[00:31:40] Caroline: There's another drop.

[00:31:41] Jason: Because we do the bi-... the biannual launch model because we have lifetime pricing. Like our revenue does trickle down. And then that's why you constantly do launches to kind of like.

[00:31:49] Caroline: And that's why we do this. But the most important thing is that this will comfortably get us. Will offer a financial bridge between parental leave and pivoting the business.

[00:31:59] Jason: Yeah.

[00:31:59] Caroline: I still think one of the hardest times is going to be the first six months of next year.

[00:32:04] Jason: Yeah.

[00:32:05] Caroline: Because not only are we going to be going back to work after becoming new parents, we are going to be starting over, basically.

[00:32:11] Jason: The good thing is we're not starting over with zero audience. We're not starting over with zero skills, like... 

[00:32:15] Caroline: And, and I'm just gonna be honest, it's kind of exciting too.

[00:32:18] Jason: Yeah, exactly. This. I don't think you had this note here, but I remember it from going through this with our WAIM members. This was our fourth highest launch ever. So I think our highest launch ever was 143 sales, and then we had like a 120 and then 115 and then 105. So this is our fourth highest.

[00:32:36] Caroline: Okay.

[00:32:36] Jason: Yeah. Okay. So those are the sales numbers and the recap. Also, I just want to say it's really, like, it's, it's easy to say numbers, like 105 and 210,000. Amazing new members so far. Like...

[00:32:51] Caroline: Yeah, that's the most important thing is, like, it's not just numbers. It's not just revenue. It's people.

[00:32:56] Jason: Yeah, we, we've had so many fun people join who, like, people from all different walks of life. Like, they're starting their business for the first time. They've been in business for a long time. They. They've doing their thing and they're just like, yeah, I just wanted to, like, be a part of WAIM. I've heard good things about it. And, like, some of those people are already the most active in our community, like, sharing helpful resources, giving ideas. And it's really fun just to see, like, the evolution of, like, who's using Teachery that joins WAIM, who doesn't care about using Teachery, like, who just wants to show up for, like, the coaching and the community. Like, it's really a good mix of people, and I think couldn't have asked for, like, a better group to... to end on, to kind of, like, lock in our WAIM community. And this is like, I. I don't know what our future holds, but at this very moment, I don't think we really have plans to add more people into the community. So it's kind of like, if you're in, you're in, like, now it's a little bit of, like, closed doors. Like, this is our group. This is it. Okay. Ready to move on to reflections?

[00:33:52] Caroline: Yes.

[00:33:53] Jason: All right, you want to start this off, Mika?

[00:33:54] Caroline: Okay. The biggest question is, was the Instagram series worth it?

[00:34:00] Jason: Yes.

[00:34:01] Caroline: And the question was it worth it? Is different from the question is do I regret it?

[00:34:06] Jason: Yeah.

[00:34:06] Caroline: The question of do I regret doing it? Is absolutely not.

[00:34:09] Jason: Right.

[00:34:10] Caroline: I very much enjoyed it, and it was stressful at times because of the way that we did it every single day and because we started with zero, like, banked content, and I was learning on the fly of, like, all these editing tools, but I thoroughly enjoyed the process of creating those videos. I learned a lot, so I don't regret doing it. Was it worth it? Did it contribute to, like, enough to sales to warrant the amount of time? Absolutely not. It was way too much time for the amount that it moved the needle. Um, but I was just at a place where like I wanted to try it and you don't. Again, I want to emphasize this. It is so easy to look back in hindsight and be like, that didn't really move the needle. But you don't know until you run the experiment.

[00:34:55] Jason: Yeah.

[00:34:56] Caroline: So you have to run the experiment. And especially if it's something you want to do. If it's something you want to figure out. I mean, I learned a lot and if I like, for example, you can see which of the videos did better than others. And so I learned a lot about that, of how I would structure the videos going forward to try to get more new people into our audience. That's what I, that's what I would do differently. Like, I probably would try again, maybe with like more of an eye on trying to get new people into the audience, trying to boost some of the content. And then also I would do it much shorter. I wouldn't do it 40 days we talked about. I would do it three weeks. I would do 21 days and I would spend two weeks trying to bank some of them beforehand.

[00:35:38] Jason: Yeah, I, I think if I was to look at the Instagram lead up strategy and I was to tell somebody else what to do, I would, I would say exactly what you just said of 21 days. If you want to do daily lead up, I would set aside whatever your daily budget is that is realistic for you that you can spend to boost the post. Because it's just, I just do not think the organic reach is there anymore for Instagram and it's pay to play. And that's just something you have to realize. So I would say whatever is realistic.

[00:36:05] Caroline: For a very small fraction of people. We, Jason and I were just talking about this yesterday. I think part of what people need to realize about Instagram is that you see these people with these videos who, who make it look easy.

[00:36:18] Jason: Yeah.

[00:36:19] Caroline: Like even from every strategy, from the looping B roll strategy to the more edited videos, you see these crazy numbers and these crazy follower growth numbers. What you don't realize is that is such a small fraction of the people who are creating content on there that it gives you this sort of survivorship bias where you're like, oh, well, this is the new strategy that is going to make everything take off. Not realizing that you're not seeing the millions of people who are trying to create content every day that are getting 200 views.

[00:36:48] Jason: Exactly.

[00:36:48] Caroline: You're seeing the people who you're like, they're not doing anything so different from me and they're getting 30,000 views and then 50,000.

[00:36:55] Jason: And also like you really just don't know if they're also boosting posts like you, you absolutely don't know. So anyway, again my plan, if I was, if someone was asking me for advice, do a 21 day lead up, do it daily because I think it is really helpful for people to get in routines and seeing your face. Have a budget for what you can spend to boost posts. I would say at a minimum $10 per day would be the minimum. That's 220 bucks. Like we're not talking about an astronomical amount of money. I know that not everybody has money to spend but...

[00:37:22] Caroline: Also depends on what your price point is for your offer.

[00:37:25] Jason: Yeah.

[00:37:26] Caroline: So we have a higher price point offer. Therefore we know pretty reliably what our marketing spend can be.

[00:37:33] Jason: Yeah. If I, if I was going to, if it was us and I was doing this again, I would earmark $100 per day as, as a boosted budget. So I would spend basically the price of one person joining WAIM, $2,000. That would be my budget for the entire boosted campaign just to get more eyeballs. And so just because I mentioned this earlier, we ended up spending $520 to boost basically reels at the very end because we didn't do it in the beginning at all. And then also during the ones that I posted, I boosted just to like get more eyeballs. 520 bucks. We have one sale that I know we can attribute to that because she sent me a message afterwards. She was like, hey, I just want to let you know I saw your video on my Explore page. I've never seen you before. I've never heard of you guys before. It's the first interaction I ever had. I then got like another piece of your content shown to me and then like I went down the rabbit hole and I bought. So I was like okay. I can attribute the fact that like that $500 is going to lead to 2,000. That's a forex return. Fantastic. But again like the strategy would have been more thoughtful in boosting things for there. 

[00:38:33] Caroline: For sure. I, I will say like I do think that the reels, whether this was just like psychologically or not, like it made me excited about the launch and it made me feel connected to our audience and it made me feel like I felt momentum which is not always how I feel when we're not on social leading up to a launch when we're just doing the podcast and we're just doing emails. People reply to emails less and less these days. And so you don't get this like real time feedback loop with your audience of potential buyers. And so it can feel kind of of weird going into a launch where you're like, I just have no idea. At least with the daily reels, I felt really connected to our audience and I felt excited.

[00:39:18] Jason: Yeah.

[00:39:18] Caroline: To go into launch. So I just want to say that like, that's worth something as well. You know what I mean? Now again, is it worth the hundreds of hundreds of hours that were invested? No.

[00:39:27] Jason: Yeah.

[00:39:28] Caroline: But I'm still really glad I did it. And, and I do think, like, no skills building time is wasted. And so I'm excited to bring some of the skills that I learned in, in doing that signature series to whatever content we will eventually create.

[00:39:45] Jason: Yeah. And...

[00:39:46] Caroline: For...

[00:39:46] Jason: Also, it's...

[00:39:47] Caroline: The next generation of our business.

[00:39:48] Jason: Two coaching sessions we're going to do about that.

[00:39:51] Caroline: Yeah.

[00:39:51] Jason: So it's like we literally learned a skill so that we can be able to teach that skill to other people.

[00:39:55] Caroline: If you want to do it.

[00:39:56] Jason: And then learned like, okay, what are the things we would skip? Like, I'm actually really excited to tell people in like creating your, your series if you're going to use this for a lead up launch, setting a boost budget aside.

[00:40:05] Caroline: Yeah.

[00:40:06] Jason: So like, I wish someone would have told me that when we started ours because I would have felt more confident and like, great. I know more people are going to see this. It will be more worth the effort. And then hopefully in the survey results, we'll see more buyers from it.

[00:40:17] Caroline: Yeah, for sure.

[00:40:18] Jason: Okay, so let's go through some of the things that helped us the most during this launch. So basically some of our biggest, you know, helpful things,  Calm Launch Formula, our own program. This actually is the only reason, I think, why we were able to continue doing the launch during our week of hell.

[00:40:33] Caroline: Yeah.

[00:40:33] Jason: Because all the sales emails were literally written ahead of time. They were all scheduled. Obviously our sales page was done ahead of time. But all of our bonuses, all of our planning for those, like we were not scrambling at the last minute to do anything or during the launch, like finish things up. Everything was done in advance of the launch.

[00:40:50] Caroline: You're just checking things off.

[00:40:51] Jason: And so that was actually an easy decision of when we were talking about during the week of hell, like, should we postpone the launch was. Well, all the sales emails are already done. They're already queued up. Like, we don't have to do anything like let's just let it go. Like we've already done all the work. So a little bit of a small pitch for our  Calm Launch Formula program. If you want to check it out, you can go to wanderingaimfully.com/deal to learn more about  Calm Launch Formula. But it is like literally we used all of our own AI prompts to like set up all of our sales emails and everything. And it's not. You don't copy and paste what the AI puts out. It just gives you a good first start. It helps come up with bonus ideas, all those things. Speaking of bonus ideas, the one thing that we wanted to do during this time was have more moments throughout the launch that felt like kind of like little events as we call them. So like little bonuses. So in the, the very first one we had our Signature Reels Notion template which was for the waitlist only. So. And everybody in WAIM is going to get that.

[00:41:47] Caroline: It was just like early access for the waitlist.

[00:41:49] Jason: Right. So this coaching session we're doing in July, all of our WAIMers will get that, but they got it first. Then I put together basically like a marketing plan generator that's personalized to your business and your product called the Marketing Lab. I'm going to talk about that in a second in an extra expense. So that was just a little tool I built in Lovable. And I spent probably like, I don't know, 15 total hours kind of coding it up. And people have found it really helpful, which is great. And then we offered for the very first time one on one voxer audio coaching.

[00:42:20] Caroline: For a month.

[00:42:20] Jason: For a month. So that's 30 days of me. And I've been doing that with... ended up, ended up being five people. And so I've been doing that which has been fun because I actually, I like doing the one on one thing, but I also like knowing that like it's not going to last forever. So I'm like helping them during this time. So that ended up getting five people. We had a Canva personalized sales funnel. So like taking your business and basically showing you a visual of like what a sales funnel could look like. So those are actually something that we're finishing up this week and delivering. And I think we had again, I think five people took advantage of that. And then the last thing is that we normally do a live preview of our unboring business roadmap which was like the main like asset in WAIM. That's like where you're learning from. It organizes all of our coaching and everything.

[00:43:10] Caroline: And originally, we were really excited to show this tool, the Calm Creator Roadmaps tool, where we were going to, like, put that roadmap into a Lovable app where you could mark off your own and then. And then AI would personalize the roadmap to your business, which we are still going to deliver to our WAIMers. But I had, like, probably 10 hours left on it. And this was the week that...

[00:43:32] Jason: It just. Yeah.

[00:43:33] Caroline: The crazy week. And so Jason just looked at me and was like, do you think you could? And I was like, no.

[00:43:38] Jason: And even. Yeah. And even now, like, we've just decided, like, listen, we. We didn't necessarily promise that to anybody in any timeline. And we. So we didn't use it at all during the launch. Like, we completely sidestepped it. But I think we do still want to deliver it to WAIMers and maybe it's going to be like, something that we'll just kind of play around with in the background during parental leave when, like, you just want, like, an hour to kind of, you know, mess down.

[00:43:58] Caroline: This is another plus in the no code tool column, because what you did was you were like, okay, great, we're not going to finish that. What is something that I can put together that would still be like, a launch event, whatever. And going back to what you were saying about, usually we do a preview of basically all of our coaching sessions. We. You, like, coded up. Well, I actually. I did as well.

[00:44:20] Jason: Yeah.

[00:44:20] Caroline: We did it together.

[00:44:21] Jason: Yeah. I told you the idea. And then because you were. I was asking you, like, hey, like, do you want to do anything? You're like, well, I could, like, work in Lovable, because I just really like it.

[00:44:30] Caroline: Yeah, it was a good distraction. And so we put together this little tool that basically you tell it what you want to learn or what struggle you're struggling with in your business, and it recommends three coaching sessions that you can preview there on the spot.

[00:44:45] Jason: So the tool ended up being. We emailed this in the sales sequence, and it was the way someone could preview our coaching sessions. They could actually, like, watch the three coaching sessions. So not only was it a, hey, look at this. But also, these are the type of things that we're going to create just, like small things very quickly.

[00:45:00] Caroline: And then it was great for our existing WAIMers because it's even more powerful than our dashboard search.

[00:45:05] Jason: Yes, our dashboard search.

[00:45:06] Caroline: Because our dashboard search. Yeah. And it doesn't. It doesn't run on AI or anything like that. So the session recommendation engine is really great because you could say, like, oh, I really need help with launches or I'm struggling with content or I need my mindset. And it will match you to three coaching sessions, which is fun.

[00:45:22] Jason: Yeah. Okay, so those were all the bonuses we had, our affiliates, obviously. And as you can tell, that went really well. And I think the reason that went really well is because we basically mentioned it to them about 11 different touch points in dedicated emails and Slack updates that we. Because we do a monthly or a weekly video update and then in two coaching sessions at the end of the coaching session, which is when we have kind of our most captive member audience, we talked about being affiliates for the last time. So that is always something you have to do lots of touch points for for affiliates. Like, an affiliate program is never just like, give them a PDF and give them a link and like tell them good luck. Like, it has. It does not work that way.

[00:46:02] Caroline: Running like two simultaneous marketing campaigns.

[00:46:04] Jason: You really are.

[00:46:05] Caroline: You're marketing to potential customers and you're marketing to your affiliates as well. But that worked really well. And then you did... You want to talk about some other paid things that we did?

[00:46:15] Jason: Yeah, so I just wanted to wrap this up because I mentioned that we. We ended up paying for a few more things than we kind of like normally do during a launch, which is we really don't pay for anything during a launch because we don't do paid ads. None of that. So we did boosted posts $520 on Instagram. We did promoted videos on YouTube. So this was $230 on YouTube. So basically $750 spent to promote content between those two platforms. You know, I think, I think we can contribute dedicated 2 to 3 sales, attribute 2 to 3 sales to that effort and so absolutely worth it, you know, and again, I would probably be more thoughtful about that in the future of like setting a budget aside and knowing what content I'm going to create and promoting it. So I think that is actually worth doing if you have the budget for it. And again, like you said, if your program fits on like, you know, if you sell $100 thing, it's a little bit hard to, you know, reconcile spending.

[00:47:10] Caroline: Yeah, that's like a whole other podcast episode about like, is the era of just pure organic content, like just dying and like, do you have to set aside a marketing budget just with the sheer amount of content that is now on these platforms?

[00:47:24] Jason: I think you do. And then the two other things we paid for. Framer help. So normally you do all of our design, our sales page, and then all the responsiveness, the animations, like all the things that make a sales page great. But we were running up against timelines and I was like hey, let's just hire someone on Upwork to do this. So we spent $400 on Upwork to have someone do all the animations and make the sales page responsive for tablet, mobile and extra large. And that $400 was insanely well worth spending.

[00:47:51] Caroline: Insanely worth it.

[00:47:52] Jason: She did an absolutely fantastic job. And all I did was I went to Upwork, I searched Framer, I searched animation and I put in like top rising talent. Like top talent or whatever. And we just picked a person within our budget, sent three messages to three different people, found a great.

[00:48:06] Caroline: You did set up a doc explaining exactly what we wanted section by section. So I think our documentation goes a long way.

[00:48:12] Jason: Yeah.

[00:48:12] Caroline: For that to be worth it. Did you rotate the X in the tic tac toe?

[00:48:16] Jason: No, it fell out in the like a last week or two.

[00:48:18] Caroline: Sorry, that just really. That's like a Jason thing.

[00:48:21] Jason: Yeah.

[00:48:21] Caroline: Like my brain was just like.

[00:48:23] Jason: Anyway, there's a little decorative tic tac toe we have. Caroline's getting sidetracked by. And then the last thing that paid for this is actually our largest expense of the entire campaign was I had to pay a developer $990 to finish off the Marketing Lab.

[00:48:37] Caroline: And what did I say?

[00:48:38] Jason: And you were not happy about it. I looked it up and during the launch when we sent out the Marketing Lab emails, we got five sales during those emails. So.

[00:48:47] Caroline: I will let you believe that that is a pure attribution.

[00:48:51] Jason: But listen, this is also just like it's a, it's a lesson learned and like we are not coding people. So there... Had I had more time, I could have probably fixed all these issues. But the call it a thousand dollars in development time. It was like a week before the launch. It was the last thing I was finishing up. I was just like hey, I just, I can't spend the time on this.

[00:49:11] Caroline: I think it's really good for us to know for next year to set aside a budget for...

[00:49:15] Jason: Developer finishing.

[00:49:16] Caroline: For finishing as well. And it's really good for those of you who are excited about this no code stuff. I know not all of you are, but I know some of you really are. Is like it's important for us to set the expectation that is realistic, which is you might have to pay for an engineer to come in and finish up the the last 5 to 10%. But still what you're able to do with these tools in the 90% is unbelievable.

[00:49:40] Jason: Yeah. And I just think like, the more complex a tool gets and the more things you want to do, like, sadly, honestly, one of the things that took the developer the longest was my stupid movie trivia that while you wait, because it just... It wouldn't, like, generate new movie trivia emojis and like...

[00:49:58] Caroline: Okay.

[00:49:59] Jason: It's so dumb.

[00:50:00] Caroline: It's so dumb.

[00:50:00] Jason: But also, it was great.

[00:50:01] Caroline: Actually, you're making me mad about the $990, the more you say that. So let's just like... 

[00:50:06] Jason: No, our launch ended up great. Stop it. And we have the Marketing Lab, which you can admit is, like a fun little tool to use, and you do, like, the trivia when it loads, it is fun.

[00:50:14] Caroline: The trivia is fun. And it is a very fun and unique.

[00:50:17] Jason: I understand what you're saying.

[00:50:18] Caroline: Is it worth? Anyway.

[00:50:18] Jason: Okay, so, yeah, in total, in absolute expenses additional to what we normally spend is about $2,000, which in the grand scheme of things, spending $2,000 is one sale. Got 105 sales. Like, I think we did a really good job on testing a couple different assumptions and just, like, seeing how they work.

[00:50:36] Caroline: Absolutely.

[00:50:37] Jason: All right, we have two parts of this list here, two parts of this left here. And I think it would just be interesting to talk about, like, emotionally where we are with WAIM and like, now that. Because I think that's one thing we've talked about a few times here is just in leading up to making this decision, you have feelings of, this is our last launch. This is the last time we're doing this. Like, we're transitioning our business.

[00:51:02] Caroline: I will say that now, on the other side of the launch, one thing that I'm really grateful for is that it does feel like the effort that we put towards making this last launch viable for us financially was worth it. That doesn't mean that we just, like, have stockpiles of cash and that there's no financial pressure. There is definitely not.

[00:51:23] Jason: And that there's no work to do.

[00:51:25] Caroline: No, there's still work to do now still financial pressure and work to do. But I will say, going into parental leave, as we wrap up the last few weeks of this pregnancy, it puts my mind a little bit more at ease that I don't feel this, like, weight on my shoulders of, like, ah, we gotta scramble because, like, there was a very real scenario where, like, if the launch didn't do well, like, we would just be in a weird spot. Yeah, for sure. And we had a couple of contingency plans, like, hey, if I have to go back to, like, making Framer websites or if we, like, just to bridge the gap, like, that's fine. And I know a lot of you listening can relate to that. Of like, you're making a big change in your life. Like, sometimes you gotta go get that Starbucks job or you gotta go do this thing, this side hustle thing. And like, that's just what you do to put yourself in a better position. So we were totally open to that. But this feels so relieving. Also, given everything that we're trying to navigate right now, I'm very grateful that the financial part of it is not more pressureful.

[00:52:21] Jason: Yeah. Like, there's plenty of stress in so many other areas of our life right now. It's very comforting to know that the financial stress is not a contributor to anything now.

[00:52:31] Caroline: That being said, I'm not totally stress free when it comes to the money stuff. Like, you and I are like, okay, like, now that we. Now that the launch is behind us, I see this, like, new frontier in front of us, and I have no idea financially what that's going to look like. We've had a predictable, profitable, and peaceful business for so many years now, and we're basically wiping that out. That is, you know, that's the. That's a lot. But like I said, we have time to figure it out. And I've. I feel confident in our ability to figure it out. And there's a part of me that's excited to figure it out because. And we've talked about this in the episode where we talk about why we decided to do this pivot. I think when you're so emotionally in a place where you're ready to move on to another chapter, the fear actually doesn't have that big of a grip on you because you're just. You're. You're ready.

[00:53:23] Jason: Yeah.

[00:53:24] Caroline: You're just so ready. Right. That's the same with parenting, too. It's like, there's a lot that we don't know. There's so much uncertainty. I'm feeling a lot less anxious about it than I thought I would. And I think it's just because, like, I'm ready to just like, step into the uncertainty. And. And maybe that is contributing to why I'm not that scared about business, because I'm like, we're choosing to blow up our whole lives to become parents. And so that's already my baseline expectation is just that I'm starting from scratch again. This is a quite literally like a new chapter of our lives.

[00:53:58] Jason: Yeah, for sure. Yeah. I. I definitely have felt myself in the past couple of weeks, you know, even before the launch had gone well. Just feeling, like, excited about the possibilities of business again.

[00:54:12] Caroline: Yeah.

[00:54:13] Jason: Because, and we've talked about this a couple times on the podcast, like, I have really enjoyed helping people and being a business coach and, like, teaching business to people.

[00:54:21] Caroline: Same.

[00:54:21] Jason: But I also, I don't get a lot of personal value from that. And so I have set aside my personal enjoyment of building.

[00:54:32] Caroline: Building, creating.

[00:54:32] Jason: Building and creating. And, like, we always have ideas and, like, being able to chase those ideas down and do things. And so I'm just so excited for showing our community and, like, the people who are going to watch us through, whether it's, whether we are posting on Instagram or YouTube or our email newsletter next year of like, you just... You have to get up and take swings and be at bat. Like you... and you're never gonna hit a home run in every single thing you try. And, like, I want to show people that we're gonna make things and, like, maybe people aren't gonna care or we're gonna make something where, like, it's really popular and, like, we make an adjacent product, but, like, ours flops and, like, what do you do? Yeah, it sucks. But, like, you don't give up and you don't... And you don't stop doing things. And I just want to show people, like, resiliency and being able to deal with the ups and downs of running your own business. It's a part of what everybody goes through. And, and so I think I'm just really excited to, like, chase down some of these ideas. And I'm also really excited for the fact that, like, we are in such... Listen, if you're against AI, I'm totally, I understand why. And you don't want to do it for your business. That's totally fine. That is your choice. But all I know is a person who has built so many things and has chased so many ideas, I have never felt more opportunity at my fingertips to chase down my ideas and to do things and to create them myself without having to, like, know that I'm getting in... in quote, unquote, in bed with a developer for the next, like, three, six months of my life to see an idea come to reality. Like, I'm so excited about that. And even just the way, the way that we have operated in building Lovable projects together. 

[00:56:00] Caroline: Yeah.

[00:56:00] Jason: Like, even like our little baby registry that we put together. Like, those types of things are just so fun.

[00:56:06] Caroline: That's actually what I was gonna say, sorry, not to cut you off, but I just am having a revelation in this moment, which is also that, like, another thing that I'm so looking forward to that I don't think we fully have realized until just now, is it's also an investment in our relationship because, when we are building things together, that is when we are, like, at our best.

[00:56:29] Jason: Yeah.

[00:56:30] Caroline: Because we're both ideas people, we're both creative people, we are both strategic people. We give really good feedback to ideas. Like, it's messy sometimes and we disagree or whatever, but it's like, I feel the most connected to you in, like, in our couple, when we're also doing that part of business. And I think that what we lose in the predictability of getting something that is working really well, where we're just like, continuing to work the system, is like, we both sort of, like, go off into our corners and we just do our roles.

[00:57:00] Jason: Yeah. I think with the way that Wandering Aimfully has existed the past couple years, which has been great and super grateful for it, we're very siloed in our work.

[00:57:06] Caroline: We are very siloed in that. And that's by design. But it's like... and it was great. Like we said, there's just trade offs.

[00:57:12] Jason: Yeah.

[00:57:12] Caroline: There's no perfect way to do things. And so we chose that trade off for so many years. And I would never go back and change it because it gave us so much predictability, especially in it... it gave us the ability to travel for a year. It gave us the ability to move to Portugal. Like, never gonna complain about setting up our business that way, but there comes a time where, you know, you need something new in your life. And I'm just so excited that, like, we're gonna have this little baby that we're gonna... is new and we're gonna be learning so much together about her and about what she needs and being parents together. And like, yeah, that'll be hard and uncomfortable, of course, but, like, you and I thrive when we're learning something new together. And then when we're ready to go into this next chapter of business, we're gonna be talking about ideas and trying things out and, you know, doing things new for the first time. And, like, I just am... I think we're entering into a chapter that is also going to help our relationship flourish even more.

[00:58:03] Jason: Yeah. Yeah. And I think even just from like a... I agree with everything you just said. I think that from a practical standpoint, the one thing that I also like is a lot of the things that we want to start, like, think about building are very much like collaborative, like, we can work on together. And I think tools like Lovable are going to give me an advantage to be able to work on your level in some degree. Like, I think you would agree. Like, the coaching preview tool that I built. Like, I did, I redid all the UI of it, and it is not perfect to what you would do, but it's way better than I could ever do working in Framer.

[00:58:35] Caroline: 100%.

[00:58:35] Jason: Like, I couldn't do that, but I can... I can prompt clearly enough, and I know enough about design, and I know enough about user experience and things that I can tell a machine how to do, like, the vision that I want for it or even based on what I can see. And so I just think, like, yeah, there's... there's going to be a lot of fun opportunities where we can pass projects back and forth, and we've never been able to do that...

[00:58:55] Caroline: Totally.

[00:58:56] Jason: In a very consistent way. Although I have gotten pretty good at Canva presentations and design, so that's no big deal.

[00:59:02] Caroline: You really have.

[00:59:03] Jason: I did the entire coaching session for our members in June, and they all said that it was on par with yours, so it's no big deal. All right. Any other emotional things you want to chat about with WAIM and, like, closing this chapter of our business before we move on to what's next?

[00:59:17] Caroline: Yeah, I just... just gratitude. Like, I have so much gratitude. Like I said, we... Obviously, we're talking about how excited we are for the next chapter, but I want to make sure that everyone here is, like, we are so grateful for the... What is it now? Eight? Eight years? 

[00:59:33] Jason: Of WAIM, in general?

[00:59:34] Caroline: Yeah. Like, almost eight years of committing to this business model and the people that we've been able to attract and the community we've been able to build. You know, it's not lost on us how special it is, and it has, you know, enriched our lives in, like, so many different ways, and I'm just so deeply grateful for that. And, and like I said, I do not. I do not lose sight of, like, when going through possibly one of the hardest things that a person can go through in, in life of, like, losing a parent. Man, am I ever grateful for the way that we've built our business because I think to myself, and I'm like, people go back to work and they work 9 to 5 and they feel like this. Like, that feels impossible to me, being pregnant and grieving and doing all the things. And, like, I just... I just want to make sure that I vocalize how grateful I am for the flexibility that we've built, the predictability that our business has brought us. And, and it's why I was motivated to do business coaching for so many years because I want that for everyone listening.

[01:00:40] Jason: Yeah.

[01:00:40] Caroline: I want that flexibility. I want you to have the choice to be able to wake up and say, I'm grieving today. And I'm not... I'm... Work can wait. You know what I mean? And people often who work for other people don't have that choice.

[01:00:52] Jason: Yeah.

[01:00:52] Caroline: So that's my wrap up there. It's been a beautiful full circle journey. It feels scary and exciting at the same time to be welcoming this new person into our family, this new chapter into our life. AI is happening. Scary stuff's happening in the world. It's a crazy time to be alive.

[01:01:11] Jason: Yeah.

[01:01:11] Caroline: And, but I, I feel the most well equipped in my life that I've ever felt mentally to be able to handle all those changes.

[01:01:20] Jason: Yeah, yeah, I totally agree. And I, I think like just, just having a foundation of an amazing community of... of WAIM members is, is really fun that we like always have these people kind of like getting our back, if you will. You know, when things go up, when things go down. Like, I know that... I mean we had so many amazing messages from people when, when I was posting kind of like by myself to our community when normally you would have been there, that everyone was just kind of like rooting us on and just, you know, being... So. Yeah, it's really great. Okay, let's talk about kind of like big takeaway lessons and then also what's next? Like what are we... What is next for WAIM as an actual business and, and maybe even this podcast. We can give people a couple ideas of what to expect.

[01:02:04] Caroline: Sure. I would say the big, I mean the biggest lesson. It's so hard to know how much of our marketing for this launch was purely just due to the last time.

[01:02:16] Jason: Well, I think...

[01:02:16] Caroline: I don't think we talked about that as enough on this episode. But like any type of like final launch, final this urgency, like we're not dumb. We know that that has... moves the needle for quite a few people. So you know, that, that I think is the lesson there is like, if you're even remotely thinking about closing something down, go all in and do a final thing of it and just choose hard because that will be the push that, that a lot of people need.

[01:02:46] Jason: Yeah.

[01:02:46] Caroline: Just make sure it's real.

[01:02:47] Jason: You may find yourself with a product or a service or whatever that's like maybe the sales have started to slow down quite a bit. And you just think like, oh well, no one really wants this anymore. It's like, I'm not going to do a final sale of this. And you know like...

[01:02:59] Caroline: Yeah.

[01:02:59] Jason: Because the sales have been going down. But it's like, ah, I would disagree. One final launch, one final time that someone can get something can really motivate them if they've been on the fence. And there are so many people who are always on the fence you don't know about and...

[01:03:11] Caroline: Totally. 

[01:03:13] Jason: And I think even in our post purchase survey is something like, I remember when I looked through. It was like 30 to 40% of people, call it 35%. The number one reason they bought was because they knew it was the last time to buy. So it's like...

[01:03:25] Caroline: That tells you.

[01:03:25] Jason: Just a third and then you know, you don't know that like maybe a whole other second third of people. It was a high reason but it wasn't maybe necessarily the highest to them.

[01:03:33] Caroline: Yeah.

[01:03:33] Jason: So yeah, and I, I definitely think that the, you know, doing the Instagram lead up series, you know, sharing kind of like the recap podcast episodes, we didn't even talk about having like the sales tracker and I was posting about that on like Threads. We did get one sale from Threads. So someone was reading my like couple days updates about our final launch. Yeah, I built this little sales tracker tool which many of you heard about and saw if you were paying attention during the recap episodes. But yeah, like I, I just think that experimenting with new things and, and trying to have fun and figuring out ways that if you're in a business like ours and if you've been doing it for a couple years, it can get very mundane and it can get very repetitive and so just trying to find ways to get you excited, to get excited about your business. And I think that like, you know, this, this idea of loving your work is such a glamorized thing. And I think we love our work as much as any two people could love their work. But there are still, you know, 14 launches into a thing... you're going to get tired of it. And so you really have to try to find ways that get you excited about it... and are trying to get new people to find what you're doing.

[01:04:40] Caroline: For sure. And then I would also just say a lesson is like so many of the, the things that we did during this launch because they weren't a part of our normal Calm Launch Formula, they were sort of add ons, we were okay with doing it imperfectly. It's like you said, we didn't track every sale of the boosted posts. We didn't do that perfectly. We did... You know, at the last minute, you're... you're deciding I'm to do a recap on Threads, and you're not thinking through that full strategy. And, you know, you're promoting a video on YouTube. Like, there were so many of these sort of, like, ad hoc things that we did, and we didn't focus on it needing to be perfectly thought out or perfectly executed. We just were sort of like, let's just try it. Let's just do it. Let's just, you know, make decisions on the fly. And I struggle with that a lot sometimes, is like my brain wants it to be fully baked as an idea or otherwise it's not worth doing. And I think that holds me back sometimes. And so you're much better at being like, just... It doesn't have to be perfect. Just try.

[01:05:39] Jason: Yeah, I'll eat the cookie dough. You know, I don't have to bake them to be cookies. Like, I'll eat the cookie dough all day long. I'm gonna get an upset tummy, but I'm fine.

[01:05:47] Caroline: You're just living on the edge. And so I do think that is a good lesson, though, because in marketing, I think a lot of times, I mean, it doesn't mean that, you know, all effort is created equal, as we saw with the Instagram. But I do think that the... the more you can focus on removing those mental barriers that's holding you back from doing more stuff...

[01:06:06] Jason: Yeah.

[01:06:07] Caroline: And this is like, you know, you often talk about. I know it's not your phrase, but the surface area of luck. It's like just doing more things. Doing more things, giving yourself more opportunities for people to discover you. And whatever's holding you back from that is something to look into and try to remove. So.

[01:06:23] Jason: Yeah.

[01:06:23] Caroline: I think just... You don't need a perfect plan. You just need a plan.

[01:06:26] Jason: Yeah. All right, let's talk about what's next for WAIM. So this is just kind of like giving you an idea of what's coming in the future for us. So this month, as of recording this podcast episode, we are in July, we have our last live coaching session ever. So we'll do our last live coaching session this month, and then we have monthly recorded coaching sessions going up, August, September, October, November, December. And our goal is to...

[01:06:50] Caroline: We might do. We might do a live one in December.

[01:06:52] Jason: We might.

[01:06:52] Caroline: Cap off.

[01:06:52] Jason: But it's not going to necessarily... I don't... We'll see, but all of those monthly coaching sessions are going to be pre recorded with some type of like quote unquote premiere of them where like our members can show up and... and watch together on a day each month. And then, yeah, our, as we've talked about and we'll talk about more, you know, as we get closer to it, is building tools and apps for creators in 2026. Like, that's our goal is to create actual things that can help you and... and shout out to our episode where we talked about six business ideas if we were to start like right now. I think that was episode 247.

[01:07:29] Caroline: I still maintain. I really did not prepare enough for that. So I feel like all my ideas were...

[01:07:32] Jason: Yeah, but we can do a whole other episode with a little bit more preparation. Like, we can just keep doing it. So. So yeah, we'll be working on that in 2026 and I think between now and then, it's just going to be a lot of conversations for us just on like, what do we want to do? What are the things that are standing out? How do we want to figure these things out?

[01:07:47] Caroline: Might be totally different people on the other side of... 

[01:07:49] Jason: It's true.

[01:07:49] Caroline: A family of three.

[01:07:50] Jason: We might just be family vloggers. Like, we may come out just...

[01:07:53] Caroline: Never.

[01:07:53] Jason: Here we are. Like, look at our child perform. "Perform, child!" And it'll just be me yelling, "Perform, child!" over and over again. Yeah. And then I think, yeah, for... for as far as, like, content for us after parental leave is going to be a lot more building in public again. Whether that's Instagram, we're going to use that. YouTube, if we want to film videos. I don't know. We'll figure out what that looks like, but we'll be doing some form of building in public and sharing that a lot more.

[01:08:19] Caroline: Yep.

[01:08:20] Jason: All right, I think that's it for our final recap episode of our final enrollment of WAIM Unlimited. It is closing the chapter on quite an amazing journey for this program that we put together.

[01:08:31] Caroline: I can't wait to see, like three years from now, what does our business look like? Because, you know, when we first started Wandering Aimfully in 2018, that... that's what it feels like where we are again. Starting over.

[01:08:42] Jason: Yeah.

[01:08:43] Caroline: And just being like, we don't know what's gonna work, but we just know that we're gonna keep trying until something works.

[01:08:49] Jason: Also, kind of buried the like, overall lead. I probably should have put this in the very beginning of the episode, but I'm sure many people would be curious to know because we don't always say it, but WAIM Unlimited, as a program, has generated $2 million in total revenue. So after this launch, $2.3M. It'll be the total after this launch. So that's amazing that we were able to build that business and that amount of revenue. So if you stayed around to the end, then you got to hear that number. We've touched on the number a couple times.

[01:09:17] Caroline: Numbers are just numbers, but they are cool and...

[01:09:20] Jason: Yeah.

[01:09:20] Caroline: You know, it helps make something concrete in your brain to be like, wow, we did that.

[01:09:24] Jason: Yeah, exactly. And also, like, it didn't happen in 30 days. So it's like, you know, it's a real timeline for a real business, you know, with real customers that aren't just, like, churning and burning. All right, I will leave some links to some things in the show notes specifically to our Calm Launch Formula. If you've listened to this episode and you're like, wow, I really want my launch to be a lot more calm, we highly recommend our own program because it is literally what we use to have our launch continue to work throughout one of the worst weeks of our lives.

[01:09:50] Caroline: And there's just so many moving parts to a launch. And if you're overwhelmed by all of that, I think that's why we made it as the Calm Launch Formula. It's just like, we're walking you through it step by step.

[01:10:00] Jason: Yeah.

[01:10:01] Caroline: So it's very doable. And you can use AI to help as well to make it easier.

[01:10:05] Jason: You also don't have to use AI. You could totally skip it. 

[01:10:07] Caroline: And you also do not have to use the prompts as well. The entire program is built so that you get to choose.

[01:10:13] Jason: Yeah. All right, that's it for us. We might be back next week, or we might be on, like, a biweekly cadence here. We'll see how we're feeling.

[01:10:20] Caroline: We're gonna try to bring you some updates until August.

[01:10:23] Jason: Right.

[01:10:24] Caroline: August is baby month.

[01:10:26] Jason: That's baby month. That's like, no more content. That's like a normal summer sabbatical. We're being very Portuguese because that's on the Portuguese...

[01:10:32] Caroline: That is very Portuguese of us to take off in August.

[01:10:35] Jason: All right, everybody, we thank you so much for listening. For all the WAIMers who joined us this final round, we're so excited to have you for years, providing value to you and creating things for you and, for everybody else listening to this, we appreciate your faces and we'll chat with you soon.

[01:10:48] Caroline: Bye.