If you're curious about how I had my biggest product launch to date,
even while going through burnout,
this video is for you because I'm going to reveal all the details of my launch,
plus how you as an entrepreneur or solopreneur can
avoid burnout. When you're doing something big,
like launching and stick around until the end where I'm going to share our exact
launch plan that helped us generate over a hundred thousand dollars in sales.
even while I was a little burned out.
Before we get into it,
let's talk about why I made some of the decisions I did to launch Social Bank.
The truth is I was close to burnout right when we were finishing the course and
right before we were getting ready to launch. If you're a course creator,
or if you've ever made a digital product,
you know how grueling course creation can be. In fact,
here's what we spent just to make Social Bank. We had a course consultant,
a naming copywriter, a video editor, a content writer.
We decided to invest in trademark lawyers.
We had a coder for our sales page and on top of it,
I did a brand photoshoot and I hired a brand outfit consultant,
which I highly recommend.
All in all our total expenses just to create Social Bank,
were $21,208 and 80 cents US.
Plus hundreds of hours from me and my team.
So this doesn't include our salaries and our months of pay in order to create
the product. So there was a lot on the line. We had invested months,
we had invested over $20,000. And yet,
as I was nearing towards the finish line of this product,
I also had to admit to myself that I was feeling burned out.
I was losing energy like crazy. Now I'm no expert on burnout. In fact,
I don't really know if I officially burned out,
but here were the signs that I saw to make me think I needed to take it easy.
I was chugging coffee some days,
and I felt like it wasn't doing anything for me. In fact,
I felt more tired after chugging coffee. And you know how,
when you drink a lot of coffee, it kind of gets your system moving. Yeah.
All of that just stopped working for me. I was downing it. I'm like,
"This Isn't doing anything stomach." You know?
So it just started to make me wonder. And then on top of that,
I could not focus. I just felt exhausted.
And so at one point I decided to stop drinking coffee because it
wasn't really working for me. And in fact,
I remember chugging it the day of my brand photoshoot,
which looks really glitzy, but the next day I looked like this.
I looked like a truck had hit me and I decided it was the coffee.
I was drinking too much coffee.
So the following week I decided to cut coffee out.
And that was interesting. I didn't have any headaches,
but I didn't have any energy until about two o'clock in the afternoon.
So instead of drinking my morning coffee,
I was drinking protein shakes and I was just a zombie.
So I'd try to work from bed. I told my team what was going on. They took over,
they were amazing, but I just didn't have any energy for that week.
And the other thing I noticed was that sometimes in meetings,
especially the early morning meetings,
because I was working in Vancouver and my team was working in Toronto,
I was three hours behind them - I was kind of grumpy in meetings.
Like even when we would hire consultants to come in and I would pay them for
their time, I was just irritated. And after some meetings,
I would even message them and apologize and just tell them I wasn't feeling
good. Like physically, my body did not want to be in that meeting.
And they were all very understanding, very nice,
but that was another major sign. I was very irritable. So sorry to everyone.
How did I handle my burnout? So when I started to see these signs,
I had to do the thing that I didn't want to do,
which was kind of put my tail between my legs and tell my team that I was
struggling.
I felt a little weak in that moment because I knew that everyone had been
working for months.
And I also didn't want to sabotage our product that we had been working on for
months. So after I looked like a truck had hit me that one morning,
I talked to my team on the Monday and I told them I needed to pump the brakes.
I needed to take a break. And so that's when I also stopped drinking coffee,
I stopped setting an alarm. I just let my body sleep.
And sometimes it was up to nine hours. I stopped taking meetings and my team,
they were amazing.
They went into overdrive to take things off of my plate as well.
I also got back on my supplements. So I was taking magnesium, vitamin B,
fiber pills,
and I was making sure to not do really intense physical exercises.
I was doing more gentle things because I was worried about my cortisol level
basically. And the last thing that I did was I stepped away from the business.
I took time off,
which sounds insane when you're at the finish line of creating a product
and then about to launch it. But I just had no choice. Like I said,
my team were amazing. They stepped in and took over a lot of things for me.
So burnout sucks. And when I polled my audience,
majority of people who answered my poll said that they had a crazy burnout
experience similar to mine. So again, I'm no expert,
but here's some tips to handle burnout if you ever experience it as an
entrepreneur. One, have a plan, but be flexible.
That's what we had to do with Social Bank.
We were probably one to two months late from our original plan of when we
wanted to get it done. But that's life.
We just had to slow things down at the end and be a little late.
The second tip is to have clearly defined roles and responsibilities,
especially if you have team members.
Everyone needs to know who owns what so that when you,
as the entrepreneur or business owner, take a step back,
people know what is on their plate.
And you also have to be able to make hard decisions. Like for us,
we decided to pause our YouTube content so that we can focus on getting
the product done. And by taking that off of our plates,
my team members were able to add more things to help me get Social Bank done.
The third tip is to have clear deadlines and communications. So for this,
we have a ton of tools that we love.
We use Slack for our daily check-ins and to share any roadblocks that we
have in our way from getting something done.
And we use Asana to manage our whole project and see at a glance
where the project is at and what's stopping it from getting it done.
The fourth tip is to protect your team from burnout.
It's often the case that the business owner will take the majority of the stress
on themselves. So if you start to sense that your team members are burning out,
consider hiring backup help,
additional contractors who could step in and help your team get their job done.
Now, if you're a solopreneur,
you might be watching this and thinking that's all great Elise,
but I don't have a team. I am one person. If I burn out what then?
And I totally get that.
I was a solopreneur for the first three years of my business. And yes,
you're right. If you burn out your business, basically shuts down.
So try to avoid burnout as much as possible and to do
so here are my tips. The first tip is to leverage technology,
sign up and pay for the software that's going to make your life easier.
Things like Zapier, Zapier? Acuity. Later.
These are all tools that allow you to automate and schedule things for you.
So definitely don't be afraid to make those investments.
The second tip is to leverage existing knowledge from other experts. And yes,
this does mean you might need to invest in their programs. So for example,
one of the biggest investments I made as a business owner was to sign up for a
program called Clockwork.
And clockwork is also a book so you can read the book,
but it's a program that teaches you how to run your business so that it runs
itself. Sounds very sexy,
but there are some awesome concepts inside of that program that I learned from
the coach and brought into my own business.
The third tip is to build in breaks and self-care and treat it as a necessity
and not a luxury. I know it's hard,
especially when you're the one person doing all the things and it's all on your
shoulders. But if you burn out - the whole business pauses.
So plan for your breaks - actually put them in your calendar and take
them. Your mind, your body are going to be very happy you did. Alright.
So let's get into the juicy details of how our Social Bank launch went,
even while I was burned out. So initially here's what our plan was to launch.
Because Social Bank was a brand new product I wanted to do what's called a beta
launch.
So I wanted to get founding members into the program at the best deal ever
so that they could get inside and give us their feedback.
So to drum up excitement, I wanted to host a Reels Challenge,
a five day reels-focused challenge.
Then I wanted to take all the challengers, get them inside of Social Bank.
And then after that, I wanted to host two live webinars.
So what that means for me is a lot of showing up.
Running a challenge means you are live every single day.
And then hosting webinars means that you're also live for hours for multiple
days. It's a lot of energy output.
When I started to admit that I was feeling burned out,
we looked at our original plan and we knew that it was just too much.
We didn't have enough time to prepare for a challenge.
And I just didn't have the energy to show up that much.
So then we switched gears and we decided to host one webinar.
But I'm not a huge fan of webinars.
I find most of them a little on the useless side
and they don't share enough how to information.
It's a lot of look at me. I'm so great.
Now all my tricks are inside of my program. I'm not about that.
And I think you're not either like as consumers, we get it,
we know where this webinar's going.
So I decided to not host a webinar and I wanted to host a co-working
session. A live co-working session where you could show up on zoom, join me,
live as your instructor and we were going to get things done.
I made it clear on the signup page.
Here's what we're going to do with your Instagram profile in this live
co-working session. And I had never seen this concept done before.
It was a first, I wasn't sure how it was going to go over with my audience,
but people freakin' loved it.
We put out the signup page and it was eight days in advance of the class.
On the day of my live co-working class,
we had 5,009 people registered.
My Zoom room that I had signed up for was for a thousand people.
And I did not think a thousand people were going to show up live.
We had so many people show up live that they were locked out of our Zoom room.
And while I was live teaching the co-working class,
my team member Kaeli had to upgrade our Zoom account so that we could let in
total 1,150 people into this live co-working class.
It was bananas. And then if you've ever hosted a webinar,
you know how important it is for people to stick with you through the entire
program.
And so by the time I got to the end of our co-working class and I was presenting
Social Bank, we still had about 900 people on with us live.
They saw the whole presentation of what's included in Social Bank.
And then I offered a fast-action bonus.
For the first 50 people who would sign up,
they would get a special bonus from me and my team.
And we sold out.
We sold the first 50 spots while I was still live.
This was unheard of in my business.
Like I had done fast-action bonuses before, but nothing like this.
Nothing that got sold out while I was still live. So I was really pumped.
I think I ended up being on that Zoom for like two and a half,
almost three hours.
I wanted to stay on as long as I could to answer everyone's questions.
But by the end, I just sort of petered out.
I couldn't even get through the rest of the 200 questions that were were there.
So maybe if I had more energy, I would have stuck with it,
but I just had to call it and end the class. So that was it.
That was my one main job. It was to show up and teach that co-working class.
After that, the very next day,
my fiance and I got in a car and we drove to Alberta.
Like I was out of reception in the Rocky mountains. The reason was,
was because my team wanted to take over after that. And they did.
They wrote all the emails. They wrote all of our social media posts,
all of our ads. They created all of the creative we needed for our social media.
It was amazing. And it was so cool for me to see as a business owner,
and a bit of a control freak - I'm not going to lie,
it was so cool for me to step away from doing the things that only I have ever
done and let my team members take over. I wasn't completely offline
during this time.
I was still reading emails before they went out and I was checking our Slack
messages. But for the most part, I was chilling. I was at the lake,
the freezing lake of Waterton, Alberta, not really swimming,
but just checking my phone, seeing the sales,
seeing my team members answer all the questions that came in.
It was a beautiful thing. So what were the results from this big,
crazy launch after months of creating Social Bank? What happened?
How did it go? I've got the data for you right here. So our sales page,
the one that did the selling,
we had 6,508 visitors to that sales page.
Our conversion rate on that sales page was 3.6%.
So I think that's a little above industry standard.
I'm not sure I'll have to look into that in total.
The number of signups that we had were 234.
Crazy. Our original goal was 126 sales,
and that would make a six figure launch.
And then when we saw how many people were signed up for our co-working class,
we decided to bump our goal up to 200.
And in the end we did 234 sales.
Now we also offered something new, which was a seven day,
no questions asked refund period.
So we did get 35 refunds. Wa wa.
But we have a lot of good data as to why people felt like the course wasn't for
them. So in total, our net signups was 199 students.
So what does that work out to in sales? Well,
including all of our sales from our launch and future payment plan
installments,
our total revenue from the launch was $165,112.
Biggest launch to date. Still getting used to it. It's crazy.
Keep in mind we had already spent over $21,000 just to make the course
and our launch expenses to run
the launch were $17,807.
So after those two major expenses,
our take home after the launch was $126,095 and
36 cents. Of course,
that doesn't include our salaries or taxes and all that great stuff.
But that's another video for another day.
So if you're curious about Social Bank and how you can use Instagram to make
bank in your business and get results, just like our students inside,
they're already making money back to their business.
Go ahead and head to this link right here and get started today.
Thanks for joining me and be sure to leave me a comment below this video on any
other future topics you'd like for me to cover here on my channel.
To ease and revenue, I'll see you in the next video.
Thanks for joining me in today's video, covering my launch breakdown.
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