Pt. 1: Why Launching Is Broken - Funnels & Freakouts & Faking, Oh My!
We're doing way too much without any real payoff.
Every association I have with the word “launch” is one of dread and disgust. I am a marketing expert with 10 years in advertising as a copywriter and STILL. Hearing someone say “launch” makes my face twitch.
A launch is like the most concentrated possible version of an organization’s marketing processes. Seeing how companies launch says a lot about what values are being upheld within their work—regardless of whether those are the values they actually want to uphold or not.
In my agency days, “launch” meant a fuck-ton of late nights, weekend work, weeks of forced business travel and cancelled PTO.
Now in entrepreneurship, I associate it with a different kind of exhaustion, burnout, grief, confusion, disappointment, shame and working really hard for REALLY free.
Every time I talk to a friend that’s working on a launch, they’re tired as fuck. Every client that talks to me about launching is anxious. Every coach I see selling a course or program on how to launch is promising ways to “make launching not suck.”
Here’s what I think: traditional launches are not an effective business or marketing practice for microbusinesses and solopreneurs.
Even once (and maybe especially once,) we’ve begun establishing ourselves—all a traditional launch really does is burn you out, drag down your self-esteem, and recycle harm for you and your audience.
For those of us who are in the space where we are no longer business newbies, but neither are we super-profitable, go-to pros, we need marketing strategies that look like something else.
Think about all the work it takes to put a launch together:
The email sequences
The freebies
The webinars and challenges
The landing pages to create
The copy to write
The graphics to make
The BTS tech and admin that makes it all work
And you're supposed to do it all while also “just” continuing to do the everyday tasks it takes to maintain your business.
AND, this process requires us to do this REPEATEDLY in order to continue making sales??
For this to be the expectation from a single human being for marketing and acquiring clients is laughable. It's not sustainable and it's not effective.
When I was figuring out “how to business” I thought launching was something tangible. I thought there was a set system or a trick I didn’t know yet.
As I struggled my way out of figuring out how to run a business into actually running a business, my sinking-feeling assumption became that maybe I just wasn’t trying hard enough.
And the coaches I was following throughout this shift all seemed to be telling me that my assumptions were true:
Learn my foolproof launch system, they’d say.
A lead magnet, then a free challenge, then a webinar, then a pitch then a sales email sequence, they’d say.
What they neglected to say was:
“I already have an audience well into the tens of thousands, so if even one half of one percent of this group of people purchases during a launch, I will have made more in a few weeks than you made last year.”
“I am a fully able, slim, white, conventionally attractive, cis-hetero woman, and am therefore already the standard of trustworthiness and desirability—people are more likely to buy from me in the first place because I am the current societal standard of womanly success.”
“I am already wealthy, and much of that wealth may not have come directly from my online business. I would never tell you if that were the case, but it does allow me to resource myself in whatever way is needed.”
“I have a dedicated full-time team to create, fine tune and/or execute all of the required launch materials for me. That’s how I can put out a full-scale launch while also having time to ideate, coach clients and take care of myself.”
“I started my business years ago in the wild west of online business, when my competition was negligible and the market was up for grabs—a completely different environment than the one you’re building in.”
“I am out of touch and have forgotten what it’s actually like at the beginning of business growth because I’ve been here for years - whatever struggle I went through has now become a (anywhere from slightly embellished to grossly misrepresented) story I tell in order to market my current offers.”
This may sound like a defeatist whine-fest, especially when we’ve been sneakily conditioned to think that if something doesn’t work for us, we didn’t work hard enough or do it right (certainly not because our circumstances have created conditions in which these “systems” will not work, or because intersectionality means that things work differently for different people for different reasons…)
Regardless of your opinion of me and my attitude, the fact remains:
The point of marketing your services is not for you to have the most complex sales funnels possible. The point is for you to help more people with those services, get paid for doing so and grow your business.
The ways we’ve been told to launch don’t actually get us all there. In fact they don’t get us even close to “there” and often set us further back. Starting with…
Working for free
Working without being paid is a thing to be expected when you’re starting a business. But working for free now without any real return in the future either is a seriously steaming load of shit.
If we are all operating under the belief that our labor deserves to be compensated in some way, why then are we so content to expend all of our own resources without any payback whatsoever, monetary or otherwise?
What the traditional online launch (a la Jeff Walker’s PLF, etc.) ignores is that there are specific conditions that need to be in place in order for that launch to succeed:
A relatively large audience.
A fine-tuned and clear offer complete with a fine-tuned and clear sales page
The willingness to show up in specific ways on specific platforms (even if that puts you out of your integrity.)
The physical, mental and emotional capacity to brainstorm, create and share all of these materials.
The systems and tools in place to physically execute all the content, challenges, webinars, etc.
The capacity to then immediately, if not in the very near future, deliver the actual offer for this influx of new clients, (which might require a whole OTHER set of content creation, tech, tools, resources etc.)
The effort we make to market our services is meant to pay off through the actual exchange of money for those services, right?
The reality is that if all of the above conditions do not yet exist within our businesses, going through the exhausting motions of executing on a launch like this is very literally a waste. The return we see on our investment of resources doesn’t balance out.
We all know that putting all of your money into a single stock trade is a recipe for disaster. The recommendation is that you invest consistently over a period of time across a number of different stocks that make up your portfolio. And whatever money you invest does not include the money you need for things like housing, food, transportation or other short term spending.
Putting all the resources you’ve got—time, energy, money, attention, creativity—into building and executing a launch is like spending your rent on a hot stock tip from your idiot cousin. (We all have at least one, and I know you just thought about a very specific person as you read this.)
What would it look like for a launch not to commandeer all of your resources, but to use just a fraction of your resources so you still have room for the rest of your business and your life?
The idea then is not “don’t spend anything.”
It simply becomes: “don’t spend it all in one place.”
OVER-working for free
Remember those nights and weekends I mentioned? The exhaustion and burnout? Yup. Here it comes.
We keep trying to shove all of this work into the tiniest amount of time. My question is: why? When we are literally the ones setting these deadlines, why would we create situations like this for ourselves on purpose?
What sadistic game is this?
Do we momentarily forget that there are more weeks in the year to come? Do we just not understand that time passes but our measurements of that time are a human construct? Do we actually not want to build a business, and instead just build a series of life-or-death situations that may or may not result in an influx of cash?
And then somehow, all of a sudden, we’re “behind” on our launches?…
Surprise! It’s your corporate trauma and societal conditioning coming back to bite you in the ass!
When you remember:
that capitalism runs on your desperation for more resources and fabricated urgency,
that social injustice runs on you being so distracted by your own perceived lack and inability to slow down that you can’t give it any meaningful attention,
that the patriarchy runs on you being “superwoman” and “doing it all” with a smile on your face—
it really starts to make sense.
Here’s where you aren’t even working for free anymore - you’re paying with your life so you can work more. That doesn’t seem like a sane tradeoff to me.
And, what happens if you have processing differences? If you’re chronically ill? Already suffering from burnout? If you just had a major life event like a loss, a cross-country move, a new addition to the family, surgery?
What kind of harm are you perpetuating for yourself in creating timelines that force you to overtax yourself in every way?
And what oppressive systems are you upholding, whether you want to or not, by staying overtaxed?…
Thanks for reading Part One of Why Launching is Broken—Funnels & Freakouts & Faking, Oh My!
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Click here to read Pt. 2: Why Launching is Broken—Funnels & Freakouts & Faking, Oh My! (The scientific method, the toll of ignoring reality and gaslighting for sales.)
About The Author:
Zoha Abbas is an Intuitive Tarot Reader, Business Coach and writer who aims to explore the small business conversations around doing business better, together, and in the grey-area of real life through data, divination and dismantling harmful systems. She is the CEO and Creator of The Ownership Method, a coaching practice where she helps fellow entrepreneurs and small business owners make change in their own businesses and beyond.
If you’d like more personalized help with:
building your next launch
reworking your business processes
strengthening and clarifying your offers
for a less harmful, more human business, join me for a 1-on-1 intensive and lets make it happen.
For any other inquiries, please email: zoha@theownershipmethod.com