Pt. 3: Why Launching Is Broken - Funnels & Freakouts & Faking, Oh My!
How can we make this better?
Did you miss Part Two? Read it here.
So. If there’s so much in the way of a successful and less harmful launch process, what—if anything—could ever work?
Here’s what has worked for me instead, perhaps it will help you find your own new process:
Accept + acknowledge, clarify and accommodate.
Accept and acknowledge:
Sometimes I wish I had more than I do. Sometimes I forget about what I already have. When I’m most in flow, I can both accept my current reality and make grateful use of what I have to work with.
Where I am is where I am. What it is, is what it is. What I have is what I have. And those things may not look the way they do for you or anyone else.
Acceptance of my position, my circumstances, my capacity, my resources—regardless of whether any of it is fair or not, equitable or not, abundant or not—allows me to create a plan for myself within at least a closer approximation of my true reality.
On the other side of acceptance is acknowledgement. It is gratitude for what is and grounding for what’s being built.
It allows me to consciously approach my possibilities at any given time. Change is always possible, but what that change looks like isn’t going to be the same across the board—not from person to person (and not even from instance to instance for the same person.)
The resources you have might not be the same as someone else’s. They might not be the same as they used to be. Here’s the biggest “productivity” spoiler alert and self-loathing’s best kept secret: That’s actually, honestly, so totally ok.
Accepting that you have what you have for right now, acknowledging the blessings of already having those things, and using them to move you forward, is way more powerful than pretending you’re working with what you’re really not or waiting around for things to look different.
Accepting and acknowledging that what counts as a baby step for someone else might count as a giant leap for you is powerful.
Accepting and acknowledging that you might not make seven figures by next month, but you could make three to four pretty good figures (especially considering that we built businesses out of literally nothing + our imagination and skills, and “in these unprecedented times” no less,) is pretty fucking powerful.
Don’t let the shiny shit distract you from the fact that accepting and acknowledging your resources allows you to act with intention. Don’t let compare-and-despair rob you of the power you do have in this moment.
Clarify:
While creating your marketing requires you to, well, create, we often forget that marketing isn’t really about displaying creativity. In the end, it has a job to do.
Whether you’re building your audience, raising awareness and educating people about your solutions or straight selling an offer, you need to get people to do something specific.
Approaching a launch as a small business owner can feel tricky sometimes. We need a lot of different things to happen in order to reach success.
We need our audiences to grow, we need to educate people about how exactly we can help, we need to establish a brand and we need to sell our offers to make money.
But, in order for our marketing to succeed—whatever phase we’re in—we’ve got to put our sense of pressure aside and let clarity and intention drive our actions.
You’ve accepted and acknowledged your specific set of circumstances and resources, and that has to include the fact that your foundation is still in progress. You may be in a state of building and growth that requires you to use your resources in the most strategic way possible.
That’s totally ok. We all start in that place, and we go back to that place every time we start a new phase in our businesses too. The most important part of getting real, practical clarity no matter where you’re at is to be able to ask yourself:
What’s actually possible within this environment?
What do you want to make possible in this environment?
What would be most beneficial to you in this moment, with these resources, in these circumstances?
Clarify the job for your launch marketing and let it do just one job at a time, and do it well.
Remember to clarify your metrics too: how will you measure whether your marketing is effectively doing the job you assigned to it?
I’m sure you’ve realized by now that a lot of the metrics we end up directing our attention to aren’t actually the most helpful ones for us to track. Keep in mind that your metrics also don’t need to be numbers-based.
Beyond tracking numbers and percentages that indicate engagement or sales, you can also measure things like:
Your energy levels in brainstorming, creating and executing pieces of marketing.
How good (or bad) you feel about a certain style of post or particular platform.
The depth of the connections you’re making (versus just the number of total connections.)
We’re not robots, and having complete clarity on what works for us and what doesn’t is a key piece of having a successful launch.
Accommodate:
You can always tell when a business switches into “launch mode.” All of a sudden there’s a fucking firehose of content coming at you on every single platform of connection possible.
I see so often with launching (and marketing in general) that people go in with a preconceived notion of what they must give in order to feed this beast.
We almost always forget to ask: What can I give right now?
If you understand your current capacity, how then can you structure this launch to function well within that capacity?
Now that you’ve accepted the realities and the possibilities of your situation, clarified your objective and how to measure success, you can accommodate all of it.
You don’t need to be on every platform ever created. You can choose one or two.
You don’t need to put out a fuck-ton of content at once. You can drip it out over time.
You don’t need to do it in such a short amount of time. You can set your own timelines and they can be as long as you fucking want.
You don’t need to use a content-creation style launch, you can leverage your relationships instead.
You don’t even necessarily have to do this online, you can use in-person and local opportunities to your advantage.
Consider, as you figure out what you actually need to accommodate, that you are making change. Change always requires us to create extra blank space for it to fully unfold.
Doing something in a new way can take trial and error. It might take time to find the way of working that actually fits for you and whatever the reality of your situation is. You’re asking yourself to stretch into a new way of being, valuing and measuring.
You can accommodate for what you actually need in order to make quality connections with the people your offers are built to serve so you can give them what they need.
In the end remember this: your launch is yours.
It’s in the interest of the unjust systems woven into the fabric of our current society that you stay distracted from how big of a difference you can make with something as seemingly “small” as a single offer-launch.
But change happens when change happens. And it’s individuals like you and me who create that change. The more of us who make those changes, the bigger those changes get.
You may be a small business now without a whole bunch of buying power or a big team (or any team at all—hey, fellow One-Person Show!🤩) but what you’re building now is part of the future of a global economy.
You have so much more power than you might think you do, and I know you’re here because you give a fuck.
I can’t wait to see what kind of change you create with your next launch.🩵
Thanks for reading Part Three of Why Launching is Broken—Funnels & Freakouts & Faking, Oh My!
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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