Inside a one-week, waitlist-only launch

If launch timing keeps breaking your brain, this is the video where I stopped trying to solve it (and tried something else instead).

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I’ve gotten fairly comfortable with the visibility part of launching, and with the kind of content I want to share while I do it. What kept breaking my brain was timing. What’s the best time to launch? What about holidays and school vacations? Is January good, or September, or are they terrible because everyone else is launching then?

This is part two of how I plan a gentle launch—in the first one I shared the three questions I use to plan launch content. This one is about timing, length, how I prepare, and how I look after myself during the launch.

The answer I give my clients, and finally listened to myself

There is no best time to launch. The best time is the one that works for you.

I say this to clients constantly. It took me longer to truly embody it in my own mind and body. Part of what helped was noticing that my audience is genuinely international, so there is no ‘best’ week—someone is always on holiday and someone is always back at their desk.

But with my marketing programme Grow I had an extra complication. It ran in four-month cohorts, which meant I wasn’t only trying to find a launch window that suited me: I was trying to find four consecutive months that suited me, around the time I wanted to take off and everything else happening in my business. That’s a much harder puzzle, and it’s the reason I couldn’t solve it.

I changed the programme instead of the calendar

The solution turned out not to be about timing at all.

A couple of months ago I stopped thinking in cohorts for this programme. Participants already had lifetime access to all the materials, so I extended that to the monthly planning calls and office hours too. Everyone who joins keeps access to the live support for as long as I run the programme.

That might sound like more work. It isn’t—I’m running the calls anyway. What it did was free up an enormous amount of space in my head, and it made launch timing something I could simply decide for myself.

If a decision keeps breaking your brain, it’s worth checking whether it’s actually the structure underneath that needs changing.

Why I’m launching to a waitlist only

My spring launch was slow. Launches always vary, and there are dozens of reasons a launch might be quiet—most of them nothing to do with us. But two things stood out: it came fairly close after the autumn launch, and I was launching to my whole newsletter list. Perhaps my audience was just fatigued by this launch and this programme.

So this time I’m trying something I’ve watched other people do: launching to the waitlist only.

On one hand, this sits awkwardly with something that is important to me, which is that we need to take up space—and that those of us raised female were mostly not taught to. Is launching quietly to a smaller group a version of shrinking? I don’t know.

What I do know is that it feels more intimate and more purposeful to launch this way. I think it leaves the wider list less fatigued. And I did still talk about Grow openly to everyone in June, with a couple of newsletters explicitly pointing to the waitlist, so the launch isn’t hidden.

The part I love most is that centring the waitlist gives me something to build all year. Blog posts and Pinterest pins point to it, and so do two lead magnets. It quietly brings people in when I’m nowhere near launch mode. Right now the waitlist is about 160 people—I didn’t grow it as much this time as in previous rounds, and that’s something to work on for the rest of this year.

One week, one email a day

I’ve been shortening my launches for years. The first time I launched Grow I had a three-week pre-launch and a five-week launch. Eight weeks of talking about one thing. I don’t know how it felt for my list. For me it was exhausting.

This time it’s a single week. The waitlist is warmer and closer to a decision, and everyone who joins gets a short sequence explaining what Grow is and how it differs from 1:1 mentoring, which is the question I get most. So people arrive at launch week already informed. I flagged the week ahead of time so they knew what was coming.

Given all that, one email a day for one week felt fine. It’s a lot, but it’s contained.

How I plan it

I plan a long way in advance, and I think that’s a big part of why my launches can be gentle. I don’t do well with pressure and short deadlines, so I give myself a long runway. I started the Notion page for this launch around 3 June.

It holds everything: checking whether the trailer needs re-recording, updating the sequence, repurposing old blog posts, making new pins, turning an older newsletter into a post. There’s a category for which regular newsletters I could tie into the launch, gently or explicitly. And a section for waitlist-building with the quiz, the new lead magnet.

I also wrote a guest post for Sarah’s blog at Sarah and Maude. Guest posting is one of the most enjoyable ways I’ve found to grow an audience, but honestly I love it just as much for the community aspect and collaborating with other business owners.

All of this depends on capacity. I had more of it this time, which is why I made something new (the marketing audit freebie). I’ve scaled this right down in the past and will again. It all still comes out of the three questions from part one: what existing content can I use, how can my existing channels carry this, and what—if anything—do I want to add?

Looking after myself during launch week

I’ll be honest: it still feels scary. My emotions swing wildly across a launch week. I feel nervous and apprehensive and also perfectly calm, and at this point there’s very little to do except keep sending the emails.

One thing I’ve learned is not to focus too much on the first day. Early on, if I didn’t make a sale in the first day or two, I’d assume it was over. But every launch is different: some of mine have made most sales in the first 72 hours, others not until the final day. Grow is a more expensive purchase, high-touch and personalised. It isn’t a five-euro impulse.

I also haven’t finished all the emails yet, which I’m not thrilled about, though in truth I never have. Three to go. The mildly silly thing is that I have three or four launches’ worth of emails I could reuse, but I had new ideas I wanted to play with instead.

What I’m actually doing to look after myself is unglamorous. Stepping into the garden and looking at the plants and the bees. Being deliberate about breaks, because when I’m nervous I get sloppy with them. Working in twenty-minute blocks instead of thirty if I feel antsy. Reading, properly sitting down to do it. Knitting. And something rather nice planned for Thursday that I might tell you about later.

Something to try

If you’re stuck on when to launch, try asking whether it’s really the timing that’s the problem—or whether something in the shape of the offer is making the timing impossible.

I’d love to hear how you feel about launch timing–leave a comment here.

And if you’re craving gentler launches and marketing that truly feels like you, I’d love to invite you on to the waitlist of Grow, and you’ll be first to hear when it opens again.

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