The first panel of Closed Door Talks, and we opened with the thing nobody puts on a sales page. Seven of us went through the launches that didn't work, the memberships that died, and the programs nobody bought, including the dollar amounts.
Sage Grayson lost more than $100,000 because she spent a year being angry that she couldn't run in-person retreats anymore. Braden Drake had a course on contracts that sold about one copy a month, repackaged the exact same material as a template library, and it has now made almost $200,000. Matt McWilliams has bought seven or eight businesses and calls every single one an unmitigated disaster. Teresa Heath-Wareing teaches launching for a living and ran a boot camp in December that nobody signed up for.
The through line is that none of this stopped any of us. It just taught us what to check next time.
On this panel: Caryn Gillen, Sage Grayson, Jen Liddy, Matt McWilliams, Rosemary Dede, Teresa Heath-Wareing, and Braden Drake.
What we covered:
- [06:29] The flop you're still embarrassed about, and what it cost. Sage's email-subscription membership sold about ten copies because she'd moved to daily emails and nobody wanted to pay for more of them.
- [08:12] Matt on buying seven or eight businesses over 15 years and being bored with every one inside three months. The lesson is about personality, not the businesses.
- [10:23] Rosemary's summit filled with the right market at the wrong moment. She caught it mid-launch through a signup questionnaire, switched to DMs, and found out they wanted one-on-one when she was selling group.
- [13:20] Jen on over-delivering as the thing underneath all of her flops, and how the enormous lift she was creating became an enormous lift for her clients to implement.
- [14:46] Teresa on teaching launches for a living and having her own launches go badly. She debriefs them publicly anyway.
- [17:42] Braden repriced a $2,000 program down to $200 for a niche audience, made ten sales, and worked out he'd have made more money launching the original.
- [18:31] Caryn has 17 years of data showing in-person works for her. A 26-person retreat turned into 13 clients within 18 months. An 11-person event had 100% take the upsell. Her biggest flop is not doing the thing she already knows works.
- [19:59] Did a flop ever turn into your best product? Braden's full Contract Club story, from a template shop that was too much back-end management, to a course nobody wanted, to a $30 library that did 200 sales in month one and now sits at $200 and roughly $200,000.
- [28:18] How many times do you let something flop before you move on? Teresa on how most "failed" launches are an expectations problem, and Matt's four-way diagnosis: product problem, price problem, audience problem, or copy problem.
- [31:36] Jen ran a membership for two years, tweaking constantly, and never once stopped to check the bottom line.
- [35:19] Matt has had roughly 50 flops in five years and thinks nobody saw more than two of them, because he tests small.
- [38:41] How do you know it's actually a flop? Sage on the pandemic, the year she froze, and why it turned out to be the best thing that happened to her business.
- [44:31] "Zero doesn't scale well." If one person buys, go find out why.
- [45:41] Jen on the gold sitting in your testimonials that never makes it onto your sales page.
- [49:26] What to do when everything you've launched has flopped: post-launch surveys, manual buyer data, and Matt's advice to do the things that don't scale while you still can.
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Want to keep all five panels permanently, plus the live Q4 Money Map session on the 20th? That's the Back Room, $47: https://lab.destinicopp.com/back-room