Hello friends, it's your host Ellen Yin back for another bonus episode of cubicle to CEO, the podcast where we ask successful entrepreneurs the business questions you can't google. This week on the pod, we were joined by Anita Siek, who revealed how she turned around her failing launch in the final 48 hours. And I gotta say, I am consistently impressed and so grateful for the guests who come on our show and choose to share on a very public platform, not only the lessons from their successes, but also sharing their weakest moments and the honesty and truth in those moments as well.
And I wanted to, of course, stand in solidarity with our incredible guests. And since then, Anita was so willing to be vulnerable about a failing launch that she had and what she felt in real time and how she adjusted. I also wanted to share a story about a time when we had a launch that didn't go as expected and how we were able to, I guess, turn lemons into lemonade, because I want you to know that we're all in that same boat. You know, we all experience launches that in this barometer may look different for everyone, but that in our own eyes are a flop. And none of us are immune to that experience. So I just wanted to share my story, because I think it's important that we talk about stuff like this.
And if you want to join the conversation on this, by the way, I'm sure many of you have been on threads since it blew up last week. If you've been under a rock, and you're like What is threads, it's a Twitter like, app by Instagram, it's super easy to sign on. If you already have an Instagram account, everything is connected, they bring over some of your existing followers. So it's super easy to join in on the conversation. But I've been having so much fun chatting with you guys on threads. And I will say, my sassy sarcastic side definitely comes out on threads in a way that it traditionally hasn't shown up on other social media apps. So if you'd like to have more of the behind the business conversations, and just life honestly conversations, musings funny moments, stories, all the things, please come hang out with me on threads @MissEllenYin. We're also there @CubicletoCEO. So follow us on both accounts. And I want to hear your story too about a time that maybe you had a launch that didn't go according to plan or that in your eyes was a flop and how you approach that situation.
So if you want to join in on the conversation, like I said, I'm going to share one of mine with you today. But I would love to hear yours too. And I think the more that we all get comfortable sharing that, the more we can all learn from each other and feel not so alone in this process of experimentation, which is really what entrepreneurship is right? None of us has the answers to every single question. But we collectively become smarter when we're able to share with each other our learnings.
So here's mine, my story is a launch from last summer, it was our summer cohort of 2022 for Paid to Create, which is a live three day challenge where we help aspiring course creators turn the knowledge that's already in their head into an online course their first online course to be specific that they can pre sell and enroll paying students for before they even create a single lesson. So this is something that we have run nine times. Now, as of this recording, we've done nine live cohorts of Paid to Create. And it's such an incredible challenge. I love this experience, because it's one week of laser focused action taking. And it's incredible to see the 1000s of students that have come through and created their first online course with us in just three days. And we actually have our next one coming up this fall in October, it's going to be I don't want to quote the dates wrong right off the top of my head. But I'm pretty sure it's the last week of October. So we'll wrap before whatever week Halloween is, but that last full week of October is when we plan to have it. So anyways, if that speaks to you, if you're someone who is wanting to create your first online course before the end of 2023. I'll make sure to drop a link where you can sign up for our waitlist below.
But for this particular launch, I actually went back through our Slack communications as a team because I wanted to really show you like at our lowest point like what are the things that I'm actually feeling right. So I actually pulled up a Slack message that I sent to my team. And I'm going to quote it to you exactly this is what I said. I said this was on June 8. I said, "Y'all, I'm pretty worried we only have 19 registration so far. Usually we're at about 60 By day three of OpenCart." So obviously I was pretty worried in that moment. Because you know, usually these challenges we have anywhere between 100 to 150 people sometimes upwards of that sometimes we're closer to 200 but on average, I would say most of our live challenges.
We've consistently been in that 100 to 150 people range and it is a paid challenge. So it's not a free challenge, we do make it super accessible and affordable $55, right for general admission, and then we have an optional $195 VIP upgrade, which at the time, if I remember correctly, the VIP upgrade wasn't even that much. But anyways, I digress. So it's a very accessible challenge. But still, it is a paid challenge. And so we typically are seeing numbers like that. And according to my own Slack message, we track the data pretty meticulously. So usually by that mark and the open cart window, which, typically speaking, our open cart is anywhere from seven to 14 days, we've kind of played with that and tested different lanes, I usually find that our sweet spot is right around 10 days, in terms of the most number of registrations are coming through in the 10 days leading up to the challenge. But sometimes we have extended the cart a little bit longer or started teasing it on social media earlier than we start promoting it on email, except for to our waitlist, that's the exception or waitlist always finds out first.
So anyways, I was worried I was in this moment where I was like, Oh my gosh, like we've never had registrations rolling this slowly before, as you can hear from what I just quoted of my Slack message. Usually, comparatively, we were, you know, at three times the number of registrations by that same window in the open cart period. So I was concerned about why the registrations were so slow. Of course, one of the likely contributing factors was that it was summertime, right summer had just kicked off. And people are generally less engaged in their businesses in the summer. And so that's not true of all businesses. And it's not true that you can't have, you know, a record high enrollment for a program in the summertime. But generally speaking, people tend to be on their phones less away from their computers more and maybe not as dedicated to wanting to tackle something like creating an online course in the summer. So that was a clue that maybe, you know, we kind of learned from and adjusted like, for example, this year, we did our challenge in May, instead of June to, you know, account for that same kind of season, but not in the month of June, when everyone's you know, out for the summer.
So that was one thing that we learned. And that's why I always think that looking at data, so helpful, because every time you do something every time you experiment with something, even if it doesn't go how you predicted it would, you're still getting valuable input from that data that you can then utilize to make better decisions in the future. And the only reason I was even alerted to you know, this being not on par with our normal level of performance at this point in the OpenCart period is because we meticulously track that sales data. So I can look back at historic data and say, Oh, normally, we might be at 60 registrations by now. But we're only at 19. So that was even helpful just to be aware of something like that, because otherwise I'm just letting my emotions rule me. Right.
So, you know, we continued on through the launch. And this is what's a little bit different than for example, the case study that Anita brought to us on Monday on the podcast is that I didn't adjust a whole lot during the launch in terms of promotions and sales. So we didn't really change our promotional strategy that much. We didn't like rewrite everything or re-visit and re-edit the sales page or anything like that. But we did still make some structural changes behind the scenes to how we actually delivered the challenge to tailor the situation to what we had on our hands, right, we wanted to make the best of a not so great situation. So for example, one of the things that we really felt was important is keeping that level of excitement and energy for our challenge participants because we know how hard it is for aspiring course creators to tackle a big dream like creating their first online course. And what makes our challenge so successful is the high level of accountability that peers feel with one another. And with the daily action items that we're giving them after our daily trainings. So we knew it was super important that if we were going to have a smaller cohort than usual, that we needed to make sure that the participation rate was still as high or even higher than normal. So it would still feel the same to the people experiencing the challenge.
And so one of the ways we did this is prior to this particular cohort in June of 2022, we actually use to offer two different ways that participants could experience the challenge. So if you pay the general admission price, you would be added to our pop up community and the daily live streams would be streamed inside the Facebook group. So if you were a general admission participant, then you would just, you know, be able to participate live in the comment section of the Facebook group livestream. But if you were a VIP, so if you chose to take that optional upgrade to VIP, which again, at the time, I can't remember what the price was, but I know it wasn't what it currently is because the VIP looked completely different, which is, again, something that I'll talk about in just a moment. But at the time, if you were a VIP participant, then you got to join us live on Zoom, which obviously makes the experience more engaging, right, if you're seeing your fellow participants on Zoom, and we gave our zoom participants front of the line access to the live q&a At the end of each day. So whatever time we had leftover for q&a, we prioritize the questions that were coming through on Zoom. And of course, if you're on Zoom too, you could raise your digital hand to be able to come on camera or on mic and actually ask your question in real time rather than having to type it out. So that was another benefit.
So we decided, because this cohort was smaller, we wanted to, again, like I said, really keep that energy high. So we thought, what if we brought everybody on Zoom, this time, instead of separating participants between the Facebook Live stream and the zoom. So we decided to test it out. And we actually ended up loving this change so much that from that cohort on. So ever since then, and we've done I think, three more cohorts. Since then, we've decided to everybody like general admission, whether you upgrade to VIP or not everybody gets to join live each day on Zoom and participate in that way. And that was such a great change that I'm not sure would have come about as early or even ever had we not experience that launch that was much smaller than we were projecting. And because of that unique situation, we were forced to make a decision on the spot that ultimately led to the betterment of the experience for all of our participants in the future. And so I'm really, really glad that that was a permanent change that came out of, you know, what was, quote unquote, a less successful launch.
Now, the other change that that kind of spurred for us was changes to the VIP package, because like I said, back then one of the main drawing points of the VIP upgrade was that you did get to be on zoom with us every day. We also offered lifetime replays to all the sessions if you upgraded to VIP, and I can't remember if there was anything else significant that we offered with the VIP package. Oh, I think we also had our VIP q&a. But other than that there weren't a lot of like templates or resources or additional bonus trainings. And so when we decided to remove the Zoom benefit from VIP and just make it available to everybody in the challenge, we had to figure out a way to replace the value that piece used to bring to the VIP package and think what can we do to make this VIP package still enticing to, you know, whoever wants to upgrade. And so because we started thinking about this, we actually ended up adding, I can't even count now exactly how many but at least five new bonuses, I know for sure that we added to our VIP upgrade that didn't used to exist prior to this launch.
But because of what happened, we increased the value significantly to the VIP upgrade. And we added in two bonus trainings that didn't exist before including some written resources to help people we also added in all the slide decks, and we added in a Canva template to help our students promote, we added in access to a vault of all of the past examples of other participants who have gone through this challenge and how they were able to promote and pre sell their first online course. So we just added a lot of plug and play tools that we knew would help amplify the results of our challenge participants. And again, I don't I don't necessarily know that this change would have come about had we not been in a way forced to pivot to accommodate the situation and have to find a way to increase the value of the VIP because we moved something that used to be only for VIPs to everybody instead. So that was another really positive change that came out of this launch flop right.
And then another thing that we did during this launch that I wanted to point out was well this one we actually did during the launch. So I guess this piece was actually impacting the promotional aspect, the other two, not so much. It was more on the delivery side, but this one specifically actually did impact our promotional strategy a little bit. So for every single Paid To Create Challenge, we always have a waitlist. And we open enrollment to our waitlist first. So all throughout the year, in between our live sessions, we're always getting signups on a weekly basis for the waitlist. And prior to this particular launch that I'm referring to today, we had one kind of masterlist that we were using as our waitlist. So people were just joining this segment from, I mean, that waitlist had been created a long time ago, and just we kept adding to it. And then every time we opened the challenge, we would just email this waitlist segment first.
But what I realized is there were a lot of I don't even know if tire kickers is the right way to describe it. But there were a lot of people who were joining the waitlist but not necessarily taking action from it. And in evaluating why I felt that it was because you know, sometimes you join a waitlist because in that moment, you have a specific motivation to do something or I don't know what the situation might be. But once you're on the waitlist for more than three months, if by the time the next session opens to you, you no longer have that same need, or that same desire, right, then you're not going to take action on it. But if we don't remove you from the waitlist, we don't really know that. So you just continue to stay on the waitlist, and over and over again, are given opportunities to join future sessions. But you continue not to take action.
So what we did is we actually decided to use urgency and email this particular waitlist segment, which at that point, I think we had about 200 people accumulated from, you know, many, many months of, like I said, having this master waitlist open between multiple different cohorts. And we've decided to email people and say, hey, look, if you're on the waitlist, we'd love to give you one more opportunity to sign up for this June cohort. And we're going to give you an incentive, we'll give you $10 off your enrollment if you want to take action now. But if you choose not to join this cohort, we're actually going to remove your name from this waitlist. And we're going to start a new wait list for the next session or the next live cohort so that you will have to re opt in if you want to show that you're serious about you know, wanting to participate in the next challenge if for whatever reason this challenge isn't working for you. So of course, I worded it differently than that in the actual email. But that was kind of the message or the sentiment that we were trying to communicate.
And it worked. I mean, we definitely got some people who I think had been sitting on the fence on the waitlist for a while not really making a decision, and that got their attention. And they were like, oh, I need to act now or I'm getting kicked off this waitlist. So I need to make a decision about whether or not this cohort is the right live session for me or whether I need to just get myself removed from this waitlist and re sign up for the next available session. And that was really helpful on our end, too. Because now we create a brand new waitlist segment for every single Paid to Create live challenge. And it really helps us because we know that the people who are signing up for the waitlist are people who are specifically opting in or showing interest in the next available live cohort. And they're showing interest in that specific cohort, not just in general, in the future, some time I would like to be part of this challenge, right, they're being more intentional with their action, and in return, we're able to better service them with what we're offering. So that was another thing that we did, or like a correction that we did, in the middle of the launch that I wanted to make sure I brought to your guys's attention.
So those were the main things that came out of what I had originally thought of as a flopped launch. But really, these were all great long term changes that we made. And I'm so glad that we had the opportunity to see those gaps in a way that we might not have had we just had our regular enrollment numbers that we usually do. And just in case you're curious, I think the final numbers that we ended with were we had 50... 56 I believe, participants come through that cohort. And I gotta say from the post challenge feedback forms, and from my own team's feedback, I do remember all of us agreeing that that was one of our favorite cohorts that we ever had, because that group was more intimate. And because it was the first time that we had had everybody on Zoom for all of the live sessions throughout the week. It really just created a whole different energy that we hadn't experienced before because it was our first time having everybody on zoom in and having that smaller group that we really got to know each participant and so I loved that experience that came out of it. And like I said, all the changes that came out of it.
So my encouragement to you is as you're preparing for your next launch, or if you're going through a current one, and maybe it's not, you know hitting the numbers that you were hoping for, I really encourage you to find opportunities to improve. First and foremost the experience for the actual students and people you're serving, and let that kind of lead the way on everything else. And I promise you that that data is going to come back to benefit you in a big way for your next launch. So don't write it off as "Oh, this is just, you know, a failure." And, you know, let's move on and hide from whatever feelings you may have about it. It's okay to have your feelings, but also realize that there's so much wisdom that comes out of it. So anyways, I just wanted to be able to share that with you all, since Anita was so transparent, sharing with you all her honest experience with a flop launch.
So again, if you have a story you want to share around this joined the conversation, let's have a dialogue about this. Come find me on threads @MissEllenYin. It'll also be linked below in the show notes and @cubicletoCEO. And let's have a conversation about this. I want to hear about a flop to launch you have what did you learn what how did you approach it differently? Were there any changes that you made mid launch or post launch that positively impacted you and share those with your fellow entrepreneurs. This is how we learn. We have to learn together and it helps we're all able to pool our experiences because we all have unique ways that we may think about a problem and then try to find a solution. And we all have unique products and launches. And so when we're able to put our heads together, we just we all win, right? And we all grow together.
So anyways, thank you as always for joining me for this bonus episode. I can't wait to chat with you all next week. We have a really special bonus episode coming for you next week. So make sure you click the plus button on Apple podcasts or the Follow button on Spotify. If you're not subscribed yet so that you don't miss out on the exciting drop coming your way next week. Hint hint there is a giveaway components. So again, make sure that you are subscribed and I'll chat with y'all soon.
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