How I made 7x more sales with my second product launch by changing a few simple things

🤔Do you think having a good product and an online following = guaranteed sales?

I did.
Well, at least until my first product launch.

Having a programming YouTube channel with over 100k subscribers, I was confident that even if I completely botched my first course launch it would still do "well".

"Well", in my mind, was at least $10k+ on launch day --

a number I came up with my looking people proudly touting their results of $20k, $50k, $100k in a single day!

You can imagine my dismay when my "algorithms course" only made $1.5k on launch day after 4 months of planning, recording, and re-recording videos.

I only made 30 sales out of 100,000 followers???
😞How is this even possible?

Well, after polling my audience...
I realized there were a few MAJOR mistakes that I made.

I'll go over each one, and then how I improved on them in my much more successful second launch:

❌ Certain platforms don't give you access to your audience
Have you ever seen those channels with 100k subscribers, and their videos get less than 10k views?

YouTube (and Twitter) don't even really give you access to your own audience. The fact is that most people click only on videos in their recommended.

So your "launch announcement" video won't even appear to your OWN followers, unless you manage to make it as engaging as one of your normal videos.

❌ Non optimized landing page
As a programmer, of course I thought: "if all the information is on my landing page, people will want to buy" --

I know after reading that, all the marketers out there are having a good laugh.

Having a basic landing page will lead many people to believe you are NOT offering something worth paying for.

Beyond that, who would be dumb enough to enter their payment info on a site that looks bad?

❌ No reason to buy "now"
I didn't offer any sort of launch sale, or scarcity offer.

Even if people like you, like your product, and their credit card already is on their desk, why would they buy it TODAY?

More likely: they'll say: "oh, looks cool. I'll have to buy that sometime."
And then forget.

❌ Brand alignment was off
Worst of all, the product I was putting out (learn algorithms to get a job) was not really aligned with a lot of my videos.

Personally, I had quit my corporate job, gone indie and was "using code to live the life I wanted"

So WHY would someone buy a product to get a JOB from me?

Even if I did dozens of interviews at a big tech company and was qualified to teach them, there was a clear contradiction.

On top of that I was competing with content creators who put "I worked at Google" / "How to get a job at Google" in every single video title.

AS A RESULT

I thought my product was bad (even tho it wasn't, feedback was all positive).
Convinced, I didn't want to try ads or anything to improve sales.
And so my sales, in general, continued to be bad.

After being disheartened for a while, I realized I did want to try again and get it right.

So I started to develop a new course, "Web Scrape Anything With JavaScript" as a personal challenge to see if I could learn from my mistakes and get it right.

In order, here are the solutions I came up with, followed by the results:

✅ Find a way to actually reach your followers
Subscribers kept saying "damn I didn't even know you had a product" the first time. So how could I fix that?

Well, by creating a free product -- So I invested time and money in developing a JavaScript Cheat sheet that only requires entering your email address.

Email is still not 100%, but at least people will be more likely to hear what I have to say.

✅ Get a professional landing page, even if it costs you
I have had an ego about creating my products -- in fact I'm sure a lot of us here want to "do everything ourselves" here.

In my situation, I had to admit: I'm not actually very good at design.
And when I did so, a weight was lifted.

I could now pay a professional designer on Fiverr for a great landing page (and still build it myself to keep my dignity 😂)

From a time and quality standpoint, I was selling myself short until I did this.

It was a major blind spot!

✅ Do a launch discount, even if it feels dumb
A lot of us here are (justifiably) averse to those "$997 countdown timer" course tactics, but they do WORK.

No, I didn't do that. (my course was just $39, no countdown time)

But I DID do a 48 hour launch sale with a discount code. And it worked.

Multiple people emailed me saying "I bought because I didn't want to miss the deal"

✅ Brand alignment / Better Positioning
Still not 100% aligned, but I did have several web scraping videos on my channel that did well.

This made me sort of a "web scraping" authority, and I could have pushed this much further by making more of this type of content.

THE RESULTS

In total, I made $7k with "Web Scrape Anything With JavaScript" in the first 24 hours, exactly 4.6x more money than my first course, "Interview Espresso"

Since the second course was at a lower price point, I actually made 218 sales (vs 30), meaning terms of sales volume it was over 7x more.

Still not crazy (and did not reach that 10k milestone), but in general I'm happy with the improvement from last time.

OVERALL

I mainly wanted to post this because I think a lot of us focus on product quality and building some kind of organic marketing channel...

...but just make sure you don't overlook these sales fundamentals because then nobody will buy your product...

...and without that, you don't have a business.

Anyway, this got pretty long so I hope people are able to see it.

Finally if you want to check out the site / course I've been talking about, it's
https://JavaScriptWebScraping.com
I created a discount code "INDIE" for 10% off (will not expire)

& my YouTube channel is
https://youtube.com/aaronjack

Cheers