The Tiny MBA pre-sales launched today, first 150 sales in just a few hours. Any questions?
Hey gang!
I've shared a few of my pre-launch experiments so far, but now it's time to see how well they've worked. Actual sales numbers!
- Over three weeks or so more than 300 people responded to my call to "email me at [email protected] for a link when pre-orders are ready."
- This morning started replying to those emails, got through the first ~100 of them in about an hour.
- I also sent out a tweet
Within ~3 hours, the landing page (https://tiny.mba) had about 200 unique pageviews and an average time-on-page of 6 mins 42 seconds.
And including some people pre-ordering 20+ copies for gifts and giveaways, total sales across all of our platforms are already over 150!
- The vast majority of that is people ordering the paperback book directly from us (which will be printed and fulfilled automatically on demand)
- 16% pre-ordered through Amazon to have the ebook delivered directly to their Kindle
- ~1% bought the ebook directly from our Podia store, which is also handling ebook fulfillment for paperback orders. In at least one of those cases it was because the ebook fulfillment part of our main site was charging for shipping b/c I had a setting wrong. Whoops! Fixed that.
I haven't cross referenced the exact emails of the 100 people I emailed, but just from having people respond to my email and/or purchase basically right away, I am ballparking 80-90% of the 100 people I emailed bought within 1-10 minutes of me emailing them. 🤯
I have another 200+ people in that queue to still email, and about a dozen ARC reviewers reading and writing reviews this week.
Trying to coordinate all of that to happen on a single day or even week is basically impossible, so I'm treating the next four weeks as a bunch of tiny launches. Over the next few weeks I have a BUNCH of things planned to continue to drive pre-sales: podcasts and livestreams, reviews from notable folks, and I'm thinking about starting my own livestream show too. LOTS of experiments to come.
What questions do you have? I'd be happy to answer!
do you feel as though you are building up momentum
The closest thing I have to a metric of "momentum" is sales coming in faster, and/or when I'm no longer sending emails/interacting on Twitter. That's positive, but also unlikely to be sustainable for more than a few days.
I think the thing I think about when it comes to momentum is the work that I did before today. It's kinda like pulling back a slingshot. The further back you pull it, the further/faster the pebble goes when you let go.
A lot of the time, folks treat launch day as the start. That's exacerbated by the (often frantic) work that leads up to launch day, which feels exciting internally, but for most of your audience, is either invisible or uninteresting.
What I've learned from many past launches (and the last 3+ years of semi-automating the recurring launches of 30x500) is that starting on launch day, you're already on the wave.
Regardless of if it's a big wave or a small wave, you've kinda gotta ride it, and there's not a whole lot you can do once you're already on the wave. If it's a big wave, you've gotta focus on keeping your energy consistent so you don't get tired and waste the ride. If it's a small wave, you can either keep the pace or ditch into the surf, but you can't suddenly turn it into a bigger wave.
That's also why there's no such thing as a single "launch day." Launches contain mini-launches, and can be repeated over and over with improvements based on what you learn.
Sort of a long winded answer to a yes/no question, but hopefully it helps!