On November 4, 2024, after years of creating my own products, attempting to launch them, and failing (mostly) miserably, I finally had a 5-figure launch. From launch day on November 4th until close-cart on November 9th, I made $16,544.25 (after Stripe fees) with a $499 cohort that 34 creators signed up for.
In this article, I want to break down exactly what worked, what didn’t work, what I would do again, and what I wouldn’t do again, to give you, the reader, the knowledge to go out and build something like this yourself.
For Context
Let’s start with something most people who teach others how to launch products refuse to add: context.
I have been making videos since May 2022. I have tried numerous ways to launch my products, including private communities, mini-courses, 1:1 consultations, PDF guides, templates, tutorials—you name it.
These products typically ‘retailed’ between the price range of $20 and $200, for the most part. None of these products, individually, have ever crossed the 5-figure mark in total sales volume. The cohort is the only product to have crossed the $10,000 total revenue mark. It also, coincidentally, is the only product I’ve ever made that I decided to put my head down and truly launch. That should tell you something about launching products instead of just putting them out into the world with no forewarning.
In terms of my follower count, as of my writing of this article, December 6, 2024, I have 71,200 followers on Instagram. It is by far my largest audience on any platform. I have an email list of around 4,300 people, 7,100 YouTube subscribers, and around 6,000 TikTok followers. However…
Instagram and email were the only two platforms I utilized for this launch.
I understand that a lot of you reading this don’t have a huge audience. You may be just starting out. And if that’s the case; keep going. You don’t have to launch a paid product right now. Even if you’re launching a lead magnet, you can use these tips for that launch. Take it one day at a time and don’t overwhelm yourself.
What works for me may not work for you, and what works for you may not work for me. We’re all different. We all have different strengths and weaknesses. We all operate in different ways. The key with products is to play to those strengths.
Also, because I am a full-time creator, I have 8+ hours every single day to dedicate to building new products. Most people don’t. So, don’t feel like you need to get all of this done in a week or two. This process takes months, if not years, to nail down.
I’m in the process of running cohort one, and I’m already planning cohort 2, which launches three months from now. Don’t be a maniac like me. Take it easy!
The Product
Instagram Creator Academy is a five-week live cohort taught in a private community on Circle. The goal of the cohort is to teach part-time creators, AKA, people who do this for fun but want to do it for a living, how to go full-time as a creator within 12 months. For each of the five weeks, there are two lessons and one Q&A session. For this cohort, I had two guest lessons: (1) Stan Store, where my Stan Ambassador Representative, Megan, showed students how to build out their own online storefront, and (2) my friend Adam Wienckowski, who showed students exactly how he produces high-quality and viral Instagram Reels.
The entire cohort was priced at $499. A steal, if you ask me.
Now, I will say that this product has evolved a lot. It started in Circle as a free community called Syndicate, where I taught creators how to create their own marketing automations and lead magnets, how to write better videos, how to edit better videos, and how to create their own products from scratch. I started that free community off with a weekly Q&A session for anyone to pop in and answer questions.
The goal was to turn that into something like Jay Clouse's creation with The Lab. If you’re not familiar with Jay and Creator Science, I suggest checking out his podcast.
So, I booked onboarding calls with the new members and used that free 30-minute call as an opportunity to showcase my knowledge, help creators write and produce better content, and upsell them into the ‘paid’ version of the community.
Now that I’m looking back on it, I don’t see a clear value proposition with going from free to paid, except for the fact that I would meet with those creators 1:1 every month. The paid version of the group was $129 per month.
The free-to-paid strategy was a tactic I reverse-engineered from Max Perzon, who runs Skool Masterclass.
Max has a free Skool community that teaches people how to build paid communities. He also has a paid version of that community. He uses the free version to upsell into the paid version through onboarding calls. I liked the business model, and Alex Hormozi likes it, so I decided to try it…
Not for me. I fucking hate sales calls. It’s the reason I quit my job in tech sales. I can’t stand pitching to people. The whole process just feels sleazy and manipulating.
So, after about 30 days of using that business model, I shifted to the only version of a digital product I had not yet tried: a live cohort.
Thus, after the failure of Syndicate, Instagram Creator Academy was born.
Syndicate walked so Creator Academy could run.
My Launch Blueprint
Promote Before Creating
With Syndicate shut down, I went back to the drawing board for my next product: Creator Academy.
I spent a few months preparing what would be the eventual release of Creator Academy. But here’s the funny thing about the preparation for the launch.
I spent 95% of my time promoting the launch instead of creating the product. Classes started on November 12th. I wrote my first slide on November 9th; 3 days before our first lesson.
While I didn’t create the slides per se, I did create the outline and schedule of the course. The skeleton was there, but there was no meat on the bones.
This brings up a great lesson I plan to teach in future articles, but I’ll keep it short in this one: Before launching anything, validate your idea with your audience.
Share what you’re creating on your Instagram stories. Ask people in your email newsletter, “What’s the one thing you would want to see me teach?” or, “What’s the main thing you’re struggling with right now that you wish you could just ‘figure out’?”
Don’t spend weeks or months creating something you’re not even sure will sell. I made a goal of 30 students and $15,000 in revenue. I reverse-engineered the number of people needed on my waitlist (301, at a 10% conversion rate from the waitlist to student) to hit those goals. If I didn’t make more than $3,000 (6 students) in the launch window, I would just refund everybody. Simple as that.
Within the first two weeks of promoting it, 171 people joined the waitlist. That was a good indication that people were interested in what I was building.
Needless to say, at launch, we did quite a bit better than 6 students. I hit my 30-student goal within the first 4 days of the launch and finished the open-cart period with 34 students.
If you had told me a year ago that in just 12 months, I would have a week where I made $16,544.25 in one week, I would’ve passed out, shit myself, laughed in your face, or all three of those things.
Breaking Down My Launch Strategy
With the product skeleton created and validated, it was time to ramp up the promotion. Here’s the exact launch strategy I used for Cohort 1.
Each of the following bullet points read as advice, but they are intended to represent only my step-by-step strategy for launching my cohort. So when I say, “Create an email course as a lead magnet and promote the waitlist,” I am saying that’s what I did, not that you should go out and do it.
At the end of each section, I rate each step on a scale of 1-10, which represents how well I think I executed that step, with 1 being the worst and 10 being the best. I also share whether or not I would repeat that specific strategy for the launch of Cohort 2 and how I would do it differently, which you’ll see in bold letters at the end of each section.
(1) Build a High Converting Website With a Video Sales Letter
I created my cohort landing page in Shopify. Let’s just say: never again.
Looking back on it, I’m not sure why I didn’t just do this in Wix because I’m familiar with Wix. I’ve built five or so websites on Wix, and I’ve never used Shopify. Stupid, Gannon.
Here’s a link to the sales page for my cohort.
I wanted to do a few things with this:
- I gave my potential students a sneak peek into how the cohort was structured by breaking down what they’d learn in each of the lessons week by week.
- Make it look sexy.
- Answer all of the potential student questions and rebuttals in an FAQ section.
- Create a short Video Sales Letter (VSL) where I talk a bit about my journey, why I launched this cohort, and what students will get out of joining.
Execution Rating: 5/10
Repeat Analysis: Yes, but hire someone to build a better one. I have already hired and paid a deposit for someone to build a stunning landing page for Cohort 2. I’d like to focus more on the VSL similar to what Tom Noske has on his Time to Build landing page.
(2) Create an Email Course as a Lead Magnet and Promote the Waitlist
I’ve tried a few different lead magnets in the past, but with inspiration from Tom Noske, I decided to take a stab at an email course for the release of this cohort.
If you’re not familiar with an email course, it’s essentially bite-sized lessons broken down into emails instead of modules for 14-30 days. Each day after the initial welcome email, your students receive an additional email from you with a new lesson.
Tom has ‘30 Ways in 30 Days’ to build your personal brand and sell digital products online. My email course, Revenue from Reels, is similar, but I dive a bit deeper into Manychat and how to use automations to create a lead magnet, give it away for free, and turn those leads into paying customers for your digital product.
While Tom’s email course is 30 days, mine is only 14 days.
I launched this email course around 30 days before launch. At the end of every email, I linked people directly to my sales page for the cohort waitlist. Essentially, I was building two email lists at one time: (1) the email course and (2) the waitlist for the cohort.
The traffic from those emails was directed to the Cohort landing page from Step 1 above.
Here’s an example of what the call-to-action (CTA) in those emails looks like:
Execution Rating: 8/10
Repeat Analysis: Yes, I’d do this again. I will likely hire someone to brush up on the CTAs in these emails and write them in a way that is more convincing and gets people to act based on urgency. I feel like I’m an okay writer, but I need to have someone do the selling for me. Again, I absolutely hate sales and pitching people.
(3) Create Promotional Instagram Stories and Reels to Promote the Email Course and Waitlist
While the email course did an okay job of getting people to join the waitlist, I knew I needed another avenue of promotion. This is where I turned to Instagram Reels and Stories to promote the waitlist.
There wasn’t a true strategy here with how often I would post a Reel compared to a Story, but Stories tend to do better for something as low in the funnel as joining the waitlist for a $500 cohort.
I used a combination of Reels, Stories, and Manychat to drive sign-ups for the waitlist.
If you’re not familiar with how Manychat works, I suggest you do yourself a favor and check it out. I was able to collect waitlist signups in the DMs rather than send those leads to a landing page. Those leads were automatically added to my Kit sequence for my waitlist leads.
Here’s an example of a post I shared on Instagram to promote the Cohort, as well as a screenshot of my ‘Waitlist’ Manychat automation, which you can absolutely copy from me. I won’t get mad. I hope it works as well for you as it did for me.
Through a combination of Reels and Stories, I had 372 people enroll in the Revenue from Reels email course, and 171 people enroll in the waitlist for the cohort launch.
I also used promotional IG stories during the launch window and shared the names of students who joined the cohort to my Instagram story.
Literally, every single student who enrolled got their own little personal Instagram story on my page, which I stole from Yasin at Viral Video Club.
Execution Rating: 10/10
Repeat Analysis: Hell yeah. This works. For Cohort 2, I’d like to focus more on the lead magnet instead of selling directly to the waitlist or even directly to the cohort. For 2025, I want to grow my email list and focus on selling through the email list instead of my Instagram page. Ideally, I’d like to NEVER promote my products on Instagram and just make everything on the backend. That’d be dope.
(4) Write a Launch Email Sequence for the Waitlist and Normal Subscribers
At this point, I had built up a waitlist of nearly 200 people, a list of nearly 400 people on the Revenue from Reels email course, and a little over 4,000 total emails. Now, I needed to put those emails to use with a launch sequence.
The leads on the launch waitlist and the leads who weren’t on the waitlist got two separate email campaigns. The launch waitlist got a series of 5 emails over 3 days leading up to the ‘public launch’ of the cohort. I decided to give those folks early enrollment to the cohort, plus a few different bonuses for enrolling early. These bonuses included:
- 1:1 Strategy Call with Me – Get my personal help mapping out your Instagram game plan.
- Done-for-You Manychat Templates – The automations I use to generate leads without lifting a finger.
- 100 Leads in 7 Days Course – The blueprint to pull in leads fast—without spending a dime on ads.
- Video Editing Pack + Tutorial: Learn exactly how I edit my videos so you can do the same.
- Chat GPT Prompts to Create Viral Content – My secret weapon for brainstorming and writing viral content fast.
I valued this at over $1,400 and included it at no additional cost to those who enrolled before the public launch. Of the 171 waitlist leads, 13 enrolled before the public launch.
My list of 4,000 emails, excluding the waitlist folks, got something different. I was a bit weary of spamming people during this launch window. I sent one email per day for the first four days of the launch and two emails on the close-cart day. To increase the urgency of signups on the final day, I added a few more bonuses for my regular mailing list, which included the same bonuses the waitlist received minus the 1:1 strategy call.
Execution Rating: 6.5/10
Repeat Analysis: I love the bonuses and think they work well. But I could have done a lot better with a more strategic Again, this really just comes down to my ability to write emails well while my brain is focused on 80 million other things at any given time. What I plan to do for Cohort 2 is hire a professional copywriter to go over these emails in the sequence and make them 10X better, or just start from scratch. I know how valuable email is, and if I’m already converting around 10% of that waitlist with shitty emails, imagine how much better it would be with great emails!
The Bottom Line
I’m taking almost every penny I earned from Cohort 1 and investing it into Cohort 2. I’ve contracted with a brilliant web designer, Eli Alcaraz, to build the landing page. I’ve hired a professional copywriter to help me write better email campaigns to convert leads into students at a higher rate. I’m outsourcing my video editing work to create more videos to promote the lead magnets and cohort. Now, this is all about scale.
I plan to make the curriculum an entirely separate piece. I’ve burnt myself out a bit while running this cohort and managing everything else in my business and personal life, but I have clarity on what I need to do to make Cohort 2 10X better than Cohort 1. Keep an eye out for that essay soon.