15: Dealing with product launch failure when you have ADHD

 

Dealing with product launch failure when you have ADHD (Transcript)

 

Launch confidence

Are you absolutely freaking out because you want to run an online offering, but you're scared shitless that no one will sign up for it. In this episode, I'm gonna help you ensure that that's not an issue.

Before we really dive into this episode, I wanna acknowledge one universal truth, that starting a business is fucking hard because you have to sell your service or your product. Selling is one of the hardest things to do. It is something that very few people are, are naturally good at. You can learn to be good at it but it's exceptionally hard when you're selling something that is so close to you, either something that you've created or your own time, your service.

The challenges of selling your services when you have ADHD

So, I just wanna acknowledge that before we get into this it's exceptionally hard also when you have ADHD. The unique challenges that the ADHD - preneur runs into when attempting to sell their services are you have shiny object syndrome, which prevents you from staying in launch mode for selling this one service or this one product. It makes you get all confused and excited about new things that you wanna go and do.

you have rejection sensitivity dysphoria, which makes hearing no to signing up with you so painful because it feels even more like a personal rejection.

And then because you have this natural need for variety, for excitement, you can honestly just forget to promote your service or your product because it's not exciting to you anymore because you've done it for three weeks and now there's something else you wanna talk about.

So I wanna talk about how you can set up a launch strategy that will actually work for you and your business and your brain. But I wanna set you up for this unfortunate truth that not all the launches you do, not all the services you offer, not all the products that you develop are ever going to sell.

You can think it's a brilliant idea. You can have all the market research that tells you that there are buyers out there for this thing.

And you can set up a whole campaign to get people to sign up. And on the last day you can check into your cart and you can see how many people have actually paid money to get this thing. And you can still see zero.

And let me tell you, the first time this happens, it is gut wrenching. The second time this happens, it's gut wrenching.

Sidebar

I'm now wondering why guts and wrenches are together. Like, is that a old torture thing that they used to do, like put wrenches and guts? Like why, why, why do those things go together? Like I can't imagine any situation where I would need a wrench near my gut.

I mean, I don't imagine it feels good, but now I'm just completely overthinking this

anyway.

It doesn't feel good

The point is, is that it doesn't feel good. It feels really shitty when you put something out there in the world that you're so proud of and you're so excited for, and no one signs up for it and no one buys. But if you're going to run a business, you have to get used to it.

It is going to happen if you are doing this right, it is going to happen. If you're putting yourself out there and you're being a brave ass weenie.

You NEED to be failing your launch

Let me even go so far as to say that if you do not have a failed launch, you're probably not working hard enough. You're probably not being vulnerable enough. You're probably not being brave enough in your business.

The success that you experience in your business is not just measured by how much money you bring in. It's also measured by how many failed launches, failed services, failed products that you've put out there. That is also a measure of your success, and I want you to celebrate every failure that you have.

I want you to brag about it. I want you to create a wall in your house that has every single failure, framed, and matted by a professional so that you can commemorate that you were brave enough to put yourself out there and have it not work out.

Now I'm doing this episode fresh off of a, a couple failures of launch. So in December of 2022, I decided to try a little experiment and offer two things that I really hadn't offered before. So I offered $97 tickets to this training on how to decide your money making niche.

it's part of a series that I'm developing called the Weenie Workshops . I was really excited about it. I posted about it. I emailed about it. It was a super affordable price. $97 is nothing compared to what I charge to work with me one-on-one. And I was convinced that this would just be the easiest thing for people to sign up for.

Also, I get so many questions from people about how they should decide on a niche, how they can determine if a niche is gonna make them money. All these things, and I was gonna go into all of it in this training. Let me tell you, not a single person signed up.

It's not a bad thing when no one signs up

I also wanna do a little sidebar that when you do launch group programs like this, or a group training or an event, it's not the scariest thing that no one signs up . The scariest thing is when one person signs up and that's it. Because , you obviously wanna seem like you're successful and you have this massive following, which you probably do, and you want this to go the way that you've sold it.

You want it to be a group program because if it's a group program and a bunch of people show up people, it's the experience that they signed up for and it fits with the brand that you were selling. But if someone, you know, if someone pays $97 for an event and they're the only person there, Your brain is gonna go haywire, making up all these stories about how they're gonna think you're such a loser.

How you weren't as successful in signing people up for this, that, oh my God, they may not know what they're talking about. After all, I'm the only person here. It's real rough on your ego. So if that ever happens to you, here's what you're gonna do.

Pro tip for coping with one person showing up

This is your pro tip. You're gonna call this person or email them, and you're gonna be so excited for them.

You're going to celebrate that they were the only person who signed up, and you're gonna tell them, Hey, listen, you're the only person who signed up the format that I had set up for. This works as a group. It doesn't work for one person. So here's what I wanna do. I want to customize this session to you.

What do you need? And you're gonna make it all about them, and they're gonna be absolutely delighted. And you're gonna own that this launch didn't go to plan. The fact that you're confident about it

will make them excited for what you're offering them. It'll bypass all those thoughts that you're projecting onto them about what they're gonna think about you and your business.

And honestly let's own that. We're really good at tricking our own brains. If we start talking about how excited we are to change this program that we'd put together into a one-on-one program, we're actually gonna start feeling that excitement in ourselves.

and also there's a lot of alsos in this and also whatever it is that they really want to hone in on, that's great market research because hello, this is the one person who signed up for this thing. There was a part of your marketing that spoke to them. Find out what part of that marketing hit home with them and double down on that next time.

Okay, so no one show showed up for the what? The niche weenie workshop. $97. Brilliant training. That never happened cuz no one was there. the other experiment that I ran in December of 2022 was I offered two hour one-off sessions for the first time. To my list. Now, I opened these up. I had 15 available in the month of January, and I had a short window of time where people could sign up for these.

Now, for this, because it was higher ticket and because it was more specific to someone who really wanted to ramp up in 2023, they didn't just have a general problem, like figuring out their niche. They needed a customized plan. I had to show up in their world a lot more often. And so I literally emailed my list 15 days in a row.

I post on social media pretty much every day. I duplicated a lot of that content, so I wasn't doing more. So whatever I emailed to my list, I would take that copy and I would turn it into a format for LinkedIn, maybe cut some parts or edit little pieces. And I would share it that way. And let me tell you, I didn't sell 15.

I didn't sell out. I sold quite a few. But here's the thing that I want you to remember about this scenario. This is a brand new offering. There was obviously need for it, but because it was brand new, it's something I had never done before. The first time is never, is the first time is rarely going to be successful.

And that's because your audience needs to be trained that this is something that you offer.

Warming your audience up

If you've done a really good job of telling them that you only work with clients over six to 12 months or in a group program, or here's my online course and then you introduce something new, they're gonna have to take some time and think, oh my God, they now do this thing. I have to rework my vision of who this person is and how they're useful to me and cool, they're doing this now.

That's so interesting. I'm gonna think about it. And then they get distracted cuz they're humans and they're busy and they have a life, right? . And then the next time you promote it, they're gonna be like, oh my God, they're doing this thing again. That's so cool. Let me think about it. And they may even open up their calendar to see if they have any time to take advantage of the thing that you're offering.

And then they're gonna get an email or a text from their spouse and they're, remember that they have to go to the store to pick up, some milk or you know, diapers for the baby and then they're gonna get distracted cuz they're humans and they're busy and they have a life. And then the third time you do this, they're finally going to say, oh my God, okay, they've been announcing this for the last six months.

They do this every couple months. I don't wanna miss it this time. That's when they're gonna sign up. So if you launch something and you're so excited and it's brilliant idea and it doesn't sell out the first time you do it, I don't want you giving up on it because you haven't trained your audience that you're the kind of person who does that thing yet.

This applies to running your first webinars. By the way. One of these scariest parts of running a business is starting that whole cycle of running webinars, of posting about them, inviting people to them, and no one showing. I wanna be totally honest. My first webinar, I was so excited for it.

I prepared, I had a slideshow. It was the first slideshow that I had created since middle school, which by the way, my computer teacher in middle school really set me up for failure here. I thought I'd have to do a PowerPoint presentation every single day of my working career, because that's all they had us do in computer class.

Okay? They didn't teach us Excel, they didn't teach us how to do any formatting in Word. No, it was just PowerPoint. Okay? The first time I did a PowerPoint was in my thirties people. Okay? . The technology had changed. It wasn't useful, Mr. Z,

Katie's webinars

so my first webinar, no one showed up. My second webinar, no one showed up. Also, I just wanna own no one registered because I was so new to doing webinars and I hadn't really thought it through. I still showed up in the Zoom room thinking, oh my God.

Well, what if people sign up like during the webinar time, what if all this stuff, like, I'm just gonna have to pretend that I'm in the middle of the webinar. My third webinar , my, my email marketing guy that I had hired to work in my, in my business, Tyler, he showed up and he had the most overwhelming info dump on him because I was just so excited to have a person there.

Okay, my fourth webinar, two people registered and they confirmed that they were coming, which instilled in me that panic of, oh my God, two people showed up to a group webinar, they're gonna think I'm a loser. So I forced, they did not have an option in this. I forced my dad, my sister, and my friend Palmer to register and also show up for the Zoom.

Okay? I made my sister change her last name because I was self, self-conscious. It's okay, , we all go through it. But here's what happens. So you're posting about your webinar, you're sharing about it, you're emailing people they're in the background thinking, oh, that's so cool. You know, Cheryl is running a webinar.

That's not a topic that I'm kind of curious about. Damn, I'm busy. I'll get the next. And then the second one, oh, Cheryl's running another webinar again it's on a different topic. I like that topic too. Let me check my calendar. Nope, I'm busy that time. Okay. I'll catch her the next time. And then the third time, oh, Cheryl's running a webinar.

Oh my gosh. Well, I have that meeting, but I kind of wanna move it now, but I can't. My boss is gonna be in it. Okay, so I'll get Cheryl next time. The fourth time, finally, the stars align, the calendars speak to each other and they're able to make it to your webinar. Okay? It took them four. You had to train them that you were the kind of person who runs webinars.

You had to prep them because they have FOMO from missing them in the, in the previous cases. So by the time you run the next one, they're like, yes, I have to sign up for this. Okay? It's a whole process that you're doing in your business when you start this that you're never going to see. It's not visible to you.

The key ingredient

So in talking about launches, I also need to talk about a key ingredient that you need to have in your business building cauldron.

And that's faith.

You need to have faith at. The stuff that you're putting out there is getting in front of the people who need your service, who want your product.

You need to have faith that they're seeing it and they're connecting with it, even if they're not acting from it.

I wanna tell this story. So my, so I come from Cape Cod, right? That's where I grew up. And in New England it's very typical. In small town, there's no garbage pickup. So literally you have to take your garbage to the dump. And it's a whole social event. It's so weird. Like politicians go to the recycling centers.

This is a real thing. Politicians, if they're running for election, they will go and hang out at the recycling centers of the dump and shake hands. It is an absolute New England thing. Ask any New Englander, who's from a small town. And this happens. So my dad went to the dump one day and he know, throws out like the bags of stuff that like can't be recycled.

And he's going down to the recycling center and you know, he's putting the plastics or the plastics and the tins with the tins. And this woman walks up to him and he kind of recognized her and she went up to him and said, you know, you're Ed McManus, right? And he is like, yeah. He's like, she's like your daughter's Katie, right?

He's like, yeah. And she said to him, and I'll never forget this. She's like, I really wish I had kept it, but she said that her son read my blog religiously and that it had motivated him to go and get a new job to start playing music again, to change key parts of his life that he wasn't happy with.

This person never reached out to me directly. I had no idea this was going on. Okay. , there were like 20 people my son reads Katie's blog. Religiously, and this is back like before I started my business. This is of like a hobby blog that I did. It was kind of motivational. who subscribed to this blog and he was one of them, and he never responded to any of the email updates about it. Okay? You need to have faith that you have this similar kind of person who's following the stuff you're putting out into the world.

Even if they never sign up for anything with you, you're having impact,

even if they're never telling you that you're having impact with them. You're having impact. And here's the thing, who knows if I had continued that blog and created some kind of service or program or product on the back end of this, this person may have very well have bought that thing. It's a long game when you're creating anything and putting out into the world, you're feeding into this relationship with people that you have no idea you're in relationship with.

Running a launch is no different. You're just making a bigger ask on the back end. Sometimes launches require a longer lead up time, a longer relationship foundation to be effective. So I wanna remind you that if you run a launch and no one signs up, people still saw your content about it, people still learn.

So, From the point of view, the perspective that you shared in promoting that they still learned about you and attached more credibility to your name in their minds that you know what you're talking about.

So, you know that wall that I told you that you should have in your house with framed and gilded, I didn't say gilded, but you know, framed commemorations of every single failure that you've ever had. I actually wanna change that. These aren't failures. These are ways that you let people see you.

These are instances of you putting yourself out there and letting people be and let people be in relationship with you even though you didn't make any money out of it.

Oftentimes my clients, you know, when they're first posting on social media, they're really self-conscious. They don't wanna put the wrong thing, you know? So let's let's make someone up. Okay, so let's make up Teresa. You know, she's not a real client of mine but maybe Teresa like really loves dogs. She has chickens, she has a guitar player, and she's a life coach who like also does psychic greetings, right?

So she wants to talk about her life coaching, but she may be self-conscious about the psychic greeting part, okay? Because it's kind of woo-hoo and out there. And what if her former boss sees this and judges her, right? And then like, you know, who has chickens? Okay, should she share about that? One of the things that I love to remind my clients is that showing up on social media, you are basically trying to get people to remember you.

As small businesses, we don't have a marketing problem. We have a memorability problem. And I want you to imagine that people are all over the world on their iPhones, on their computers. Cuz you know, Androids don't exist in my world, . And they, I want you to imagine that in their minds, they have this blank canvas of you.

And every time you share a little detail about who you are and what you're interested in and what work you do, they're adding more detail to that canvas. So Teresa, if she goes on and shares that, like that morning when she went to feed the chickens, she realized that like there was a hole in the fence and one had gotten out.

And so she ended up being like this crazy person running around the neighborhood in her pajamas and her slippers trying to chase after this chicken and was five minutes late to a client call. You actually just learned a lot about Teresa. You learned that she has chicken. So that she probably eats eggs, right?

Which I mean, if you like eggs too, you feel a little connected to her. You also learn that she cares about animals because she didn't want her chicken to get lost. You also learned that she's willing to make an idiot outta herself to protect her pets , which I mean, of course if you love animals, you're gonna feel so connected to her.

Then you also learned that she takes clients interesting. I wonder what she does with those clients. I'm gonna click on her profile and I'm gonna do a deeper dive, and I'm gonna learn more about her. So I want you to imagine you're standing on stage in front of this massive audience, but you have this huge canvas that's in front of you.

Like they can't see you. They're looking at the stage, but there's just this canvas. It is your job as a business owner to jab your finger through this canvas and poke all these holes. I own chickens. I do psychic readings. I am a life coach. I do this. I do not like fois gras whatever, like anything that has to do with you, because the more holes you poke in that canvas, the more they can see of you and the more they can see of you, the more that they can remember you or the better they can remember you and the better they can remember you, the more likely they are.

If they have a problem that you can solve, you're gonna be their first call. The more they remember you, the more likely they are to sign up for your shit when you launch it and you announce that you have something for sale. So every failed launch I want you to remember, is just another hole in that canvas.

It's another detail on that picture that they're painting of you in their minds, it's training them how you're useful to them or useful to someone that they love.

In talking of being visible online so that you can tell those stories, that will help your clients with buying that relationship with you, I invite you to go back and listen to my recent episode all about staying visible.

No such thing as a failed launch

There's no such thing as a failed launch.

And let's talk about us as ADHD - preneurs, because we have so many hobbies we've liked throughout our lives. We're interesting. , we nerd out on the weirdest shit. Okay. . We have so much to give on social media. We have so many weirdo perspectives that we can. Don't hold that stuff back. Don't let your rejection sensitivity dis.

Don't let your rejection sensitivity dysphoria prevent you from putting yourself out there and waving that freak flag high.

Because here's the thing about running a solopreneur business, as people aren't just buying your thing, they're buying the relationship with you and for them to want to buy that relationship with you, they have to feel connected to you. So any weirdo thing you share about yourself is going to draw the right people in closer.

So I have some seriously good news for you all. So I shared at first about how gut-wrenching, whatever that means, it is to launch something and have it fall flat on its face and have no one sign up. But let me tell you this, that this past launch, these two launches that I experimented with, one that had no buyers and the other one that didn't sell out felt neutral.

I've done this so much at this point that it doesn't even impact me when something doesn't work. It's just data. I've gotten to the point, and you will too if you continue to lean into the failure. When something doesn't work out, you don't attribute any meaning to it.

You genuinely just look at the data and think, oh cool, what about this didn't land? Maybe the timing wasn't correct. Maybe the title wasn't good. Maybe your description of it wasn't good. Maybe you didn't promote it enough. Maybe you didn't promote it in the right place.

That feeling of your throat dropping into the bottom of your stomach because you may have embarrassed yourself by putting something out there that didn't work out and now it's public and you failed and oh my God, what are they gonna think of you? Doesn't last. You get desensitized to it after a while.

So I don't know if that's like a really, alluring light at the end of the tunnel that it's gonna suck and it's gonna feel really bad, and then it's not gonna feel like anything . But I hope it gives you some hope, , because let me tell you, launching stuff and having them work only happens when you lean through the failure.

And that feels really good, but it never happens if you're not willing to fail first.

If you're freaking out and pooping your pants over the idea of failing your first webinar or course offering, I invite you to join my weenie ADHD - preneur community, where you'll get all of the support from myself in a group of fellow ADHD - preneurs.

Go to weeniecast.com/members.

 

 

 

 

© 2022 - 2023 Katie McManus – Business Strategy For Weenie ADHD-preneurs