Why I Didn't Go Through With a Product Launch
+ more things
PRE-P.S.: I’m sending an extra email on Sunday or Monday with all the More Things links for the month of September. Cheers!
Hey, if you only know me from this newsletter or from Medium, you may not about my secret life: I’m a professional marketer.
Specifically, content marketing and SEO (search engine optimization—getting things to the top of Google).
In some ways, it’s a nice complement to what I do here and my fiction work.
A few years ago, I created a course like many of the gurus tell you to do, and I made more than $10,000 from it.
The course was about SEO and essentially my strategies to get to the 1st page of Google. I’ve used the strategy at several companies, so people were interested.
The course is almost 2 years old, and I haven’t doubled that return. The sales definitely slowed down.
The New Product Idea: Building Content Briefs with AI
Because of that, I thought I’d create another product for content marketers. This time around AI and building content briefs using AI.
My first course was around ~$100 and this was only going to be $15. It would probably take a few hours to do: make a video, take some screenshots, and write copy.
Why I Didn’t Go Through With It
I have a small, but pretty dedicated email list though I don’t nurture it that much. I pre-sold 4 copies.
That didn’t feel like enough validation.
Plus, I announced this for October 1, giving myself about a month to get it done.
Yet, I’d only been in New York City for 2 weeks.
Yet, I didn’t know exactly how this product would add value.
An exact launch date was supposed to be a motivation to do more research and experiment.
Instead, it felt like a drain. A huge burden.
Something I didn’t necessarily have to do.
Meanwhile, I have my day job, and my regular life, and I’ve been writing more on Medium and doing this newsletter.
Those things were more exciting to me. So that’s what I’ve been doing.
Sure, my work wouldn’t care if I took out an hour or two to make that course. But I didn’t feel motivated to do it.
However, I didn’t feel confident to do it either.
It felt like a sham. A product only to have a product.
I’m still learning what it means to write and create with all the AI-hype. I didn’t feel like I had anything new to add to the conversation (yet).
I could not get behind it 100%. That may be fine for others, and I’m sure I’ve felt that way behind other things that I’ve pushed forward, but this time it didn’t sit right with me.
So I pulled it.
And I refunded those 4 people their money.
I’ll keep learning and going.
And I’ll do the next product when I’m ready (if ever).
More Things
The Need for Mourning at The HedgeHog Review.
“Like play, mourning holds things in suspension: presence and absence, remembering and forgetting, reality and imagination. By letting us play with what we have lost, and thereby modulate its departure, mourning is a way of treasuring, of asserting value.”
6 Brilliant Authors Who Only Wrote One Novel at The Big Think.
These 38 Reading Rules Changed My Life by Ryan Holiday.
Congrats, You Found The Best Productivity Software. Now You Have to Be Productive. At Medium.
Level 7856: How I Treat Writing Like a Video Game. At Medium.
Finished 100 Foot Wave! Such fascinating, dangerous lives.
Recently started “The Dish Washer” by Stephan Larue (translated from French)
Last Thing
“Far better is it to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure... than to rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy nor suffer much, because they live in a gray twilight that knows not victory nor defeat.” — Theodore Roosevelt
Keep going,
-Josh Spilker