📅 Mon, 11-08-25

My first $1000+ (with less than 1000 views)

This email is an exercise in transparency
​

Yesterday, I closed the launch of my first ever online product.

​

This way, if you ever embark on a similar journey, you'd now what to expect.

​

But first, THANK YOU!

Thank you for encouraging me throughout this launch.

Thank you for the 41 new joiners who purchased the Vault - making it now a grand total of 60 beautiful people who have lifetime access.

And thank you for messages like these:

🥹 made me emotional

🫶 I can't wait to see how the Vault impacts the lives of every single one of you!

​

Now on to the meat that you all want:
​

How much work?

As you know, I have limited time because of my 9-5 job.

So step 1 was to be ruthlessly organised.

I made a detailed plan, listing of everything that I needed to produce for this launch. This way I always knew exactly what to work on every time I had a spare 20 minutes in my day. (I used timers to max out my productivity)

​

Here is the exact plan I followed for this launch:

​

I started working on this in mid June (almost 2 months ago) to make sure I had everything ready ahead of time and avoid scrambling last minute and still have a somewhat normal social life.

​

Pre-Launch

I like to think that

The worst thing you can do is to pour your heart into a product, and then expect people to buy it.

We don't buy products, we buy offers. We then use the products after buying, but before buying we only interact with the offer. So the offer and the product are to be considered equally important.

A great offer is clear, it is timely, and it puts you in the right state of mind to make the most of the product. The same product can be experienced differently with a different offer, because you'd come into it with a different expectation.

But it's not enough to design a great offer.

For a great offer to work, it needs to find its way to the right people. People who need it, people for whom the offer is relevant and valuable.

That's why the main focus of any product launch is to:

1. Raise awareness that the offer exists
2. Build a waitlist of the right people

This is surprisingly difficult to do.

Emphasis on "right", because it is easy to be mysterious about a launch and get a lot of people to sign up. But then by being mysterious you've just bloated the waitlist with people who do not have a clear expectation of what the offer is, so they are not going to buy and you will just annoy them with all the waitlist emails they'll receive. Or worse, they will buy but with the wrong expectation and then have a bad experience once they access the product.

Building a waitlist the right way is difficult.

It requires a lot of touch points, the ability to communicate the offer clearly in very little time and space, to avoid hijacking your normal comms.

It requires you to strike the right balance between clarity and hype, without being sales-y but also without shying away from mentioning it over and over.

I tried to take this seriously (and I hope you felt it).

Each bullet point listed in the Waitlist Buildup is a touch point where I mention the offer and link to a waitlist.

If you count them that 13 touch-points across 3 different mediums (video, email, community post).

After all of that I had built my newsletter to 145 people who (I thought...) were highly interested.

​

Launch

After almost a month of pre-launch activities to build my waitlist it was the time to finally launch!

For products that you don't only work on once and then forget you could launch and then leave it open to allow anyone to buy at any time going forward.

But for products like the Vault, that you continuously work on, grow and update you want to create a "moment" where you stop touching it and allow people to access it.

There's many reasons for this, the most important one in my opinion is because the value of the product grows over time, thus it will be unfair to people who join earlier to pay the same as those who join further down the line.

The benefit of a launch with a finite time window, is that people are force to make a decision, which is often the little push we need.

However I absolutely hate it when this dynamic is abused, imposing launch deadlines for products that have no reason to have one.

So if you are planning a launch, ask yourself:

If there isn't then don't create an artificial end date for buying.

You can reward action-takers by adding more, exclusive perks, which do have a deadline. Perhaps because there is finite stock, or because it involves your direct time commitment.

Anyways, regardless of whether you have a finite window or ever-green, the launch will fall on deaf ears if you don't over-communicate.

This was also surprisingly difficult to do.

..surely everyone knows about this already.. I even made a public video about it!

I felt loud, I felt annoying.

So much that I was considering not going ahead with half of the emails.

Luckily, I made this poll in the community tab:

I quickly realised that even though I felt loud, more than half of my audience hadn't even heard me once.

People have busy lives and the online world is nosy already, so over-communication is not only recommended, it is necessary.

​

Post Launch

Launch closed!!

Sadly the video only gathered 998 views during the launch.

But it's time to count the money right?

Wrong.

There's a couple of crucial bits left:

I like to think that:

​

So what a missed opportunity would it be to do all of this work and not learn from it.

And what's the best way to improve?

Feedback + Reflection.

That's why after the launch is close I:

• ask everyone on the waitlist who didn't buy .. Why? 😅
• I personally welcome the new joiners, ensure their expectations are exceeded, and ask them to share more about themselves and their reasons to buy
• I take time to summarise and reflect about all I've done (THIS EMAIL IS PART OF THAT)

​

Alright, now let's count 💸

How much money?

$2k launch!! 🥳

But let's dive deeper.

The beauty of digital products is that there is no material or fulfilment costs.

So from the $2,009 earned, you only need to account for the processing fee taken by the platform you use.

I use one called "Kit" which has a 5% fee so ➡︎ $1,908.

This is pre-tax of course, so it gets much lower (I won't go into explaining UK taxes, but in my case I have to pay ~45% in tax .. ➡︎ $1,049 🥲 )
​

But for argument's sake let's just call it $2k... 🙈

​

Up to you to decide whether $2k justifies all this time and effort.

But for me... it absolutely does!

Sure, I can't cover living expenses in London.

Not even close.

But psychologically, making my first 4 digits launch with a product that genuinely improves people's lives is worth way more than the money itself.

The insights and skills that come from it are invaluable.

And of course I will be distilling them all into new entries to add to the Vault, making it even more precious.

Which brings me to what truly matters:

Is the product worth it?

Hopefully by now you can appreciate how much work a product launch really entails.

So why on earth would you put yourself through this if what you're selling is not something truly valuable?

Turns out that value is hard to quantify.

That is why I waited so long for my first product launch.

I wanted to be proud of my product.

Otherwise, if I thought it was just "good enough", I knew I wouldn't have the motivation put in the work to launch it properly.

I genuinely believe the Vault would have changed my life if I had access to it at the start of my creative journey.

But that wasn't enough to give me courage.

So back in May I "tested" it with my core audience first.

With only one email and one "temporary" YouTube video (which was live for only 72 hours) I tried to pitch this idea of a Vault of my insights and lessons learned.

Back then I called it "100+ Lessons Database"

And tadaa 🎉

19 people from my core audience got early access to it for $20.

This is what is meant by "validate the idea" first.

It allowed me to test the checkout, the delivery and the onboarding flows.

I got to know my first customers, listened to their feedback, improved the product further, and got the confidence for the next step (this launch).

​

So the key lessons are:

1. Make sure you're proud of your product
2. Give as much attention to the offer than you give to the product
3. Don't be afraid to be loud, because you probably aren't

​

Hope you learned a ton from this one!!

​

🫶

Massa

---

P.s.
If you reply to this email with what you'd like to learn from me next I would love it
​

P.p.s

If you want to share this email with friends, feel free :)
​