What 100+ Online Course Launches Taught Me About Simple Launch Strategy

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Most entrepreneurs assume launching an online course requires massive complexity — live webinars, big teams, giant funnels, and months of preparation.

But after spending the last decade behind the scenes of over 100 online course launches across multiple industries, I’ve found that complexity often creates burnout more than results.

In this episode of the Regenerative Business Podcast, I break down the real story behind two launches:

• a $300,000 launch that required months of work, a large sales team, and total burnout
• a $40,000 “lazy launch” that took just a few emails, a few Instagram posts, and about 15 minutes per day

You’ll learn why many entrepreneurs overcomplicate their launch strategy, how relationship-based marketing sells online courses faster than complicated funnels, and how to design launches that are both profitable and sustainable.

If you want to sell online courses without burning out, this episode will completely change how you think about launching.

In this episode we cover:

• Why complicated online course launches often generate less profit than expected
• The simple definition of a launch most entrepreneurs misunderstand
• How trust and relationships drive sales during a launch
• The hidden costs of big launches (teams, burnout, recovery time)
• Why “lazy launches” can outperform complex marketing funnels
• The one ingredient that makes simple launches convert

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:56

So a couple years ago, a business hired me to consult for them and they were showing me the behind the scenes of their recent $300,000 launch. And when you hear that, you're like, wow, $300,000 for a launch. I mean, that might sound like a lot to you, or it might sound completely average and actually a little low for you. For them, it was a big deal. It was bigger than they had. I think it was triple what their previous launches had been. But then they started showing me the dynamics of the behind the scenes of the actual launch. They held multiple live webinars, they had 100 salespeople doing sales calls with people, lots of email segmentation, dozens of emails being sent. They had months and months of preparation. And at the back end of it, the founder, the face of the business, had to take three months off, not because she was like going on this lovely vacation or taking time off or celebrating, but because she was burnt out. She needed months to recover. And that moment really struck me because around the same time I had just come off of a $40,000 launch, which, yes, is a fraction of a $300,000 launch. But that $40,000 launch was happening kind of behind the scenes in my business while I was traveling. It only took me 15 minutes a day to complete. And it was just so simple to do. And I've had many, many multiple five-figure launches, many six-figure launches within my own business. And I've been the back end of supporting my clients in six, seven, and multiple seven-figure launches. So I like, I know this game, I know the launch game, I know the online launch game in the online spiritual space. And the big difference, even between my clients who have multiple seven-figure launches, and this one person coming in telling me about her multiple six-figure launch was how complex, how effortful their version was. And they were following the doctrine of a fairly big name in the online space, very bro marketing, which is ironic because they're like a spiritual feminine business doing all of these bro marketing techniques. And I looked at it and I was like, that's just not worth it. In my mind, that is not worth doing. Sure, they generated cash, but then what? They had to pay all of these salespeople for their sales calls and affiliate commissions. Like, how much did she actually bring home with profit? Not that much. And she had to take three months off just to recuperate. Versus my lazy $40,000 launch that took a couple weeks and a few emails and a few posts. I can do that all day long. Or like the whole point is I'm not doing that all day long. It's taking 15 minutes a day. So today I wanted to talk about how to create lazy launches in your business. And I've used this same formula for clients for myself to have much larger launches, but that was just the direct comparison and the timeline. And I really want to address and lay to rest this idea that successful launches have to be complicated. Because in my experience, both with my own programs and being behind the scenes of over a hundred online launches in the spiritual online space over the last decade, complexity is not what makes launches work. So one of the biggest myths in the online business space is this idea that if you want to have a big launch, you need to have or create this huge, complicated machine. People assume success requires multiple live events, growing your team just for the launch. A giant funnel, tons of tech, tons of ad spend. And sometimes those things exist in successful launches. For sure. For sure they exist in some successful launches. But that doesn't even mean that they're the reason the launch works. And it's definitely the most effortful way to make a launch work. Because a lot of time this complexity is actually a coping mechanism. I see people stack tactic after tactic because they don't trust something or they don't actually want to lean into intimacy with their people. They don't trust their audience, they don't trust their offer, they don't trust themselves, they don't trust the unseen forces that are supporting them. So they just add more emails, more webinars, more people, more whatever. But complexity does not guarantee success. Most of the time it guarantees exhaustion. So first let's really simplify what a launch actually is. It tends to be over mystified in the online space. On the most basic level, a launch is simply doing a promotion with a time constraint. That's it. You're promoting something and it has a time constraint. If there's no time constraint, it's essentially an evergreen offer, could be in a funnel. You're telling people this thing exists, this is why it matters, is how it'll help you. Here's the window of time that you can join in. And there's a million and one ways to make this work. Of course, it can include webinars, of course, it can include salespeople and sales calls, but sometimes they can just include some emails and some Instagram posts. Webinars are optional, challenges are optional, five-day video series are optional, running ads are optional, sales calls are optional, huge funnels are optional. If they help you sell and you know that they work, amazing. But they're not the essence of what a launch is. The essence is simply inviting people to buy something within a period of time. So why do simple launches work so well? This $40,000 launch I had when I broke everything down with okay, I had a free pre-recorded video that people could watch to give them value, to feel my energy, to understand my ethos. I did some Instagram posts, I sent some emails, I had a sales page that people could read about the offer. It was a $500 self-study program. But why it worked was because of the relationship that I already had with my people. By the time I launched that course, people already knew my work. They were familiar with me. They had already been following what I wrote, they already trusted my perspective, they'd already experienced value from me. And when I promoted the offer, they didn't need 10 webinars to be convinced. They didn't need endless persuasion, they didn't need a complicated funnel. I gave an invitation and people said yes. Because the trust and the relationship was already there. And all of these extra bells and whistles, they're essentially manipulating people into having a relationship with you. And manipulation can be good or bad, like we manipulate clay in order to make a beautiful vase, but for simple, lazy launches that still make you lots of money, continually leaning into intimacy and relationship and giving value all the time makes it so that you don't have to have these force manipulative, frantic launches. We're trying to shove in the whole relationship process in a tiny period of time. Instead, when you have trust building for months or weeks at least, it's this slow build, this slow burn of beautiful relationship development. When you have these trust and relationship ecosystems in place, your launches become shockingly simple. And another thing that people don't talk about with these big launches, like when this person said they had a $300,000 launch, they're not talking about the hidden cost of this type of frantic, complicated launch. I mean, the $300,000 of gross revenue coming in, it sounds amazing, right? But the gross revenue is only a part of the story. You also have to look at how much time it required, how much effort it required, how much team it required, how many people you had to pay, the stress it created, how much future time it was taking away from you because you have to take months off. A launch that makes $300,000 but requires a month of prep or multiple months of prep, a huge team, hundreds of calls, and total burnout afterwards, in my book, is not better. It's definitely not better than a simple launch. Because that smaller, simpler, lazy launch is sustainable and is repeatable and makes you excited to launch again. Because your business should not require you to destroy yourself every time you sell something. So if launching has started feeling overwhelming for you, I want to offer a different way of thinking about this today. Your job at a launch is not to do everything, but instead to identify and lean in to the few moves that actually create momentum. And if you've been in business for years or at least months, you should already know what those are. You should be able to look back over the past years or months and see what moved the needle. What platforms actually led to sales? Where are your relationships actually developing? Where are you showing up consistently and nurturing? For me, it was Instagram and emails. I knew that as long as I focused there, sales would come. I had proof of that. The only fancy thing I sprinkled in was having a free video training that people could sign up for to give people a reason to actually lean in, lean towards me and my work. And if you watch my video on here where we talk about the phases and energetics of a launch, this is a really important period to have to allow people to actually give them a taste of you and your work. Thank you so much for joining me for this episode of the Regenerative Business Podcast. Now we are doing something really special next week. The Art of High Conversions, my new free video training, and it is actually ended up being a four-part video training, is coming out next week. I will be publishing the four trainings on this here podcast. But if you want the videos, the companion workbooks, the transcripts, the resources that go along with it, definitely sign up for the full shebang. I'll put a link for it in the show notes, or you can go to my link in bio on Instagram. But we're going into the strategy and the energetics of having high conversion rates or results that don't make sense. The secrets of, you know, those people that you see where you're like, I don't understand how whatever they put out, people buy and they just keep having success after success after success and all their launches always work. We're going into that. So I'm really excited to share that with you this next week. It will only be available for a limited time. So from March 16th until March 27th. So take advantage of it while you can. Okay, see you then.