The story of my first ever launch [case study]

Let me take you back to July 2024 – so around 2 years ago at the time of writing.

Hold tight, because it’s a long one – but hopefully this will be interesting to anyone who’s thinking about or planning to launch their own product from scratch…

Hint: Just do it! It’s a strategy I’d highly recommend to every single person reading this.

1. The final results

Before I get into my strategy, let me first give you the results. No point reading all this if my launch was a flop, right? 😆

After the first week, my stats were as follows:

(Keep in mind this was my first product, starting completely from scratch with no list and no income)

• 113 sales in total
• 8% overall conversion rate
• $1.54 visitor value

Total sales: $2,075.92 (minus $1,191.19 in affiliate commissions, minus W+ and PP fees)

Perhaps most importantly, I added 65 people to my buyers list. I promoted one of Tony Newton’s offers a few days after launching and made 3 sales and $44.98 in affiliate commissions, which at the time I thought was an excellent result from such a tiny list.

Overall, I was beyond pleased with how well it went – especially considering this was my first launch.

Since then, I’ve done a further five launches, most in collaboration with Andy Waring – with many more to come.

2. My back story

So, why did I launch my own product in the first place?

As some of you may (or may not!) know, I was made redundant from my job at a digital agency in 2023. After this, I worked full-time as a freelance copywriter and web designer… and things didn’t go well.

In fact, my business was slow sinking every single day, and something desperately needed to change.

Which is when I decided to get back into internet marketing and launch my first product…

But what to launch?

Creating PLR was the obvious choice because I’d done this in the past and I felt like it utilised my skills without working directly with clients or trading time for money.

Then the doubts set in. Was PLR still a thing in the age of AI? Surely the market is saturated by now?

Some initial research suggested it was still selling.

I emailed Tiffany Lambert, who is basically the queen of PLR. I asked her a few questions and told her about my plans… and her response was to just go for it. Stop thinking about and do it!

She also said she’d promote it IF it was good, so that really spurred me on.

I also messaged Tony Shepherd, who is a marketer I’ve long admired, and he also said not to second-guess the market, which of course was excellent advice, and especially so for someone who had a tendency to overthink everything!

3. Creating my product

I figured I’d need a frontend product + at least one upsell, which I decided would be a package of two other related reports. I wanted it to be as appealing as possible, so each product would consist of an in-depth report with an accompanying package of sales materials with graphics, sales page, thank you page, etc.

The first thing to say is that sitting at your computer with the intention of creating multiple products from scratch is quite a daunting thing, which probably explains why it took me months to make any serious progress.

The first task was writing the reports. I probably had an advantage here because I have a lot of experience writing for clients, and I’ve also launched my own products in the past. Even so, it took me a while to get back into the swing of things.

Once I’d created the reports themselves, there were other things to figure out, such as how to design the ecover graphics and how to create the HTML pages I’d be supplying to my buyers.

After looking at other offers on WarriorPlus, I noticed many people were also including course slides, lead magnets and autoresponder emails, so I followed suit as I wanted to pack in as much value as possible. A good idea… but a lot of extra work!

4. Creating my funnel

The next task was to create the various sales pages for the frontend offer, upsell and downsell + the thank you pages for the downloads. I already had access to Elementor, so I decided to use this rather than purchasing anything else. In all honesty, it doesn’t really matter what you use – ClickFunnels, LeadPages, System io, etc. Any of them will do – just pick one and go with it. The same goes for your autoresponder.

These days, many people are using AI to create their funnels – and that provides a much easier way to get started.

I also created a JV page outlining the details of my offer (very important!), with links to the affiliate sign-up page on WarriorPlus and a swipe email for affiliates to use in their promos. Randy Smith pointed out that I should have multiple emails as many affiliates will want to promote more than once, so I added two more.

Of course, there was also the small matter of setting up the offer on WarriorPlus. There’s quite a bit to it (which I won’t outline here), but most of it is fairly self-explanatory. My top tip would be not to attempt it while coming down with suspected Covid, like I did. 😁

5. Finding JV partners

THE most critical part of a launch like this is getting affiliates on board. After all, they are the people who are going to generate the sales, especially when you’re starting completely from scratch with no list and no existing buyers, like me.

As soon as I started creating my product, I began contacting anyone and everyone who mentioned PLR.

If an email landed in my inbox promoting PLR, I sent a reply explaining that I was working on my own offer and asking if it would be ok to send them a review copy when it was ready to go. Likewise, I researched PLR sellers and got in touch with as many as possible asking the same thing.

A week or so before the launch, I sent the promised review copy to anyone I’d previously contacted. I also did some extra research and found a few more people to ask.

I also posted my launch on MunchEye and in various PLR/JV/launch groups on Facebook. It took a little while to get approved on MunchEye, so try to do this as far in advance as you can.

I was very pleased (and somewhat surprised!) to get responses from some big name marketers, including affiliate requests from people I hadn’t even contacted.

6. Launch day

After testing my funnel the night before (always do that!), I sat nervously at my computer waiting for 2pm BST / 9am EDT to come around…

At 2:01pm the first sales dropped into my inbox, quickly followed by another a few minutes later.

For the first hour especially, my emails were going crazy with sales and payment notifications. I dreamt about this but honestly didn’t think it would actually happen, LOL.

I don’t mind admitting that I was dancing around my kitchen at one point. 😂

After 40 minutes, I was up to 19 sales, and just over an hour later my offer crept into the top 10 W+ sellers of the day at #7.

After this, the sales continued to come in, before dropping off after the first week.

One thing I failed to do on that first launch was to set an early bird price. Now, I always set a price for the initial 5-day launch, and then increase it to the regular price once the launch has ended.

We also tend to do an affiliate contest with a leaderboard – which is a great way to motivate affiliates to keep promoting. Even if you’re not offering any cash prizes, a ‘bragging rights’ or ‘just for fun’ contest keeps affiliates pushing to promote.

My biggest lesson from all this? Just create stuff and put it out there. Don’t overthink it or procrastinate for months like I did. If you want to do it, you can.

This first launch was honestly a life-changing moment, and something I’ll never forget. It’s what set me on my current path, and I couldn’t be happier or more motivated to keep pushing ahead.

I hope you found this helpful – and please do leave me a comment below if you have any thoughts or questions. I love hearing from you!