Launch

Jeff Walker was a stay-at-home dad in the 1990s, taking care of his kids while trading stocks online to help with the household budget, a long way from being a marketing guru.

He started sending out an email newsletter about what he was learning in the financial markets, for free, just to share it with people interested in the same subject.

When he decided to sell a course on his own way of trading, he didn't build a sales page and start advertising. He told his list, released content little by little, and only then opened the door to buy. He sold more in one week than he expected to sell all year, and that is how the formula he named a launch was born, without any planning.

The difference between launching and simply selling is time: selling means asking for the purchase in the first message, while launching means spending days building the reason before asking for anything.

The book calls this the sideways sales letter: instead of one long page full of arguments, the seller spreads the same persuasion across several pieces of content delivered on different days, each one setting the stage for the next.

This changes the experience of the person receiving it: instead of feeling sold to, they feel like they're learning, until they realize they already want to buy by the time the offer finally shows up.

It's like telling a bar story in parts, getting straight to the point: the story hooks you more when it comes in short chapters, with a cliffhanger at the end of each, than when someone dumps everything at once.

Before any launch content goes live, the book recommends a step most people skip: letting your list know something is coming, without delivering anything yet, just to gauge whether there is real interest.

A simple question about the audience's biggest struggle on that topic already works as a thermometer: if almost nobody answers, that's a sign to rethink the product before spending weeks producing it.

This pre-pre-launch also makes the audience curious, talking among themselves about what's coming, which starts generating word of mouth before the first piece of content even goes out.