Welcome back to another episode of the Stephanie Kase Podcast. I am going to get really vulnerable on this episode about our last launch for the The Instagram Growth Course. To be honest, I cried multiple times about a lot of issues that were completely out of my control during this launch, as well as not hitting the goals we wanted. We had to make some huge pivots along the way during launch week, as we saw what was happening. But, today I want to share a recap of it all – including our free class and the actual launch. I’ll be sharing some lessons learned, final stats, and what it looked like in my launch report for the Instagram Growth Course. 

Our Launch

This launch was for my newest course, the Instagram Growth Course. The Instagram Growth Course is all about how to grow your business on Instagram – from making actual conversations with your followers to strategies to grow your account. We’re obsessed with it and the students who have joined have seen lots of great lightbulb moments. It’s been awesome to connect with students in our Facebook group! But, the course prep and launch came with some bumps in the road, which is what I’m going to share about today. 

My Mindset

Leading up to the launch, there was a lot going on in my brain. I really expected it to be a hit with our audience, because we have lots of products related to Reels and they’ve always converted really well. We had beta testers checking out the course who loved it and were seeing great results. So, that was super encouraging. In fact, we had to shut down our beta testing application within a few hours – which told me that people wanted to learn this content. We felt super in tune with our audience about what they wanted! 

Now, we’ve done some big launches before but this one felt pretty big. So, we spent about three months preparing for it. We decided in January that this is what my audience wanted – a course about Instagram. I began to work on the slides, outlines, and record videos. Michael and I edited the videos, and Maggie was doing all of the other prep work for us. Our first webinar was March 30th – so it was about three months of work. 

Our Webinar Experience

We decided to do webinars to help launch this course. We’ve done them before and so we planned for three days of webinars. How did they go? Not so great. I’m about to get really vulnerable. We did three live webinars, like we normally do – different times across three different days. When we’ve done webinars in the past, we’ve promoted to about 22K people on our email list. For this live webinar, we had about 1361 people sign up, which is still pretty good. It was a bit low for our email list size, but not bad overall. We were still super excited about everyone who wanted to learn. My webinars are always live classes – it’s super interactive. That lasts for 40 minutes and then the last 15 minutes, I pitch my new course. Near the end, I read off the names of anyone who had joined the course – but no one was.

I was freaking out inside, wondering if the link was broken. We did wind up with a few people who joined, but only about 3% – which is really low. Usually, we’ve got 15-20% of them signed up by the time our Q&A ends. After that, I was crushed. I remember walking down to Michael and the twins and just crying. I just knew intuitively something wasn’t working. There was a huge disconnect from the webinar and the course. Whether it was the topic of the webinar or attracting the right people, I didn’t know yet. We knew our pricing was competitive after research. I wound up reducing the price before the next webinar, thinking that might help. 

Pivoting…

At 11am the next day, we had the next webinar. And we really started realizing, after some emails we got after the webinar, that people had issues with the links. So we thought there might be a technical issue going on. Even with the price decrease, we saw basically the exact same conversion rate around 3%. So at that point, though, even though I felt super defeated, I was also just dumbfounded. I was like, okay, something is totally not clicking here. Something is not right. I am so confident in this product. I know it can give people results and it’s given results to the students who have already gone through it. Plus, I know these are the questions we get asked over and over day after day in our brand. 

But something’s not clicking with my audience. And so after that was 11am on Friday, March 31, we had one more webinar time on April 1 at 11am. I really got into brainstorming mode! I spoke with my friend Rebecca again and we decided to change the webinar. I changed the slides, the way I talked about everything and focused on making money on Instagram. We wanted to see if these changes helped us convert any more audience members. 

More Tech Issues…

First of all, as we get onto the webinar, and we start it, we’re getting emails about issues with the links and the video lagging. So that was issue number one. I didn’t know this at the time, because I was focusing on teaching. But, people seemed interested and engaged as we began. Then about 5 minutes to the end, my airpods died and completely messed up our sound. I couldn’t finish the webinar. We couldn’t find a solution to fix it, so we just dropped off at the end. Over the weekend, tons of emails came in about issues with our replay links – so it was a huge mess from Webinar Jam. 

I went downstairs to Michael. And I started literally laughing so hard and crying at the same time. Like belly laughing so hard and tears are coming under my eyes from exhaustion and just overwhelm. I don’t think I’ve ever experienced those two emotions that strongly at the same time. I just didn’t know what to feel. We had all these technical issues after trying to fix the content for higher conversions – and we don’t even know if it helped! 

Webinar Results

Well, obviously, we’re getting a new webinar program. WebinarJam did NOT serve us well during this process. We wound up extending our replay and offering it for longer than we usually would because of all of the issues we had. Between the live webinars and replays, we had 33 sales of the Instagram Growth Course. It was definitely lower than I was expecting, but I’m also trying to remember that we had lots of technical issues. 

Launch Week

After the webinars, launch week started. My energy was already really low. Launch week ran from Monday to Friday. Anyone could have bought the course at the discount with some bonuses. I knew I had to show up on Instagram stories, but I was struggling. I didn’t feel good and I was disappointed about it all. 

But, despite everything it was amazing to see people in our Facebook group. We’re so thankful to you. And happy that it’s helping you! It is so encouraging to see everyone engaging and commenting – and working together. Serving people is the most important thing about any launch or product, so I’m thankful that it’s doing that! We’re still brainstorming how we can make changes and tweaks moving forward – either the course itself or the way we present it, but we want to keep the heart of why we created it the same. 

That actually was something we realized we needed to clarify. These lessons aren’t included anywhere else. They’re brand new lessons. The Instagram Growth Course compliments the Reels Mini Course well, but they’re definitely different. 

Final Stats of Launch Week

Let’s get to the final stats of launch week for The Instagram Growth Course. 

During the webinar, we made 33 sales – which is super exciting. In addition to those sales, we had another 46 people join during launch week. As a reminder, we had a bonus running with an additional Zoom call with Instagram audits if they bought during launch week. We had 23 of those 46 join on the last day. That told us the bonus was really helpful! So, we sold a total of 79 courses and 23 of those bought one of our upsells, too. 79 sales is a 3.5% conversion rate from our email list. We would have loved to see a 5% conversion rate, but we still made sales! 

With those sales, we generated $29,489. During this like 10 Day launch period, the actual dollar amount that we saw come into my bank account was $22,763. So about six $7,000 worth is the payment plans that are going to come in later. We had 18 people select the payment plan option out of those 79 people and we also had $621 come in from the upsells. 

Now, from the webinar, $9,160 came in from those sales and $12,982 was from the launch week sales, plus another $1,944 in other shop products. That’s always interesting to me – when we do a big launch, we see an uptick in the shop products in general that week. 

Launch Expenses

I wanted to touch on expenses. We really only had one big expense. The week before the webinars, we spent $279.35 on Facebook Ads. I wasn’t really seeing any conversions and didn’t have the capacity so, I turned them off after about a week. We kept the video editing in house, Maggie did work a few extra hours for the launch – which was necessary, but we didn’t have any other big expenses. We have general expenses of $3,500 for Kajabi yearly for housing our courses and paying WebinarJam for $1,000 a year. But those are related to the business running regularly. 

Lessons Learned

From this launch, I learned a lot. Number one, we did a market research survey at the end of 2022, asking our audience what they need help with. I realized we asked what they need but not what they’d buy from us. So, I want to learn more about what they’d buy and want from us. Secondly, another thing I learned is that I’m glad we spaced out the webinar times and had multiple times. I normally keep them on the same day but it was nice to have space to make changes. The third lesson I learned is that having a supportive team makes a world of difference. Maggie was someone to talk to and was key. Talking with Michael and my friend Rebecca also helped so much. 

Fourth, I learned to prepare ahead of time – in case your energy or motivation is low. I almost wish I’d prepped more for Instagram stories ahead of time. We did prepare A LOT – emails, posts, and such – so lots had already been done. But as I was feeling low, defeated, and sick, it would have been nice to have more content ready. Next, I learned that I want to explore the idea of paid beta testing. I’ve always offered it for free (they provide feedback in exchange) but I think the paid option may help validate more of the need for the course. The last lesson I learned is to release the pressure of a launch. It’s hard because you’ve put so much time and energy into it, but when you build up that pressure, the end result can feel very defeating. 

As a Christian believer, I want to trust that God is going to put my course in the hands of the people who need it, even if it means I don’t reach my big goals. I think ultimately releasing myself of some of that pressure will make the next launch even better! So, I hope that you found this episode helpful if you’ve had a “failure” in your own business or struggled with the way something went. Feel free to reach out – I want to talk with you and hear your stories! I’m cheering for you! 

Other Instagram Resources 

Learn inside the course ALL of my strategies for seeing real growth on the platform, including gaining loyal followers, monetizing your Instagram, increasing engagement, posting consistently, creating content with ease, and more! Join us at http://stephaniekase.com/instagramgrowth . After launch week, use code PODCAST for 15% off your purchase! 

I also offer a free one-hour Instagram Reels class if you want more help with how to grow your reach, followers, and customers with Reels in 2 hours a month! You can sign up for that HERE. And, if you have questions or want some extra support, I’ve got a FREE Reels Growth Facebook Community that you can join. I absolutely love getting to chat with everyone and help them work through their questions about Reels!

Wondering what to make for your next Reel? Free quiz to find out what type of reel idea you should make next! 

Discover what your next step should be to gain your next 1,000 followers!

Need ideas for Instagram? Grab our free sample Instagram posting schedule here!