🪄The day I hit "publish" on my first launch


Hey Reader,

Sweating.

That's how I remember feeling the first time I ever launched something.

My twins were 2.5 months old. I was barely sleeping. But I'd been working on this ebook since before they were born, and I had this overwhelming urge to launch it.

I needed to get it out of my head and into the world. And I knew if I didn't, I'd try to perfect it forever, and I no longer had the luxury of time on my side.

So, I wrapped my Google doc in a shitty Canva template and hit publish on this Tweet:

I hadn't done much pre-launch buildup, which is a big no-no. However, I had something else on my side that let me get away with that...

I'd built up my audience's Trust Battery, as Jay Clouse likes to say. Here's a snippet from his article on this concept (I'll link it below so you can read it in full).

By the time I launched the Book of Hooks, I'd been posting on Twitter and LinkedIn almost daily for a year.

365ish days of giving away value and expecting nothing in return.

So when I finally asked people for something? They jumped at the opportunity to "pay me back" if you will.

But let's be clear: I wasn't making a random ask.

I'd built up tons of authority on this topic. Like when I wrote about clickbait vs. valuable hooks five months earlier:

But even though I didn't prime my audience about my Book coming, you better believe I kept the momentum going once it was live.

Here I am running the "Early Responses (Share Initial Social Proof)" play from our Launch Content Playbook.

By the time I was ready to release V2 a few months later, I had a much better understanding of how to write launch content.

Here's the first time I primed my audience for "Something's Coming," a critical pre-launch play.

It worked.

I made $14,849 in 5 months. I still had a day job, so this side hustle money felt excellent.

Since then, I've launched 8 or so more times.

I wish I had screenshots of all those launches in one place, but I've switched tech and stuff too often.

So here's what my past year has looked like:

The spikes are launches. I'm hoping that one on the far right surpasses the one on the far left in the next few days...we'll see 👀

I owe all this to a strong launch strategy and resonant launch content.

I rarely hard sell. I like to think of it as inviting people to invest in a solution to their problems. That makes me feel way less icky about selling, and makes writing emails like this fun, instead of a chore.

With that said, I'd love to invite you to grab The Launch Content Playbook before the price goes up on Thursday at midnight PST.

257 people have picked it up so far. The first spike is the presale, and the second is the launch sale we're running right now.

(Gosh, this is so meta lol.)

My favorite piece of feedback so far is, "What is this witchery." So perfectly timed with Halloween month.

>>> Grab The Launch Content Playbook now <<<

Cheers,

Erica

PS. Here's that Jay Clouse article about Trust Batteries if that topic piqued your interest.

​

Cut the Fluff

Learn to edit words like a pro. I've edited 3M+ words and each week, I share a lesson to teach you what to cut, how to add value, and how to finally feel confident when editing. Every subscriber gets access to my Editing Library, a database of 62 edits broken down by the problem, my take on how to improve it, and my edited version.

Read more from Cut the Fluff

Hey Reader, I record all my calls. Client calls, sales calls, coaching calls, random catch-ups with other solos. Everything. Why? Because the best content comes from real conversations. Not from sitting at your computer trying to reverse-engineer wisdom. And what I say when I'm not trying to say anything is always better than trying to force expertise all over the place. When you force it, we can feel it When you try to manufacture an insight or force an idea, it comes across as blahhhhhh. We...

Hey Reader, Sorry to email you twice in one day, but I've gone down an AI analysis hole and this is too cool not to share. My hypothesis: I shift my strategy based on what I see/feel working NOW, now what used to work.My process: This morning, I was like why don't I export all my LinkedIn posts, pop them into Claude, and run a massive analysis. (Had a no-call day. Figured what the hell.) Then I had Claude write me a full report of my activity. IT'S SO COOL. (I'll drop the full report in the...

Hey Reader, I'm slightly obsessed with my friend Jen Allen Knuth's content. Jen posts almost daily on LinkedIn, and every single time I see her name in my feed, I stop scrolling. Not just because she's an awesome human (HI JEN IF YOU'RE READING), but because her hooks are absolutely magnetic. So I decided to analyze a bunch of her recent hooks to figure out what makes them work so damn well. Also, this feels like a good way to show you the hook principles from our course in action with real...