This is 2022 all over again.

In October 2023, I sat down to write the very first launch email for the new course I had just completed called The Creator MBA. It was the biggest, longest, and most ambitious course project I had ever taken on, and now it was time to get the marketing in order.

I remember staring at the blank Google Doc for about ten minutes before I finally started typing. I wrote about why I decided to build the course, what it would help people do, and how it would impact their life and business. When I read it back, it felt...generic. I mean, really generic. Like it could work for anyone, which meant it probably worked for no one.

So I rewrote it a few times, trying to make it broader so it would speak to more people. I added language about "starting" your business and "building" your foundation. But every time I tried to make it better, it just got more watered down.

That's when I felt it in my chest: This is 2022 all over again.

The launch that broke my confidence

Almost two years earlier, I'd launched another course called The Content Operating System. I thought it was going to do $200K, maybe $250K. I'd spent months building it, I had a big email list, and the content was really solid. I felt good about it.

The launch did around $55K. Not terrible, but nowhere close to what I'd expected.

Honestly? I kind of winged the marketing and launch. I hadn't put in the love and care I normally would for something that important. I just threw together some emails and hit send. After that launch closed, my confidence was destroyed. I kept thinking: maybe people don't want to learn from me anymore. Maybe I don't know what I'm doing. Maybe this whole thing was a fluke.

That feeling hung over me like a dark cloud for two years. Through the entire nine months I spent building the Creator MBA (probably over a thousand hours of work), I kept thinking about that $55K launch. Now, three months before the biggest launch of my life, I was watching myself make the exact same mistake.

The problem I couldn't write my way out of

That first email was nearly impossible to get right because I realized there was a problem I couldn't solve. My ideal customers fell into several different categories. I had people still in corporate jobs who needed to hear about taking the first step, people running side businesses who needed to hear about going full-time, and people already full-time who needed to hear about systems.

The word "start" didn't work for two-thirds of them because they'd already started a business. But if I didn't use "start," I'd lose the people who hadn't begun yet. No matter how I tried to write it, the language couldn't speak to all of them. The more I tried to make it work for everyone, the more generic and useless it became.

I couldn't write my way out of this. I needed a different approach.

The call that saved the launch

Feeling stuck, I decided to call my friend Brennan Dunn. He built a tool called RightMessage, that personalizes email and website content based on what you know about your audience. I'd seen him talk about segmentation before, but I'd always thought it was too complicated for me.

I told him I was about to screw up the launch.

"Stop trying to use one message,” he told me.

“You need to segment your list, and I can help you."

So we spent the next three months doing exactly that. We set up a simple survey that new email subscribers filled out when they signed up for my newsletter.

Then, the Right Message tool did most of the heavy lifting. It automatically tagged people based on their survey responses and changed parts of each launch email based on their answers. But I was still worried that the whole process would break.

Two weeks before launch, Brennan and I were on a Zoom call until midnight, sending test emails back and forth. We were making sure the personalization was working and people were getting the right messages. We tested and tested, but I kept thinking what if this breaks? What if the emails show up wrong? What if I mess this up and waste my one shot to get this right?

When I finally hit send on the first email, I wasn't confident. I was terrified.

What actually changed

The biggest conversion rate improvement cam from how I spoke to people who were already running a side business and wanted to go full-time. In my generic email drafts, I'd been talking about "starting your business" and "building your foundation," but these people had already started and they had a foundation.

I called this persona The Struggling Side Hustler.

So I changed the message entirely. Instead of "Here's how to start," they got: "You're looking for the safety of knowing you can go full-time. To do that, you need predictable cash flow and the certainty your business will be around next month." Same course, same price. But now I was speaking to where they actually were instead of where I assumed they were.

I crafted similar language for my other segments, too. People who were still in corporate jobs heard about taking the first step and building confidence without quitting tomorrow. And people who were already full-time solopreneurs heard about systems and buying back their time.

About 5% to 10% of each email was personalized based on segment. And the rest of the language was all the same.

But that 5% to 10% changed everything.

What happened when I hit send

The first day of The Creator MBA launch was incredible. Sales were spiking, and I thought: holy shit, this is actually working.

Then everything got kind of quiet. For three days, sales trickled in. And I was convinced I'd messed it up. That I'd overcomplicated things. That I should have just sent the generic emails and hoped for the best.

I called Brennan in a panic. He told me this was normal. There's always a spike at the beginning, a lull in the middle, and then a massive spike in the final 24 hours. The last day of a launch is always the biggest, he told me.

And guess what.

It turned out just like he said it would. The last day was absolute chaos. The final hour alone did more revenue than some of my previous entire launches.

When it closed, the launch had done $1.6M at early-bird discounted pricing.

The personalization delivered a 38% lift compared to my previous approach. That's $650K in additional revenue just from speaking to people based on where they actually were in their business journey.

I didn't get more traffic or have a bigger list. I just stopped trying to talk to everyone the same way.

The bottom line

Your audience isn't one person with one problem.

I almost repeated my 2022 launch mistake because I thought I could write one message that would resonate with everyone. But I couldn't. And neither can you.

There were several other variables that took The Creator MBA launch from good to $1.6M. The specific survey questions, the email structure, how to personalize without breaking everything. (I can't fit all of that here without this turning into a 3,000-word technical manual.)

So I'm doing something I've never done before: a live breakdown of the entire strategy with Brennan Dunn on Thursday, November 13th at 11am EST. The segmentation framework. The specific questions that identify each segment. All of the other elements that contributed to the results.

It's free, but I'm only doing it once. Register here.

Can't make it live? Register anyway, and we'll send you the replay.

That's all for this week.

See you next Saturday.

P.S. The difference between my $55K launch and my $1.6M launch wasn't the quality of the course or the size of my audience. It was finally accepting that I couldn't use one message for everyone. If you're launching anything (a course, a service, a consultancy, a coaching business), this workshop will change how you think about your audience.