How to make $100,000 in a day

Not too shabby for a week of vacation

Those are the daily sales during the launch of my Advanced Personal Finance course. That’s $482,851 in five days. And almost half of it in one day alone.

(BTW, I made an additional $69,660 in that launch — beyond the $482,851 you see above — thanks to some advanced launch amplifiers that we’ve discovered. If you’re curious, I’ll tell you more about those.)

I’ve been doing launches for I Will Teach You To Be Rich and GrowthLab for about a decade now. It took some trial and error. But my team and I have gotten to a point where big money like that is kind of routine.

That’s not to say that there’s not the occasional flop or disappointment. There absolutely is.

But for the most part, we know: If we do what we know how to do, and we do it well — then by the end of a launch week, we’ll be looking at data that looks like this:

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Table of Contents

Daily sales for a recent Earn1K launch

Not a bad week for a 10-year-old course

That’s $134,841 in one day last year from pitching Earn1K, a course I created in 2009 and have already launched over 15 times in the past decade. (When I say our courses are thoroughly tested and built to last, I mean it.)

By comparison, last year, the median household income in the U.S. was $61,372.

Or take one of my recent launches: The product was called Double Engine Growth. It is an advanced strategy course for CEOs of online businesses:

Daily sales for Double Engine Growth launch

Daily sales for a very advanced product I launched last year

By definition, this was a super-niche product — one that only applied to a tiny fraction of my audience. In fact, the course cost $6,000 and I actively told people NOT to buy it if their business wasn’t already making 6 figures.

Even with all of those handicaps, we STILL cleared $160,530 in one day.

Let’s put that in perspective:

  • To make $160,530 … you could work as a Director of Marketing … in NYC … for an entire year
  • Or you could save $10,000/year … invested at 8% … for 11 years!

By the way, it’s not just me. We’ve taught our students — people like you — how to run launches with life-changing results.

Like Ben Dziwulski. Ben just recently ran a $50K launch for his business, WODprep, and he’s planning more where that came from in 2019.

Or Bushra Azhar, who earned $130,000 from a single launch — in just the second year of running her business.

What would you do if you could earn $100,000 in a day? Or $50,000? Or even $10,000?

I know, I know. These kinds of stories seem crazy, foreign — even to the point of, “What’s the catch?”

That’s why I’m so insistent on taking you inside the numbers to show you how it actually works.

Because once you understand how it’s not magic — it’s just math — you start to realize what a single breakthrough launch can do for you.

For me, it meant being able to hit my savings goals years earlier.

It meant being able to move from SF to NYC — and be bi-coastal! — so when I came back to California, I always had my place to stay (and I could let my friends/family borrow it any time). Sadly, the one thing I could not get was good tacos in NYC.

Now, these launches mean I can invest more in my business and health and the things I love. And after teaching so many people how to run launches, I know they can have a huge impact on your Rich Life.

So the question is not “CAN breakthrough launches happen?”

It’s “How can I run a breakthrough launch in MY business?”  

That’s what we’re going to talk about today.

You may have heard me say it before: It’s not magic. It’s math.

I’ll show you what I mean.

(BTW don’t think that, just because I’m talking about six- and seven-figure launches, I must not be talking to you. No matter where you’re at in your business, the lessons here apply to you.)

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The 3 major levers the drive launch revenue

There are 3 levers that affect launch performance:  

Lever #1: List Size
Lever #2: Product Price
Lever #3: Conversion Rate

When you put them all together, you get a formula that looks like this:

List Size X Price Point X Conversion Rate = Launch Revenue

To see how these levers work, let’s look at a few different launches. (By the way, I’m not pulling these launch numbers out of thin air: they’re all real numbers from launches run by GrowthLab students.)

A $5K Launch:

5,400 Subscribers X $47 Price Point X 2.7% Conversion Rate = $6,852 in Launch Revenue

This is a solid 4-figure launch. We’ve got a healthy List Size, and a Price Point that quality customers won’t blink an eye at. But the real star of the show here is that Conversion Rate. That tells us two things:

  1. That we have a high-quality list of engaged readers who are interested in what we have to say
  2. That we’ve designed a launch that does the work it needs to do to communicate value and get our readers to take action

A $15K Launch:

7,361 Subscribers X $297 Price Point X 0.7% Conversion Rate= $15,303in Launch Revenue

Our Conversion Rate has dropped a little now, but that’s okay — it’s normal for conversion rates to go down as your price point and subscriber count go up, which ours have here. (Although List Size, not by that much.) The lever we’re really pulling on here, though, is Price Point. We’re moving up the value chain, providing more value with our product, and asking for more value in return.

Now let’s push the numbers up a bit:

A $50K Launch

57,000 Subscribers X $125 Price Point X 0.7% Conversion Rate =$49,875in Launch Revenue

Here we have an example of what happens when your List Size starts to get up there: you can have a sub-1% Conversion Rate and a slightly lower Price Point and STILL clear $50K in revenue — because every subscriber represents another bite at the apple.  

Let’s pause here for a moment and think about what this means.

With $50K, you could take 2 months off and travel to 5-star hotels across Asia.

You could pay off the U.S. average student loan debt of $25K — TWICE.

But it gets even better.

Now let’s jump up to 6-figures. What would a $225K launch look like?

A $225K Launch

150,000 Subscribers X $300 Price Point X 0.5% Conversion Rate =$225,000in Launch Revenue

In fact, those numbers are very close to the results of one of my favorite recent launches: a $223,670 launch for our Delegate and Done course.

Delegate and Done shows 6-figure business owners how to work with a virtual assistant. With a super-niche course like that, you’d expect Conversion Rate to plummet, but we managed to keep ours at 0.5% (without any gimmicks or sleazy sales tricks, either). Combined with a lower Price Point and a nice List Size, we enjoyed a $223K week.

What happens when we pass 7-figures?

Let’s look at a $5MM launch:

A $5MM Launch

238,069 Subscribers X $2,367 Price Point X 0.98% Conversion Rate = $5,522,391 in Launch Revenue

I’ve told you about this launch before: the very first release of Zero to Launch, when I made more than $5MM in revenue in one week — $2,000,000+ of that on the last day of the launch alone.

What I remember most about this launch is that we were actually playing at an entirely new level. If we had minor problems, we could pay the problem away. As someone once said, “If you have a problem that money can solve, you don’t really have a problem.”

With a 7-figure launch, everything has to work in concert. You can see that in our Zero to Launch results:

  • We had a nice, big List Size that gave me plenty of opportunities to turn subscribers into buyers;
  • We had a Price Point that conveyed the value of what we were offering; and, last, but definitely not least
  • We had a Conversion Rate that showed us that all the work we had put into the launch — designing and writing the email funnel and sales page, making sure every word was in place and every sentence hit the exact emotional note that we wanted it to hit — all of that work had paid off. And it felt AMAZING.

Whether you’re building your 1st or 101st launch, these three levers will be critical drivers of your results.

And if you want to improve the performance of your launches, there are three things you can do:

  1. Increase your list size
  2. Raise your product price
  3. Boost your conversion rate

It is possible to make money quickly, and it’s not a catch. Here’s how:

But there’s a catch: How to understand these launch levers

Some of them are easier to move than others.

Take List Size. You should always be trying to grow your list, of course. But today, right now, your list size is what it is, and there’s not a whole lot you can do to change that.

Besides, list size isn’t destiny the way a lot of people think it is. (Tomorrow, I’ll share some stories of entrepreneurs who have run successful 4- or even 5-figure launches with subscriber counts of 500 or fewer, and you’ll see what I mean.)

Price Point is also hard to change. You may be able to raise the price of your product a little — assuming that it’s an amazing product and you’ve been undercharging for it in the past. But every product has a price ceiling.

And building a brand new product from the ground up takes a ton of time and effort — and there’s no guarantee it will be a success.

That leaves Conversion Rate.This one is my favorite because it’s the lever that you can control RIGHT NOW.

You can’t fill your email list with high-quality, highly motivated subscribers overnight.

You can’t wave a magic wand and turn your $99 product into a $999 product.

But you can ABSOLUTELY sit down and write a thoughtful, well-designed email funnel that clearly communicates the value of your product. You can ABSOLUTELY design a launch that grabs your list’s attention and pushes them to take action — and drives that Conversion Rate straight through the roof.

That’s the thing that I’m proudest of when I think about that $5MM first launch of Zero to Launch.

We designed an effective funnel that is STILL earning us revenue today.

Note I said effective. Not how great the writing was, or how long it was, or how “perfect” — in fact, the most effective copy often isn’t perfect. Effective copy HOOKS your reader’s attention, keeps them INTERESTED through your launch, and drives them to take ACTION by buying your product.

With the Zero to Launch funnel, we had an amazing launch. I’m not afraid to say that, because I know they’re that good. The reason they’re good is because we spent a ton of time getting them right, and we had refined and tested how we did that over multiple years and multiple launches.

(But what if you’re not a good writer? That’s OK. You don’t have to become a professional wordsmith to learn how to craft highly effective copy. In fact, some of the most effective copywriters in the world aren’t great “writers” in the traditional sense. I’ll show you how we do this on Wednesday.)

Building a great launch is a major lever for driving serious revenue for your business. One you have a lot of immediate control over. And once you know how to run a great launch, you can do it again. And again. And again.

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