How to Know You're Ready to Launch Your Next Big Thing
Emylee here. It seems that at any given moment a creative can have two to one bajillion products “on hold” for launching. They sit in real or metaphorical corners waiting to pass go and be launched into the real world. We keep them there for various reasons. Maybe “the market isn’t ready” or you “don’t know what to charge” or “you haven’t settled on a name for the collection” or whatever excuse sounds good that day.
It seems like we’re all waiting for something to push us over the edge and actually launch the damn thing. Why are we waiting? What’s the hold up and how can we get past it?
First, let’s address the mythical ding.
There’s this thing that we call the mythical ding that we’re all waiting for. Some of us give so much power to this ding that it prevents us from launching our business, our blog or our latest creation for fear that we’re not ready. We convince ourselves that once it’s “ready”, we’ll know. That something will just shift in the air and we’ll know that it’s okay to launch the thing.
The ding doesn’t exist.
The ding is made up of excuses that we use to hold ourselves back out of fear. Period.
You can’t know until you try.
Yes, yes, you can sit there and roll your eyes at us for making a total “mom” comment, but it’s true. You cannot know if your latest idea is going to work until you actually get it out there. But guess where it works the least? Guess where it will make you absolutely zero dollars? In the shadows.
We like to say “good is good enough”. We heard that phrase from our friend Nikki Elledge Brown and we clung onto that hard. We keep saying it to ourselves every time we put something new out into the world. Whether it’s a blog post, a webinar, a new program our even our brand new YouTube channel!
Good is good enough.
There is no guarantee.
We tell ourselves that we’re waiting to launch until we know that the launch will go well. Until we have enough people on our list or a big enough social media following or enough blog posts written. We think that by having all those things that our launch will go splendidly and we’ll make 6-figures.
Those numbers don’t guarantee anything.
We’ve had fantastic and meh launches both with small audiences and big audiences. We’ve had launches that statistically should’ve gone a certain way (both high and low) but they flipped up on us. That’s okay.
We learn something new every time.
If you give yourself permission to fail and to succeed you’ll win every time.
So, since we know you’re just waiting for us to give you permission to launch here is a list of how to know you’re ready to launch your next big thing:
You have an idea for something great (but haven’t made it yet)
You’ve created something you want to share
You have 17 blog posts in queue
You have 1 blog post in queue
You’ve asked your audience what they want from you
You want to try something new
You want to add on a new service that you’ve done a thousand times now
You want to add on a new service that you’ve kind of sort of done (once)
You have half of something new made
You picked a price, but you might want to change it later
You haven’t fully worked out all the details on your new thing yet
You heard from Think Creative Collective that you should just launch the damn thing
Notice a trend? Notice that it doesn’t matter where you are in the creation journey, and that you should just launch it? You will learn so much just by getting it out there so your next launch(es) will be bomb diggity.
No one is sitting out there tallying up everything you “should’ve” done in your launch. No one is counting your mistakes. No one is saying you should’ve waited. Oh, wait. Yes there is someone.
It’s you.
So stop it.
Put your thing out into the world. Make waves with it (or ripples). Just do it.
If you’re all like “okay, I’m ready to launch, but….how?” We’re here for ya. We’ve got a handy dandy launch checklist waiting for you right here. You’re going to figure out how to generate some hefty buzz so you can freaking launch baby!
