How I Made $500K in 4 Days (The Real Story)

  Sam Vander Wielen: All right. I have to be honest, having my biggest launch ever was definitely not on my 2026 Bingo card, especially since I’ve already declared that 2026 is my entrepreneur gap year. And if you wanna read more about what I mean when I say that, you can click the link in the show notes for the Substack post that I wrote about that.

But I really didn’t see it coming when a few weeks ago, I sold over $500,000 in revenue of the Ultimate Bundle® in under four days. Honestly, for days afterwards, I just kind of walked around in a little bit of shock. I mean, for one, because I just ran a $68,000 launch, uh, less than three months ago.

And at the same time, everybody in online business is all like, courses are dead, launches are dead, webinars are dead. Like memberships are dead. Apparently everything is dead. And I think I would either be ,an egomaniac or just crazy to not think that that would also affect me. Like if some of the biggest names in the online business industry are seeing that, then why would I be immune? You know? That’s the way I think of it.

And I’d also be lying if I didn’t tell you that, you know, having a lot of success in online business, like I still have these moments, these moments of doubt where I’m like, yeah, it’s been good, but what if it all stops working? What if everybody is right? What if this is some sort of like freight train that’s coming up behind me and I don’t even know it, and I’m just over here thinking everything’s fine and it’s just, I don’t know, like there’s a lag time, right?

So it’s a little confusing for me because it’s like if everything’s dead, apparently as they say online. Then why are my launches getting bigger every single time? Why is my business so profitable? Why is my business keep churning out six figures in revenue in an evergreen funnel every month between these launches?

So I have some good news for you and I have some bad news for you. I’ll get the good news out first, which is that I am an open book and I am happy to sit here and share with you a lot of the things that I did in this launch. Um, I’ll share the stats with you In this episode. I’ll talk about some of the trends and changes that I’m seeing in the online business industry, in launches, webinars, sales, all that kind of stuff that I think contributed, um, a bit to the success of this launch.

I’ll save the bad news for you for the end. It’s really not that bad, but we have to have an honest conversation about what it honestly takes to run launches like this and maybe why it’s not as simple as you just copying and pasting some sort of formula that I have or that you think that I have.

I want to welcome you back or welcome you if you’re new here to On Your Terms®. This is a podcast for online business owners who want to be as present in their lives as profitable in their businesses.

Because if you get to know me, I am hopefully both. That is my goal. Yes, I want my business to run like a very well-oiled machine, which it does. But that is then what allows me to go and be so present in my life and even honestly present in my business to be more creative with what I do, to take more of my time to do things right, to do things at such a high quality.

Um, I hope that’s my goal at least. And so I’m only able to do that because the business is so profitable. So for me, these really go hand in hand. And these go hand in hand when it comes to launches. ’cause if you can do really good launches, it gives you a lot of wiggle room in your business.

Now, part of today’s episode is not only inspired by the fact that everybody was asking me like, how the heck did you just do this?

How did you have a $500,000 launch in four days? But it also came out because so many people started reaching out to me on Instagram and asking me like, well, what’d you do about this? And what about your ads? And how many emails did you send? And asked so many good questions that I asked everybody like, Hey, you have any questions for me about this launch or business in general?

You wanna talk email list, you wanna talk about building an audience? Drop them here. So I actually went ahead and created something brand new for you that I’m very excited about. I created a Video Ask feature. You can click the link down in the show notes. You can submit a video to me, a voice note, or even just a simple text if you want asking me whatever questions you want me to answer here on the podcast or in my weekly newsletter, Sam’s Sidebar, which if you don’t get that already, make sure you sign up for it in the show notes down below, but this really is going to be the best way moving forward.

If there’s something that you wish that I would talk about here, or something you’d love for me to do a deeper dive into, maybe on my newsletter, go ahead and send me that video. Send me a quick voice note, whatever you want, using the link down in the show notes. Submit it to me and then hopefully you will see it featured on a future episode or issue.

Now I should just mention like really quick off the jump that I don’t obviously sell anything related to business coaching or like anything like that. My dms over the weekend were blowing up with people being like, would you be my business coach or do you offer anything about this? Have you ever considered selling something?

And I’m like, no. That’s why I have such a chill business because like I keep it, I keep it tight and I keep it simple. I am, I’m staying in my lane for now, but I have written a book, which hopefully you know about already, but I’ve written a book called When I Start My Business I’ll Be Happy. It just came out last year and my book is not about anything related to legal.

My book is literally a step-by-step plan on how to market your business. How to build an audience online. How to build an email list full of buyers and even how to create your first $1 million digital product. I have an entire like step-by-step playbook in the book about how to build out that product on your own.

So if ever in the past you’ve wished I could be your business coach, or after listening to this episode, you’re like, wait, I wanna learn more about how she did this. That is what my book is. So go grab my book When I Start My Business, I’ll Be Happy anywhere books are sold or I’ll drop the link down below of where you can shop for it.

I have to be honest with you. On the one hand I sort of hate it when people talk about huge launches and then don’t tell you how they happened. And if you’re anything like me, when I started my business when I was earlier on, I would hear people share like these big fancy numbers and then I would be like, oh yeah, well how much did you spend on ads?

Or like, I bet that like that wasn’t very profitable ’cause you had to spend so much to make so much. And that was always sort of the going like attitude behind the scenes when the big wigs would share their numbers. So. I’m not sure what you’re gonna think after I share these, but I’m very curious how you’ll feel about it.

I want to break it down for you as honestly as possible. I also think that there’s a lot behind these stats that is like, that’s of invisible essentially. Like you’re not seeing the 10 years of work that’s been put in up until this point. You’re not seeing the five years I spent as an attorney, the three years I spent in law school, the however many months studying for the bar, right?

The six months I waited for the bar exam. So there’s a lot that comes up before this that in my, in my opinion, is like a lot of culmination as to these results. I wish it was as easy as I think what some people think and like I, I think this is maybe where people are coming from when they ask me like, Hey, can you create a course on this?

Like, what’s behind that question for me is this idea that I could put into a course like a nice, neat five step process that you could take to just be like, do this, set up this, say this, this way, and then like, bam, here’s the results. Right? But this is like not an easy bake oven. I wish it was a business easy bake oven, but it is not. Right?

So I want you to take this mindset and this attitude into listening to me for the rest of this episode. What you are not here to do is just be like, okay, Sam did it like this. Sam did it that way. So my goal now is just to like replicate that, like one plus one equals two and that’s it.

It’s really to pay attention to maybe my thought process behind it or to even listening to how I did it, to essentially translate it into like, well, how would that work for me? What would speak to my people? What would speak to my audience? How does this translate to my product? I also wanna caution you against any mindset, stories, mindset, drama that might come up as you listen to this.

Now, look, I am not throwing stones because not only do I still do this, but when I started I would’ve listened to this and been like, yeah, but yeah, but yeah, but she can do that because she can do this, because I can’t do that because, right? I get it. ’cause I, like I said, still do it. Did it for a long time.

However, also something that I work on really hard to not do, right? Or at least to call myself out on it when I do. And I want you to pay attention to where in this episode you hear something and you’re like, that’s not for me, because I can’t do that. Because she can only do that because, right? And then just ask yourself like, is that true?

Is it a fact? Is it something I could take a picture of? Do we have proof, do we have evidence? Or is this something that we are making maybe a bit more of a story out of than we think? I’ve already heard it many, many times in the last couple of days about how you can’t sell this thing because you, you know, you don’t sell this kind of thing like I do.

And I’m like, I feel like I could sell more of what you sell than what I sell. So we all have our stories around this.

Okay, now enough yapping. I promised you some stats, so let’s talk about the webinar stats. First, I hosted only one live webinar. It was on Monday, February 9th. I learned at least a year, maybe a year and a half ago, that I could no longer do three or two live webinars on our sale week, our promo week.

I used to do three. I don’t know if it’s old age or what, what’s happening. It’s just, it is a lot of energy. I don’t think people quite appreciate or understand, like if you do it right, uh, it is a lot of like high energy, high output. And I stay on my webinar usually like an hour past when it’s even supposed to be cut off just to continue answering people’s questions, to hang in the chat.

And like I, I was on there for hours this time, so it’s a lot. Um, but I, I honestly, when I went from three webinars to one webinar, I was like, oh, I’m gonna see such a huge decrease. I’m sure I actually saw an increase. I think it actually really helped to have one webinar where you just kind of say, this is the time.

Hopefully you can make time for it. Like I understand everybody’s busy. That’s what the replay is for. Like having all of these split times, it just led to a lot of confusion. So personally, I’m an advocate now for like cutting down, just having the one live webinar time and then really push hard on the replay, which I did and I can talk about later now.

We had 11,000 people register for this webinar, which I can’t believe, and 25% of them showed up live. So much so that we kind of broke Zoom and we had to push people over to YouTube live.

In case people don’t know, uh, this, this has never been a problem for me in the past. This is the first time there’s a setting on Zoom where you can say that if there’s overflow, like past the cap of the number of attendees. So like even if you only have a hundred attendees right now, you can push the overflow into a YouTube live.

Which actually we were kind of worried about as a team, like how that was all gonna go and the chat and everything and everything was great. So it all, it all worked out fine. The huge bonus is that then I also have the video on YouTube that now I can turn into an evergreen video.

Now, in terms of conversion percentages, like sales, actually on the webinar we sold to over 5% of the people on the webinar, which you have to remember that the industry standard is one to 2%. One to 2% is the natural conversion rate in the online business industry, which I think that it, I just, I wish like when you became an online business owner I wish you got like a set of paperwork that someone would pass to you and, and they would tell you like, Hey, this is normal. Like this is what’s normal. And they would tell you that one to 2% is the conversion rate.

Because when people say to me like, oh, I wanna have a hundred thousand dollars in sales in this thing, and you’re like, okay, how much does your product cost? How many people do you have on your email list? Like if that’s where you’re selling it, I mean, do the math. If it’s only one to 2% of those people are converting , either your product has to be very expensive or you have to have a ton of people on the list. Right? So it’s just really helpful for setting, I think, more realistic goals so that you don’t beat yourself up and think there’s something wrong with you when in fact, it’s very normal in the industry to have a one to 2% conversion.

So you can imagine my surprise when we had a 5% conversion on the webinar itself is crazy. That’s crazy. Crazy high.

Now while we’re still talking about the webinar, let’s talk about why I think I got so many people to sign up and show up and buy. In terms of why I think I got so many people to sign up. Well, for one, we actually got about half and half of a split between signups, between our email list and then signups and like my own organic kind of social network.

So Instagram and wherever else I’m here on the podcast where I was talking about it, my website, and ads. So it was flipped between me and ads. Also, sometimes things like get attributed to ads. I mean, this is getting like really into the weeds on the backend, but, you have to remember too, that sometimes things get attributed to ads.

Even though like this person was on my email list, but then they saw my ad, they click the ad and they sign up for it. . It will be attributed to them being a grab through ads. But really, I’ve been nurturing them on my email list for three years now. I don’t see it that way except I get a little defensive when people are just like, oh, everything you do must be successful.

’cause you have ads. And it’s like ads help a lot. They are not the end of the story and they’re not even the start of the story. So like it really takes much more of this holistic perspective of like, maybe I pull somebody in, I’m nurturing them on my list, then my ads are really good. Or it’s like my ads are good and it pulls somebody in outside of a promo and then they don’t buy that time.

But I keep nurturing them on my email list every week through Sam’s sidebar for years. Right? So to me it’s kind of like an infinity symbol and like the stuff just all works together.

I was talking with my friend Tim Grl about this the other day, and I guess it’s just one of those things that I didn’t realize that this was like, uh, an interesting way that I think about this. But I was telling Tim that I think about my meta ads, so these are ads that run on Facebook, Instagram, you know, all the meta platforms.

That I think about that as like a separate social channel essentially. That’s the way that I think of it. So to me it’s like I take it just as seriously to produce content for that quote unquote social channel as I would to create something for Instagram. I also am very open to experimentation and one of the things that has worked really well for us from a both an ads and a social perspective is that I’m very open to testing something out organically on Instagram.

So I will create a reel, for example, that will invite people to sign up for the webinar. And if that thing takes off, I then tell my ads manager, Hey, please turn this into an ad. We’ve also done it when we’re more like mid promo, where I will turn something, uh, like so let’s say a piece of organic content takes off.

Like I had a TikTok reel well. It’s a reel on Instagram about TikTok terms that took off during the promo and I. I slacked my Facebook ads manager and I asked her like, Hey, can we do something with this? And she said, let’s just boost it. And she boosted it and controlled that, which was fantastic ’cause she’s an expert.

And then that reel took off even more and led to a lot of signups for the webinar.

Now 25% of the people showed up live. And don’t forget, thousands of people watched the replay, but you always wanna get as many people as possible to come live if you can. That’s great. , And I have worked tirelessly to improve this number because my number used to be abysmal. For one, it was lower when I had multiple webinars.

And two, even when I first went to one webinar, it still was really low and I was so confused. I’m like, everybody’s signing up for this. Why am I not getting them to actually show up. For one, I really focused my language in the show up. You know, all the show up, like, uh, emails that they get and show up content that they get really talking about, showing up.

It sounds stupid, but I think in the past they were more like confirmation emails. Like, this is a reminder that you signed up for this webinar. And we also in our show up emails used to focus on the problem, the pain point, and like reminding them why from a content perspective that they had signed up for this thing, but we didn’t literally talk about showing up. And so we have changed that a lot. A lot of my show up emails we’ll talk about like, Hey Michelle, I know that you signed up for this thing. , Like this is why it was so important to you. It’s really important that you like, take this one hour to yourself to do, to like make this happen. And then I started looping in little layers of commitment.

So when I would write those types of emails, it would say like, can I get you to respond? Will you like hit reply? Say, heck yes. Like you’re committed to yourself. Not necessarily asking them, Hey Michelle, will you be there? Right? I do that sometimes it’s actually turning it to be about them.

So are you going to give yourself this one hour to figure out how to start your online business the right way? And then I’ll be like, hit reply and say Yes, I want you to commit to me that February is the month that you spend getting your business legally protected, that you’re committed to getting your business legally protected. And we’ll do this to like get them, first of all, to reply, which is just good for like a million different reasons.

So it’s really good. But also I do this because there is like, I think maybe a little bit of a mental flip where you’re now getting people to commit to it. This is something bigger than just a one hour free live webinar.

Now, as for why I got so many people to buy on the webinar itself, I have a million ideas. Now, I’ll be honest with you, I’ve heard from a couple people that I am decent at giving live webinars. This is what people say. I’m not saying it, they’re saying it. That feels very Donald Trumpian of me, but that is true. And, and so that, that is what people have told me.

I’m, I’m laughing because I just. As I am not the kind of person that wants to say something like that, but I, I feel like it would be disingenuous to act like you could just show up to your first webinar, like straight out of the box and just give this thing, and like, not have to have done the tons of webinars that I’ve done already to learn, to get more confident, to see like, oh, when I say this, everybody responds.

Oh, when I said it this way, I got crickets. Like, I have already done that. I’ve done webinars where no one showed up. I’ve done webinars where only 60 people signed up, which was, I thought a ton at the time. And it is, it is a ton. Imagine giving a talk to 60 people. That’s terrifying. So I’ve done that, right?

But I would be remiss to mention the fact that like, my webinar itself is good. The slides are good. I know how to deliver it. At this point, I’m, I’m getting better and better every time of like knowing like, oh, this works, this doesn’t work. So there is something to that and the only way for you to do that is to practice is to keep going.

You have to have the webinars that go to three people. You have to give a webinar to 60 people. You have to give a webinar where two people buy, right? So you have to give those in order to get to these.

Now there’s that part of just kind of getting good and I think there’s just a certain like structure to the webinar, certain pain points, emotional things I hit testimonials. I’ve worked really hard to get much better, cleaner testimonials that perfectly match the pain point that I’m talking about. Or perfectly match the, uh, objection that I’m talking about.

I have combed through these, I’ve picked out handpicked very, very intentionally. There’s nothing I, I swear to you, there’s literally not a word on a slide or a picture or whatever on that webinar that was not very intentionally placed for some reason. Right? So there is like a very, uh, methodical way to do these.

And no, I have never taken any webinar classes and no, I’ve not taken anybody’s courses or been coached by anyone on how to do webinars. You can like skip that whole part. Everybody asked me afterwards like, oh, clearly so and so taught you. No, I’ve never done it. I’ve never even taken their webinars. So I don’t know. I’m telling you, this was done with practice, practice, practice over time.

The last thing I’ll mention about the on webinar high conversions is that I also beefed up the types of, bonuses that people got if they purchased on the webinar. So something I started doing recently. That seems to have really increased sales is sweetening the deal a little bit when people are able to purchase when they’re on the webinar.

I don’t love financially penalizing people because I’m not in the pressure business. So this is just a core value of mine, a business value of mine that like I, I respect the fact that people might be like, I need a couple hours, I need a couple days, whatever, to think about it.

One way that I combat that, by the way, is that I am very upfront in a lot of my emails, if you’ve signed up for my webinars before that, at the end of my webinar, I’m going to talk about the Ultimate Bundle®. I have links to it, I talk about it. I talk about what it might cost, some of the bonuses that are going to be available.

So there is a heads up, like I, I nurture that part of the sales process. I also ask for people’s consent at the beginning of the webinar, which which I think has led to a huge increase in sales is just asking people at the top like, Hey, is it cool if at the end of this free workshop or I’m gonna teach you X, Y, and Z?

So many things, I’m gonna talk about my paid program, and then, do you know what I do? This is really important. So you have to listen, if you were like doing a hundred things or tuning me out, come back. What I do at that point is I then also say to them, I only want you to purchase the Ultimate Bundle® if it’s the right fit for you and if it’s the right fit for me.

Like I don’t want people to purchase the Ultimate Bundle® who don’t need it. And I don’t want people to purchase only because they felt pressured to.

And I also only want people in it who genuinely need it, who are gonna get great use out of it. You know why? Because if they don’t, I’m gonna be dealing on the backend with, uh, annoying, you know, refund requests, which we don’t, we don’t give. ’cause it’s a digital product. And so you’re dealing with that.

You’re dealing, you would deal with an unhappy person and you know what happens with unhappy people? They tell other people that they didn’t like it and that this thing didn’t go well and yada yada. No. I want people in there who use it. And because when people use things and they complete things and they get some benefit or some transformational outcome out of it, which even in my case, can be starting a business.

They’re naturally going to tell other people about it. They’re literally going out and doing my work for me.

I can’t tell you how many dms and emails and all the things that we’ve gotten in the last week from people who have been like, I’ve been in the bundle for years and I just told my friend about it and she bought it during the sale. Or like my friends who announced it to their communities and they bought it.

And it’s so, word of mouth is so overlooked yet so important. And if we would focus on getting the right people to buy our stuff and making sure that our products are actually really good and actually work for people and provide what they say that they’re going to provide, we would, I, I think as marketers, our job has just made a lot easier. So I do think it helps that on the webinar I will say things like, if it’s right for you, if it’s right for me, right?

Like I also kind of have to accept it. I also want you to feel like it’s the right fit.

And you might be thinking like, you might wanna slap me. ’cause you’re like, well you can afford this but I can’t afford this. You can’t afford it either. If the people are bad clients, you can’t afford that. You can’t afford for it to go wrong. You also don’t have the time to waste on the wrong people ’cause you’re out here looking for the right people.

So we need you to have the time and the spaciousness, the mindset, right, of like not being annoyed and frustrated with the people you’re working with. That’s what we need for you.

Now, everything I just told you happened all in one day. But then over the course of the next four days, we sold over 230 bundles. Plus we had a lot of order bumps. That’s the stuff that people can add in at checkout.

And all in all, we ended up making about $500,000 in revenue for those four days. And I know what you might be thinking, you’re like, okay, but then how much did you spend in order to get this? So I basically only had three launch specific, , expenses. And I, I hope you’re sitting down. Um, the first one was that I spent a hundred dollars on Zoom because we had to upgrade our Zoom, uh, account in order to hold so many people.

I then spent $3,200 on my sales emails, my launch emails from my copywriter. So I write all of the copy in the business that you see from the weekly newsletters to like literally everything else that goes out, except for the emails that are just during the, um, in what we call the invite and the sales period that are inviting people to sign up for the webinars.

And then the sales emails themselves. They’re highly technical, like specialized emails that go into like sales psychology and objections and voice of customer and all of those kinds of things. I’m heavily involved in how they are written. I edit the crap out of them. I am putting my own touch. I add in my little quips and my dry humor and like all of these kinds of things. But the bulk of that is coming from my copywriter, Katelyn.

My third and final, you know, launch specific, uh, expense that I had here was on my meta ads, so on the live webinar ads. In order to get people to sign up for my live webinar, I spend a total of $22,611. That is the bulk, that’s the 99.9% of where my ads spend went to, so that most of the admin goes to getting people to sign up because the logic there. That once we get them to sign up, they’re getting my emails and then they’re gonna probably purchase through the emails and not necessarily through getting served a sales ad.

We do, however, run sales ads. So I spent on total, , for the sales promo period, $1,555 on sales ads. Those are ads that just ran for like three or four days to remind people that the sale was ending. So in total for my launch ad spend, I spent $24,167. So essentially I spent $24,000 to make $500,000. But I mean, again, all of my signups and all the leads did not just come from ads.

I don’t currently have the specific breakdown of like how many came from affiliates. We have, we have a handful of affiliate partners, like people we specifically reach out to and we ask for them. I have a lot of friends and like colleagues who mentioned it in their newsletter, shared on social media. I had people just sharing just to be friendly.

Like we had a, we had a wide array. Obviously I was also sharing on my social media on Instagram and then on my podcast here as well. It’s very hard at this point in the business to keep track because it is such a, like a well-oiled web essentially of people. Like, people come into my email list and then they start listening to the podcast, but then the podcast drives them to Sam’s sidebar, which then gets them onto Instagram, which then means they start getting served ads.

Like it’s just this like crazy. It’s like a pot of soup. That’s what it reminds me of because it’s, and I’m just like in there throwing more and more stuff in, because that’s really your goal as a marketer is, is to be everywhere without having to be everywhere all at once.

So why do I think that this launch went so well? In particular when everybody’s saying that everything is dead? Well, for one, I think that this is a testament to the fact that when you have a good product that actually works, , that you can still sell it regardless. You know, if you create something that there was a need for that, there’s a demand for, you don’t have to worry so much about selling it, to be honest.

It’s, it’s really not about selling it. Like, I’m not trying, I’m not in the business of convincing people that they need this. I’m convincing people that this is the solution. To the problem that they have identified. That’s how, that’s essentially how I would put it. And so they have a problem or even they have a, , an outcome that they want, right?

Like they’re like, oh, I want to start an online business. But then I guess the problem that they have identified is that they don’t know how to do it, right? And so then I’m essentially positioning the bundle as being the solution to starting an online business, right? ’cause it is, right? So you see how, like, then that’s very easy.

I’m not trying to convince you the value and like why it’s so hard and all this kind of stuff. And when you really understand your customer and you understand their pain points, like they want to do it right, because they don’t want to accidentally do something wrong. They don’t want to be made a fool of, you know, they don’t want to seem unprofessional.

They want to take themselves more seriously when I understand all their wants and their concerns. It’s then very easy to just speak directly to that and not in a manipulative way. Like they are literally telling me this is what they’re worried about and I am just saying back, yeah, I hear you. I see it, and here’s how this will resolve that. And it does.

If you’ve read my book, you know, I spend a lot of time in my book When I Start My Business, I’ll Be Happy talking about building out your product the right way. Everybody wants to get to the part where they’re having the $500,000 launches. People don’t want to talk about the part of like how I painstakingly created the Ultimate Bundle® to begin with, right?

How many, probably I’m, I’m assuming at this point, thousands of hours have gone into talking to customers, creating the bundle itself, doing market research, competitor analysis, like all of the things that went into creating it. And then the thousands of included in that thousands of hours is like updating it and iterating, making it better, learning how to talk about it better and better because I talk about it so much and I didn’t give up.

I sold two ultimate bundles a month for a very long time, and I thought I was a fucking rockstar. I thought I was like, gonna go buy like a Miami penthouse, like overlooking the ocean.

I was like, this is insane. I can’t believe people are buying this. This is amazing. If I can do two, how many else can I do? Right? I bet you there are so many people who would have done that, who would’ve looked at the two and been like, I can’t only just sell two of these, so I’m gonna go out and create a new course and see if I can sell more.

And so everybody wants my like quick tips, quick features. About how to create a launch like this when the truth is, it’s a lot about sticking to it, and it’s a lot about having the growth mindset, adopting the growth mindset of what else can this thing do? Let yourself be amazed at yourself. For one, sign up. Let yourself be impressed with yourself. When three people take your webinar, let yourself be impressed when two people buy it in a month and you feel loaded.

So I think so much of it is just related to this like pain sticking process of making a good product, testing it over time, sticking with it, not losing my focus, not going off and creating seven other products when the ultimate bundle wasn’t selling that much like I believed in it and I kept pushing forward.

I also integrated certain things into this launch, like leaning into the trends of more like one-to-one or personal interaction, , with customers or potential customers, which is really hard to do actually when, you know you’re getting 11,000 people to sign up for a webinar.

I’ve really liked using the tool Video Ask. I’ll leave a link down for it, as a resource in the show notes for you. But I’ve liked using Video Ask because this is a platform where it’s owned by Typeform and it’s a tool where essentially people can submit a video, a voice note, or text, the same one that I asked you earlier to go down and click in the show notes to you can send me one for me to do an episode on a topic that you’d like.

And so I also use this tool in my funnel and I ask people, Hey, what do you want me to talk about at the webinar? I get hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of replies, , for these, and I send back a personalized video for every single person. You might think like, that’s crazy or like, how do you, how the heck do you do that? Or, I don’t know. I’ve heard all these different comments.

Here’s the way that I look at it. That is my job. So when someone sends me a Video Ask that is a warm lead, that is somebody who has taken the time to send me a question. They’re interested, they have signed up for my training.

And so all the other crap that I might do throughout the week, like leading up to a launch, if I’m not getting those done, like what else am I really doing? Because this is the point. Like that is the focus. I think that that’s maybe where, we excel a bit in terms of like really honing in on what matters and saying like that, you know, the, the customer service, the high level of customer service, people getting a little surprised and delight when they get a personalized video back just for asking a question.

Now this creates a touch point, and then no wonder our show up rate went up so much, right? Because in those videos I will also ask those people like, Hey, are you coming? Like, let me know. And then they will typically text me back or send me a video. So many of those people replied and were like, I can’t believe you actually replied, right?

And I say the person’s name, I comment on what they said or something about them. One guy sent me one, uh, a video of him on a plane. He was literally flying. And I was like, tell me where you’re going. I wanna know. I hope you have a good flight. Like, let me know you landed safely. So I just have fun with them, but I think it’s also a way to create a personal connection.

Okay. Remember earlier when I said that there’s bad news, it’s kind of time to deliver the bad news because essentially the rest of what I think went well in this launch is just what I would put under the umbrella of culmination.

I think that one of the disservices that some of the big dogs have done to you in, in terms of like serving you up business coaching products and services and courses and memberships, is that they’ve taken something that is so complicated and nuanced and individual and unique and due to a lot of hard work, and they’ve made it seem so easy and so one size fits all, so formulaic.

Like if you take this step and then this step, you will get this result. It’s, I just don’t think it’s true. And to be honest with you, when people ask me of like, oh, would you create a course? Would you do that? The part that I get really hung up on is that I would not feel in integrity for offering like certain types of courses or these kinds of things.

With the idea that like people would think like, oh, if I sign up for this, then I would have launches like her, because that it, like just signing up for this thing or just purchasing a course for me is not what would result in that. So to be perfectly frank with you, that’s, that’s like what causes a little bit of that dissonance.

It’s also what I see in some of the questions that I get from people.

It was also really clear to me in reviewing the post-purchase survey responses from people, which we got hundreds, that what I’m saying is completely accurate because it, it was like so many of the people who purchased were like, I bought, and, , by the way, I’ve been getting your emails for five years.

Like, I’ve been getting your emails for two years. I took your webinar last year and I wasn’t able to buy, but I bought this time. Or you know, my friend Louise Henry told me about you. And so I bought. It was just watching this like culmination, like all come together in these responses itself, where you’re like, yeah, it’s not the time we sent the emails.

It’s not the number of emails. It’s really like so many things all coming together at once. Now speaking of, I sent an email to my email list last week, breaking down my launch, giving some of my initial thoughts as to like why I thought this launch went so well. Which if you don’t get my weekly email, Sam’s Sidebar, make sure you sign up using the link down in the show notes.

But I ask them, what other questions do you have for me and what do you wanna see next? Either on the podcast or here in Sam’s Sidebar. And I got so many good responses.

First up is a text that I got from LilIette, which she used the Video Ask text, audio video platform that I am linking to down below that you can use to send me a text, a video or an audio note. But LilIette sent me a text saying, this

Sam, I’ve been following your journey for the longest time, and I’m always so impressed by your success and how transparent you are about everything. I bought your bundle last year as well as your book, and to date, I don’t regret those investments. As a new business owner, I’m overwhelmed about how to have a launch.

I’m still growing my audience and wearing all the hats because I can’t hire a team yet. What’s your advice for someone whose business is still so new and not generating revenue or lots of revenue yet? All right, Lilette, that is a great question.

Well, when I got back to Lilette, I reminded her that in my book I actually have a calendar suggestion of an exact timeline you can use for a launch. And the reason this is really important is because the first thing that you do when you want to do a launch in your own business is that you have to pick a date.

Like the thing, the live date, or like say if you’re having a webinar, for example, that would be the live date or it’s the date that your sale goes live. So let’s say like your sale goes live Monday, June 1st, right? That’s the first date you put on the calendar. Then you back out. You have to reverse engineer.

If you’re having a live class, you need to reverse engineer, like at least a month, if not six weeks. When you start to talk about this thing’s coming, this thing’s coming, this thing’s coming.

Two weeks before your live date. If you were hosting a live webinar, for example, you would start very. I don’t mean aggressively like in a bad sense, but like very like focused and in a focused way, you would start emailing your list, telling them, Hey, this live webinar is June 1st, like, sign up for it here.

And you’d be very methodical about that. And then you would have your live, , webinar on June 1st and then for however many days you want. I personally like the five region. It’s, it tends to be a good, good amount of time. , You, you hammer that home for like the sale for those five days, right? So that’s essentially like the structure of how you do it.

If you’re not running something live, you can do the same thing. You just don’t need to be focused on telling them to sign up for a live webinar in all of those weeks leading up, this is where I think a lot of people really just don’t, don’t do enough in this part of it. You really wanna be warming up your audience to the idea that something’s coming that, your level of like vagueness can essentially dissipate as it gets closer.

So I start out really vague of like, I’m working on something big, like I’m have this thing coming. I can’t wait to tell you what it is. Then to being like, I’m gonna be announcing my first live legal workshop of the year in a couple of weeks. I hope you’re ready to sign up for it. Then I start saying, when signups are actually gonna start.

Then I start the sign up period. So it’s like a very like methodical rollout process

at this point too. I would say to someone like LilIette, you don’t have to be so fussed about the fact that you don’t have a team. I did not have a team for a long time when I was doing these kinds of launches. Luckily, there were also to a lot less people, so they are a lot more manageable. The whole point of this period. It’s kind of like when you’re single and like you’re, before you get married, it’s like very important to kinda like work on yourself, get your own stuff right, so that you can be a better partner when you do find someone. I think it’s kinda similar in this case, it’s like when you don’t have a, a team.

It’s like you have to figure out what your system is. You need to know your customer. You need to know the way you run launches. When I hired my team, I told them, Hey, this is how we run the launch, right? This is how I do it. This, I’m gonna have this webinar. We do this for five days. This is the product that I’ve already created that thousands of people have already bought.

It wasn’t like bringing them in and being like, so what do you guys think? Like how long should we do it? They’re looking to you right to, to tell them like, what is the structure? What’s happening here? Like, what are we doing? How are we selling this thing? So I think there’s a little bit of a disconnect. I’m not saying that this is what’s in Lily’s question, but I saw this in a lot of people’s questions of like this disconnect between being like, oh, you can only do this if you have a team. And I’m like, you guys know you’re responsible for the team, right? Like you’re the one that’s telling them what they need to go do.

They’re not gonna tell you. The difference is if you hire a consultant, right? If you’re gonna pay a consultant to come in and they tell you how to run a launch, that’s different. But that’s not what team members do. They go and implement what you’ve asked them, the system that you have set up, right? So it is a good time for you to practice this.

It’s a good time to say, there’s only one of me. There’s only so many hours in the day. What can I do? What’s the best use and the best focus of my time? Right? Like. It’s, in my opinion, it would be to be working on building your email list and building your audience so that you actually have people to sell to. And then once you’re building that up, that you do start talking about your product and then start running a sale and running this launch. Kind of similar to the structure that I talked about here and that I really clearly lay out in my book.

All right. Next we got a video from Ruth Ann. let’s hear from Ruth Ann.

Ruth Ann: Hi Sam. Uh, my name is Ruth ann. I just ordered your ultimate bundle and I’ve been making a ton of progress on it, so thank you so much for that. And, um, i’m about to launch, um, a course using a webinar in a couple of weeks here, so I’d love to know.

Yeah. Um, just any behind the scenes things that you haven’t shared that you’re wanting to share and i’d really like to know more about the ads. Like I don’t really know how to do ads on, um, anywhere. I’m assuming you did some on social media.

Um, so if you could give us any details about that, that would be really helpful. Thank you.

Sam Vander Wielen: Ruthann, this is a great question. I’m so glad you asked. So I know I just talked about kind of the launching a course with a webinar situation, so hopefully you found that answer helpful. I would say that when it comes to the ads part, I personally do not recommend investing in Facebook ads and any responsible Facebook ads manager will back me up here until you have proven your webinar funnel, uh, using your own organic traffic.

So until you have sold to your own email list or to your social media people, like anybody in your audience, wherever you have, wherever you’re sharing about your business, until you’ve ensured that that process runs smoothly, like, you talk about the webinar and people actually sign up for it and then people come to the webinar and then they actually buy the thing and then they buy the thing.

And then like the, the kind of delivery of the product and everything that’s smooth too. Like that is really, really important. So when you start out inviting people to the webinar, if people don’t sign up for the webinar, that’s a super interesting piece of feedback, right? We are not gonna be discouraged by the fact that people don’t sign up for the webinar.

Again, this is a place where people quit on this. It might mean that the titling is off. It might mean that the positioning, like the way you’re marketing it might be off. It might mean that the pain points that you’re talking about, that you’re saying you’re gonna talk about in this thing are not hitting with people.

If I can give you any secret, it would be to never call it a webinar and, and anywhere other than between me and you. Right? So internally, I always refer to it as a webinar. You will never catch me externally referring to it as a webinar. It’s a, that’s a death note to the, to the webinar itself, right? So you always call it a class, A training, a workshop, whatever you wanna call it.

It’s very important. ’cause like mentally people hear webinar and they’re like, whoa, no, no, I don’t wanna go to a webinar. A free training though. That sounds interesting. You know? So it’s just a shift in perspective. So you want to play with that. Like, let’s see, can we get people to sign up for this webinar?

Once we’re on the webinar, do we get people to actually convert right? Either through on the webinar or through your emails. And then from there, if that process starts working, if you’re like, okay, I talk about this webinar, people sign up for the webinar, people are coming to the webinar engaged, they seem like the right people, and then they’re actually purchasing either on it or after. That is when we turn to ads, ads are like going from a drip faucet to like a full fledged fire hose. But the, the drip has to already be there. And I think, I think the way that a lot of people think of it is like, you have a dry well and you’re expecting to go to a fire hose. That is not how it works, right?

So this, when I had the Ultimate Bundle®, I was selling quite a bit of it on my own, probably anywhere between 30 to $50,000 of the Ultimate Bundle® a month by myself, right? Just me going on Instagram being like, Hey guys, I have this thing called the Ultimate Bundle®.

And, and literally pitching directly to it. And also creating an Evergreen webinar. So once I got to that point, and I’m not saying you need to wait as long as I did, I, I probably waited too long. But once you get to that point where you’re like, oh, I talk about this, people sign up for it. People buy, that’s when it’s time to invest in ads.

Yes. I realized from your question too, that I’m probably assuming a lot of knowledge like that I, I certainly didn’t have when I started. And so yes, when I say ads, I mean meta ads. I mean, that’s not the only type of ads, but those are the ads that I’m running. So meta ads are those that run on Instagram, Facebook, et cetera.

Of course there are also YouTube ads, there’s Pinterest ads, there are Google ads. Now there’s gonna start being chat GPT ads. I just saw. So there are lots and lots of different kinds of ads. As well as, you know, like digital ads you can run on people’s websites or billboards and things you can do in person.

I also like, I was just talking to somebody about this the other day that if, if I could plug for using in-person marketing strategies for your online business. It is such a huge flex that I think people miss on. So like if you were offering your first webinar and you know, of a place in your community where your ideal customer would hang out, you know, would go by.

That is a great place to put up a flyer about your webinar. Like sometimes we kind of forget that we’re like, oh, I thought because it’s online, I have to like talk about it on Instagram, but I don’t have any audience. There are other ways to speak to an audience outside of just social media. When I started, my business, I started going around to like local coffee shops and cafes.

I would contact like the alumni association of my college. Like I was looking for every like, kind of unique opportunity and even like small business associations in your state to be like, well for me I was like, Hey, I’m offering this thing about the legal side of your business.

Like would you be willing to tell your members about it or asking if somebody would include it in their newsletter or like whatever. So there are lots and lots of different ways, like especially in the beginning, that can be a great way.

Okay, next up, I got a video from Ariel.

Ariel: Hi Sam. My name is Ariel and I bought the Ultimate Bundle® I think in 2021 maybe. And I’ve used it for a couple different businesses and I’m very grateful for it. And I send people your way all the time. I am just popping on because I wanted to thank you for one. I. Just read your email and it made me really happy to see you have such, such a successful launch.

I’m in the process of just starting to launch a new program, um, with a new, like new, content and I’m a little nervous and, um, it’s kind of more spiritual health and wellness and I know that that’s very different than like the legal packages that you sell. And my question is really like, what would you recommend someone who is pretty much a solopreneur and doesn’t have the team because it seems like you, you know, and doesn’t have the resources to spend, you know, $27,000 on ads, um, or doesn’t have any resources for, you know, a second business or an online business.

Any suggestions for that? Okay, bye.

Sam Vander Wielen: Okay. Ariel, great question. Thanks so much for asking and thanks for being in the Ultimate Bundle®, obviously. Um, it’s always cool for me to hear from people who have been in it for so many years, but I think that this is probably something I was referring to at the top of the episode where it’s like. We do want to be careful where we create some stories, for lack of a better term around this. Like, I can’t sell like that. I don’t have the team like that. I don’t have this, that, the other thing I, because I too could very easily Ariel generate those stories for you. ’cause I, I have stories for days about how like, well, I can’t sell like that because I’m not promising people that I’m gonna make them a lot of money.

Right and so like, there’s like a bunch of stories I have around that of like, well, that’s why I’ll never get any bigger. Or I have stories around like, I sell legal products. Like, are you kidding me? Do you know how hard it is to get people’s attention, to get people jazzed about coming to a live webinar for a legal thing?

Like I have a lot of stories too, right? Like I have, I have a lot of stories. So on the one hand there are, there are true parts of these stories that we tell ourselves and there are parts that can also be like. What if, what if, what if, what if, right? So I would encourage some of this as like a little bit of a shift in terms of the way you might be thinking of it as like if you’re going into something already being like, well, I can’t make that kind of thing because I talk about X, Y, and Z.

That’s just an invitation of something to be like, oh, that’s interesting that I’m, I’m already thinking that way. And we haven’t even started yet. So like, it’s just an invitation to shift the mindset on it.

The first time I ever ran live launches, I didn’t spend anything on ads. I did not have any ads and I had no team and I made a lot of money, not a lot, not a lot less than now. I made a lot of money. Right? I also was working my ass off and I was working constantly.

I was always on my phone. I was completely stressed out and frazzled and working on weekends and nights and checking, uh, at that time Facebook at like 7:00 AM and taking care of customers, answering the entire inbox. I was like, I was like that guy that has like 10 piece band situation. Like that’s still how I feel on certain days, but like it was way worse, right?

So I was working my butt off, not having a team, didn’t spend any money on ads, and it was still generating quite a bit. As we’ve talked about a lot throughout this episode over the years. Yes, you’re right, like I layered on ads. Then I layered on a team. I didn’t have a team when I started ads, so that was a tough period, by the way. ‘Cause then like an influx of new things were coming in. I didn’t have anybody to help.

But also, as I mentioned earlier, like this is a beautiful opportunity for you to get this set up. Like get the webinar, test the webinar. We’re in a testing phase right now. Do people even like it? Do they need it? Are you using the right language?

Survey your audience about the title of your webinar. That’s what I did, right? That’s how I got the webinar title. And I’ve never changed it because it works. And so you can survey them, practice giving the webinar, right? See if people purchase from those emails in, uh, improve those emails. If they need improving, this is the time to get all that set up so that you are working towards handing this off to a team.

You are generating the revenue that will become your ad capital investment, right? That is what, that is what you’re doing right now. So I think instead of thinking of it as like, I can’t have that launch because I don’t have the ads in the team, it’s like. That’s what you’re getting ready for. You’re like doing like the understudy work right now.

And you have to do this part in order to get to that part, right? It’s crucial. Actually, you won’t, you won’t get to the other part. So remember that as you’re doing this, this is an experiment and you are going to be responsible for handing off this experiment, the findings of your experiment to the team that you hire.

Unless you hire a consultant, you’re going to be responsible for giving the playbook. So you’re writing the playbook right now. And so I think starting small, starting with your audience, speaking to the people who are already there, if you don’t have an audience, now is the time to build it. And I think that this can be a , and both thing.

Like you can be building the audience and then start selling to that audience, or like building the audience and getting them onto your email list and then telling them about a free webinar. Like you can do both. So don’t. You don’t have to wait until you have some like big fancy number, but if that’s the quote unquote problem, if you essentially have like an audience lead problem, focus on that right now and then start sending this webinar to them and start like getting, getting the reps in, getting the practice, that’s where I would start.

Okay. Last but not least, Lauren sent me a text with a bunch of great questions. Lauren said, I have a bunch of questions about your $500,000 launch. First, where did most conversions come from?

Like I mentioned earlier in the episode, it was almost evenly split between ads, uh, what has been attributed to ads and then what we would attribute to our own organic network, which would include my 62,000 email list, , Instagram, which is almost, uh, almost even size. And,, this podcast. And then any like friends who sent out emails or anything like that when did sales spike and why? We got the most sales on the webinar itself. And then probably, also when fast action bonuses closed. And that’s because the bonuses are the best.

What fear did most buyers have about purchasing? , I tend to think that it’s probably most helpful for me to explain to you what the common fears are of purchasing, period, because it doesn’t really help you unless you sell legal templates.

And if so, get the heck outta here. So the three like main fears are always time, money, and snowflake, as I call it. So it’s always time, right? It’s always like, this is gonna take me so much time. I don’t have the time. Like, I’m so busy. Like there’s always time objections.

The other thing about time, it’s not always about, just like, I don’t think I literally have the time for this. It can also be about timing. So it can also be like, I’m not sure if this is the right time for me.

And typically that goes in the way you kind of work through and overcome that objection is talking about how, what’s going to be different if you wait. So it’s like if you say you wanna start a business, you say you want to, uh, get in the gym, like you say you want to start looking for a new career, how’s that gonna be any different six months from now?

Like, are things gonna get better? Yeah, no, they’re not gonna get any better. We’re just gonna keep over researching, overthinking, sitting on the couch, like whatever the thing is. So it’s really about kind of painting that picture of like, that’s not really going to help you. It’s also what helps when you learn.

I think hopefully I do a, a somewhat careful balance of urgency of like, you have to build an urgency into these funnels in order for people to actually take action. It’s just like marketing 1 0 1. I think there are people who do it in a really gross way, and then there’s people who do it. Not so much I hope to be skewing, uh, closer to the ladder, but, you know, in order to get people to take action, that’s where it’s helpful to have like limited time discount, limited time bonuses, those kinds of things.

So that’s, can, can, that can sometimes be what moves the person through the timing issue when it comes to overcoming the time objection. Some people just have a, a bit of a mindset issue when it comes to time, and that’s like kind of something they have to work through. The, the thing that you can really do on your end is to demonstrate why it’s so easy.

The second one always money, right? There’s always a money fear of like, this is so expensive. Or like, even in that, it’s like, it might just be that they’re the fears, like not seeing the value. Like it might come out as like a, this is so expensive, but it’s actually the value. But there are people who can afford it and who do need it, who you have to work through some of the money objections. That’s all.

The third one is what I always call snowflake objections, which is typically the, I don’t know if this is for me. Um, so typically this is the person who, because, you know, every snowflake is, is uniquely different.

So this is why I call it that. Very creative. I know. So, um, the, the snowflakes, always think that they are so unique that their situation is so unique that your product is not for them.

Typically, snowflakes need more information. So typically snowflakes, it’s just like, I don’t know if this is for me because I have, in my case it’s like I have this kind of business. I, I’m American, but I live in London. That was an email I got the other day. Right? So they’re like, I don’t know that this applies to me. And I’m like, it does. And then my job is kind of to explain why it applies to them or why it’s still helpful to them.

I very intentionally think that these are the three main objections, right? And then I very intentionally hand select testimonials that speak to each one of these, test these objections. So even on something like Instagram or Instagram stories, for example, when I was in the promo, I was going in and getting out screenshots, and then I would be like, okay, one for time, one for snowflake, one for the money, right?

Of like, oh, I’m so scared this won’t be worth my investment. So I, um, this person said, oh my God, this was the best investment I ever made. Boom. Overcomes the money. The other person that said, oh my God, this was so much easier than I thought. Boom, overcomes the time objection, right? So I think of it always in the reverse of like, I’m gonna show you the testimonial that overcomes this thing.

And I will just give you a bonus tip that like when I shared those testimonials, anywhere I shared those testimonials, I contextualize them. So if you saw when I did this on Instagram. When I shared the time one, I would literally say, if you think that this is gonna take you a lot of time, and then I would put the testimonial, if you think that the legal stuff is really boring, like, or whatever.

If I had like, somebody’s testimonial was like, actually this was pretty fun. , Or if I had something from somebody that was like, actually I went out and made like, um, a bunch, like I got a bunch of new clients after I did this. And I’m like, oh, if you’re worried that your investment’s not gonna have any like return on investment, boom.

So I’m always contextualizing so that it literally is speaking to the person who’s probably having that thought already and then they’re just seeing the evidence that it’s not true right there in front of them.

Okay. I think I’ve literally downloaded my brain, uh, about this launch as much as possible. I feel like I could talk about this for a, a week. If anybody wants to come hang out with me here on Long Island, that’d be great. Just wait till it’s warmer. Um, but I could talk about this forever. Now you gotta do your part.

I need to know from you, now that you’ve listened to this, what questions do you still have? What’s lingering? Maybe I’ve created new questions for you. I want you to go down and click that Video Ask link so you can ask me any of your questions. If you send me a video or audio note, I will ask your permission.

If I can use it in a future episode, that’d be awesome. But you can also just shoot me a text, whatever you wanna do. I’d love to know from you what you want to know from me. And if it’s not launch related, fantastic.

I’m happy to talk about anything other than this launch at this point. So you can go down below and you can also leave me a question about anything else you’d like me to talk about here on, On Your Terms®.

And I don’t mean to keep mentioning it, and I’m not, I’m like, not just saying this, but like, I, I literally, I just wish I could convey to you how much of what we’ve talked about, but even deeper, I go in my book, right? So my book really is the place, if you want to go learn about launches, you wanna learn about how to build the audience.

You have people to launch to. You wanna learn my webinar secrets, my funnel secrets, like all of the things are in that book. So go buy When I Start My Business, I’ll Be Happy anywhere books are sold or grab the link down the show notes. You’re not purchasing it through me, you’re purchasing it through bookstores.

So like, I’m just sharing where you can go get it, um, down below. But I would love, uh, for you to grab a copy of the book. All right with that. I’ll see you next week. I can’t wait to talk to you soon.

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