28 Apr
LAUNCH STRATEGY, PRE-LAUNCH

Launching a Product vs. a Service: Why the Strategy Is Different

Launching a Product vs. a Service

I’ve built launch strategies for a perfume brand, a wellness spa, a group coaching program, an e-book, an online course, a masterclass, a 1-1 coaching program, a high-ticket service, and a paid online community, among other projects.

The perfume launch and the coaching program launch had almost nothing in common. I mean, they had the same buyer psychology – people still need to understand, connect, and trust before they pay. But how you build that understanding, connection, and trust? Completely different.

Most launch advice doesn’t make this distinction. It treats every launch the same – build hype, tease the offer, countdown timer, go live. And that’s exactly why so many launches underperform. The strategy was rarely in alignment for what was being launched.

The Core Distinction: Desire vs. Gaps

Here’s the simplest way I can put it.

Products sell on desire. Services sell on gaps.

When someone buys a product, they’re buying because they want it – the feeling, the identity, the experience it represents. When someone buys a service, they’re buying because they’ve realised there’s a problem they can’t solve alone.

These are two completely different buying emotions. And they require two completely different engines to drive them.

Using the wrong one doesn’t just underperform, it actively works against you. A candle brand running gap-reveal content feels preachy. A business coach running aspiration-only content feels shallow. The content isn’t bad, just built for the wrong type of launch.

How Product Launches Work

When I built the launch strategy for a perfume brand, the campaign was anchored entirely in desire. Not education. Not ingredient breakdowns. Not “why this product is better.” Desire, the kind that makes a product feel like it belongs in someone’s life before they’ve even bought it.

The pre-launch content wasn’t informational. It was experiential. It built a world – a feeling, an identity – that the audience wanted to step into. By the time the product was available to buy, wanting it wasn’t the question. It had already been answered.

I ran a similar strategy for a wellness spa, launching a new concept. The pre-launch wasn’t a list of services or a breakdown of what was included. It made a specific type of customer feel so seen – so specifically understood – that buying felt like finally being let into something that was already theirs.

That’s what a product launch is supposed to do. Not convince, invite.

How Service Launches Work

When I built the launch strategy for a psychotherapist launching a mental health program, desire wasn’t the engine. Gap reveals were.

Her audience wasn’t going to buy because the program looked aspirational. They were going to buy because the pre-launch content showed them something about their own patterns they hadn’t seen before – and made the program feel like the only structured path forward.

When I worked with a personal brand strategist on his launch, the same principle applied. The pre-launch content didn’t lead with what he offered. It led with what his audience couldn’t see about themselves – gaps they were too close to their own work to notice. That content did something informational content never could: it made people feel genuinely seen. And feeling seen is what earns the trust that turns into a sale.

Service launches don’t build desire. They build clarity, and by launch day, the audience isn’t hoping the offer might help them. They know it will – because the pre-launch content already showed them exactly why.

Where It Gets Nuanced

Not every offer falls neatly into one category.

A paid community can go either way – or both. A book launch is usually desire-led, unless it’s the entry point to a higher-ticket offer. A physical space or a masterclass often runs both engines simultaneously: the experience sells on desire, the services inside it sell on gaps.

The decision isn’t obvious. It depends on the specific offer, the specific audience, and the specific buying emotion that’s most powerful for that combination. Getting it wrong – or splitting the difference without a plan – means neither engine fires properly.

This is where templates fail every time. A template can give you a structure, but it can’t tell you which engine your offer needs, or how to build content that fires it in the right sequence for your specific audience.

The Most Expensive Mistake

I’ve seen service providers try to sell coaching programs on aesthetics and aspiration alone. Their audience thought it looked great – and scrolled past. No gap was surfaced. No reason to buy beyond “this seems premium.”

I’ve seen product brands try to sell through long educational posts about ingredient quality. Their audience learned something – and then bought from a competitor whose content made them feel something.

The strategy was bad, per se, just built for the wrong type of launch.

And the painful part is that you often can’t see it from the inside. When you’re close to your offer, it’s almost impossible to be objective about which emotion actually drives the purchase – or whether your content is building toward that emotion at all.

The First Question Isn’t “What Should I Post?”

It’s ‘What drives the purchase decision for this specific offer?’

Is it desire? Is it gaps? Is it both – and if so, which leads?

That single decision shapes every piece of content, every email, every sales page headline, every story. Get it right, and your launch works as one coherent thing, each piece building on the last. Get it wrong, and you’re pushing hard in a direction your audience was never going to follow you.

If you’re launching this quarter and you’re not sure which engine your offer needs – or you know, but you don’t know how to build around it – that’s exactly where I come in. I identify the engine first. Then I build the launch strategy around it.

Because the strategy that sells a perfume is not the strategy that sells a coaching program. And the difference between them isn’t something you want to figure out mid-launch.

28 Apr
LAUNCH STRATEGY

Why No One Buys on Launch Day (And What to Do Instead)

You built the product, you’re proud of it, you know it’s good.

You’ve spent weeks – maybe months perfecting it, pricing it, packaging it. And then you announced it.

And nothing happened.

No rush of notifications. No “you just made a sale!” emails. No DMs saying “I’ve been waiting for this.” Just quiet.

So you posted again. Maybe you added a countdown timer. Maybe you reshared the announcement on Stories. Maybe you sent a few DMs to people who’d engaged with your content recently. And still, nothing that looked like what you imagined launch day would feel like.

If this has happened to you, I need you to hear something clearly: your product is not the problem, and it’s not your audience either.

It’s what didn’t happen before launch day.

Launch Day is not the Beginning of your Launch

Most business owners treat launch day like the starting line. It’s the day they announce, promote, sell, and hope. But launch day should be the finish line – the final moment in a sequence that started weeks earlier.

By the time you say “it’s live,” your audience should already know what you’re selling, why it matters to their life, and why now is the time to buy. If they’re hearing about your offer for the first time on launch day, you haven’t launched; you’ve announced. And announcements don’t convert, they inform.

The difference between a launch that sells and a launch that falls flat is almost never the product itself. It’s whether the audience was ready before the cart ever opened.

I Learned This the Hard Way

In 2021, I created a masterclass on how to write captions that sell. I priced it at $5. Deliberately accessible, deliberately low-friction. I’d already sold multiple offers to my audience. I had testimonials. I had trust, so I thought it was going to be easy.

Day 1, I got 2 or 3 sales.

2 or 3 sales from an audience that already knew I was good. And almost nobody bought.

But what I missed is that my audience trusted me, but they didn’t understand the new product. They hadn’t been shown what this masterclass would actually look like for their life. They hadn’t been given a reason to care about it specifically, as opposed to everything else competing for their attention and their $5 that week.

I assumed trust in me would automatically transfer to anything I put out. It didn’t.

Mid-launch, I started creating the content I should have created before the launch. The next post brought in around 20 buyers. By the end, I had roughly 60 total.

Still the same product, price, and audience. The only thing that changed was the content, and the fact that it was doing a job it should have started weeks earlier.

That was the moment I understood that trust in you does not equal readiness to buy your new offer. Every offer needs its own journey, every launch needs its own build-up, and that build-up cannot start on launch day.

Why No One Buys on Launch Day

When someone sees your launch post and doesn’t buy, it’s rarely because they don’t like you or don’t have the money. It’s because they haven’t been through the journey that makes a person ready to buy.

That journey has three stages. And the thing most business owners don’t realise is that each stage requires completely different content to build, and the content has to arrive in the right order, at the right time, doing a very specific job. Skip a stage, or run them out of sequence, and the launch stalls regardless of how good the offer is.

Understanding comes first, then connection, then trust. And when all three exist, your audience arrives on launch day already decided. The launch post isn’t convincing them, instead, it’s confirming a decision they’ve already made. And when any one of those stages is missing, no amount of countdown timers or “last chance” emails or stories will close the gap..

What To Do Instead

Launch day needs to stop being the main event. The weeks before it need to become the main event, and how long that window needs to be, what content belongs in it, and what job each piece needs to do is different for every offer, every audience, and every price point. And there’s no universal timeline. There’s no template that accounts for all of it.

What there is is a strategic arc. A sequence where your audience moves from “I’m not sure what this is” to “I’ve been waiting for this” before you ever open the cart. Every piece of content in that arc has a purpose. Nothing is posted to fill space or maintain visibility. Everything is doing deliberate work – and the work it’s doing shifts as the launch progresses.

The business owners I work with don’t launch and hope. By the time they announce, their audience has been on a journey with them for weeks. The content has done its job. The offer makes sense. The trust is earned. And launch day feels like a celebration, not a gamble.

The Pattern Is Always the Same

After years of building launch strategies – for my own offers and for clients across industries – the pattern behind every underperforming launch is remarkably consistent.

The product wasn’t the issue, the audience wasn’t too small or too cold, and the content existed – but it didn’t do the right job at the right time. The business owner went straight from “I’m creating something” to “it’s live” without the sequence in between. And the launch paid the price for it.

Your product deserves better than an announcement and a prayer.

If you’re launching this quarter and you want it to feel different, I build the strategy, map the content arc, and stay in the room with you through execution. Or if you want to start with a plan you can see and trust before committing to anything, a Strategy Intensive gives you exactly that.

Either way, the launch you imagined when you built this thing is still possible. It just needs the right foundation underneath it.

23 Apr
PRE-LAUNCH

How to Build Demand Before Launching

Let me paint a picture.

You’ve been posting consistently for months. Your engagement is decent. People reply to your Stories. They save your posts. They comment things like “I needed this” and “you always say exactly what I’m thinking.” You feel seen. You feel ready.

So you launch.

And the same people who were commenting heart-eyes emojis last week are nowhere to be found. The DMs that used to light up are quiet. The content that was getting saves and shares suddenly feels like it’s landing in a different room entirely.

You sit there staring at your phone thinking: but they were engaged. They liked me. They responded. Where did everyone go?

They didn’t go anywhere. They were never ready to buy. They were ready to follow. Those are two completely different things, and if you want to know how to build demand before launching, that distinction is exactly where to start.

Visibility Is Not Demand

This is the single biggest misconception I see in business owners who are about to launch. They confuse visibility with demand. They assume that because their audience is engaged, that audience is also ready to purchase.

It’s not the same thing.

Visibility means your audience sees you. Demand means your audience is waiting for the moment they can buy from you. One is passive, the other is active, and no amount of saves, shares, replies, heart-eyes emojis will close the gap between them automatically.

That’s why you can have 50,000 followers and zero demand for your next launch. And you can have 500 followers and genuine demand that converts from Day 1. The difference isn’t audience size. It is whether demand was built intentionally before the launch, or whether you assumed it would exist because people enjoy your content.

It won’t, because demand doesn’t happen by accident. It is built, and building it is a specific process with a specific sequence, and that sequence is almost never what business owners think it is.

What Is Required To Build Demand

Before your audience is ready to buy, three things need to be true. They need to understand your offer and why it matters for their life, specifically. They need to feel genuinely connected to it, not just intellectually interested, but personally convinced that it’s for them. And they need to trust it enough to pay, which means trusting the offer, trusting you, and trusting their own decision.

Understanding. Connection. Trust. In that order.

When all three exist, demand exists. And your audience won’t be waiting to be convinced on launch day; they’ll be waiting for you to open the door so they can buy.

What most business owners don’t realise is that each of those three things requires completely different content to build, and the content that builds one can actually work against another if it’s deployed at the wrong time. Understanding built without connection creates an audience that thinks, “great offer, for whoever needs it.” Trust built before understanding creates an audience that thinks you know what you’re doing, but doesn’t have a clue what you’re actually selling.

The sequence matters as much as the content itself. And the sequence is invisible to most people who are inside their own launch.

The Gap Nobody Talks About

Most business owners spend months creating content that builds visibility – tips, relatable posts, behind-the-scenes, jumping on trends. That content has a job, and it does it well. But it doesn’t prepare anyone to buy a specific offer.

Demand-building content has a completely different job. It’s not about making your audience aware of you. It’s about making them aware of something – a gap, a pattern, a cost they hadn’t calculated, that makes your offer feel not just appealing, but necessary.

The problem is that visibility content and demand-building content look similar from the outside. Both get posted, engagement, and feel productive, but one is warming a room, and the other is building a case. And if you arrive at launch week having only warmed the room, there’ll be no case to close.

Most business owners post visibility content until the day they launch, then switch to “it’s live, buy now” overnight. Their audience experiences that as a gear-change they were never prepared for. The bridge between those two things – between “I enjoy following this person” and “I’m about to spend money with this person” – was never built.

That bridge doesn’t build itself, and it can’t be built during launch week.

Why Launch Week Is Too Late To Build Demand

The part nobody wants to hear, but I have to say, is that if demand doesn’t exist before launch week, launch week cannot create it.

You can post more, send more emails, show up on stories every day, and all of it will feel like noise to an audience that hasn’t been prepared because it IS noise. The content didn’t exactly fail, but the timing was just wrong. And the real work that makes launch week convert happens weeks before launch week begins.

The launches that look effortless from the outside – the ones that seem to sell out quickly, that generate DMs before the cart even opens – aren’t the result of better launch-week content. They’re the result of a pre-launch period that did its job so well that demand already existed by the time the offer went live, and launch week just activated it.

That’s what a well-built launch feels like from the inside. Not a scramble, or a push, but an opening.

What Separates a Sold-out Launch from a Quiet One

By now, you should know it’s not the offer, audience size, graphics, sales page or the number of emails in the sequence.

It’s whether demand was deliberately built before the launch started, in the right sequence, with the right content, for the specific offer and the specific audience. Every launch I build starts there before anything else. Before the content plan, before the campaign arc, and definitely before a single caption is written.

Because the strategy that builds demand for one offer will fall flat for a different one. The content that works for one audience won’t work for another. And your launch is too important to be built on assumptions.

If you’re launching this quarter and you want demand built before you open the cart – the strategy, the sequence, the content that does the work in the right order, that’s exactly what I do.

Because the worst time to figure out how to build demand is after you’ve already said “it’s live.”