EPISODE 75 OF WHAT WOULD THEY DO? THE CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE PODCAST FOR SMALL BUSINESS OWNERS
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You’ve launched before, your audience knows you, and your offers have sold successfully.
So surely launching your next offer should be easier…
Right? Not always.
In this episode, I share the behind-the-scenes story of working with Krista Miller from Summit in a Box on the launch of a brand-new offer. While Krista had years of experience and a loyal audience, one thing still stood in the way:
Founder bias.
Let’s unpack why being an expert in your own business can make it harder to see the messaging gaps, assumptions and blind spots that can derail launches before they even begin.
If you’ve ever questioned whether your next offer will land, this episode is your reminder that sometimes the biggest breakthrough comes from borrowing someone else’s perspective.
What we cover:
Why successful launches can create dangerous assumptions
The hidden impact of founder bias on your messaging
Why audience research is about much more than writing better copy
How customer insights shape offers before they’re built
The difference between assumptions and evidence
Why experienced business owners still have blind spots
How objective feedback transforms launches
The role customer journey design plays before someone ever buys
Soundbites:
“The experience that comes with successful launches builds assumptions that going through the motions, repeating what you’ve done previously is going to work for a new offer as well. And often it doesn’t. Hearing something once or twice is not the same thing as actually checking it against whether that is true for your audience in this instance and in relation to this offer Your customers don’t have your context, and they don’t know what you’re assuming about them. What they do is they experience the result of that assumption. And if that assumption is off your whole launch and your whole offer simply won’t tick all the boxes.”
“Admitting to yourself that you need an objective perspective and that you need to hand this pre-work over to someone is a lot less about tactics, but it’s more about being willing to admit to yourself that you simply can’t see your blind spots. Which can be hard, particularly when this is the first time that you’re inviting an objective perspective into your business and into your processes.”
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Episode Transcript:
Nadine (00:00)
Hello, hello, and welcome back to the podcast. Today we are picking up where we left off last week, and we are going to take a closer look at why it is so bloody hard to diagnose your own leaky funnel or your new offer launch, your pre launch. We are going to yeah diagnose why it is sheer impossible to find that moment that matters, that is letting your funnel down.
so today I want to share a client project with you, one of my favorites over the past few years, and it just so beautifully highlights how when you admit to yourself that you are simply too close to your offer, to your audience, to the whole process.
It feels so much harder than it actually should be to bring a new offer to life. So I am going to introduce you to Krista Miller from Summit in a Box. If you’re new to her, I literally call Krista the Summit Queen. She helps online business owners to run their first or next successful virtual summit. She knows her stuff, her audience loves her. She has a big community of loyal fans around her.
So when Krista looked into launching a brand new offer that was somewhat aligned with her current offer lineup, but touched on different pain points her audience was experiencing, she decided to yeah talk to me, explore how I can support her with her offer messaging.
And as we started talking, it became evident that the intensive was the best option for Krista. So what we did was start with a super strategic audience survey that I put together for her to identify messaging gaps, opportunities, beliefs people had around this new offer, and make the whole launch process a lot smoother. And when I say the whole launch process, I mean
Obviously, the copy, the messaging, the pre-launch runway, the webinar design, but also the offer creation. So Krista had a pretty good idea around what this offer would include, but what wasn’t so obvious was the format, the packaging, how her audience wanted to experience this offer. So all this was part of the process, and thankfully.
As you can hear in a second, because I’ll hand you over to Krista. Thankfully, everything fell into place for her. Krista had an amazing first launch result and how she put it, the whole process, the whole launch experience felt fun. And we’ve worked together again since, which hopefully speaks volumes of yeah, the work we have done together and the clarity that it has provided Krista with. So
have a listen. Krista’s going to talk you through her experience and what that meant for clarity in her launch process.
Krista Miller: “Hey, everyone. So excited to be here. So I am Krista. I am the owner of a company called Summit in a Box, where we teach online business owners how to plan and launch profitable virtual summits that are just a great experience for everyone involved, both as far as the process goes and as far as results go. We want it to be impactful for the hosts, for speakers, and for attendees. I’ve been in business since 2015. So I’ve worked with lots of different people, launched lots of different offers, written a lot of copy, both good and terrible. I’m excited to talk about it a little bit more today. Okay. So when I approached Nadine for help with my copy, I don’t really know what I thought I was doing before that, because I decided I wanted to launch a new course. And I just like wanted to get it out quick. I’m one of those people where I have an idea and I want it to happen yesterday. Like we’re doing this fast. So I was like, I’m just gonna write my own copy. I don’t have time for this. I don’t want to find someone I had previously had a full time employee who wrote on my copy, and she kind of stepped into a different role and wasn’t doing that anymore. So I didn’t have like a go to. So I was like, I’m just gonna do this. And I don’t even know if I got further than the blank page before I was like, Oh, yeah, this is why I don’t write my own copy. I need to find someone else. I knew that the results just weren’t going to be as good. The sales page was not going to speak to my ideal person as effectively as someone who actually knew what they were doing. And it was their thing. And really, I didn’t look around. I had received an email from Nadine. She literally all she did was pitch me to be on my podcast. And it was so memorable. It was such a great pitch. And like going to her website and looking into that pitch was such a great experience. It was just a no brainer. I did not look around. I did not look for other copywriters like, all right, let’s go see if she has an offer that will work. And luckily, she did. And you know, I think, you know, I think, while I was on her site, just the way her offers are communicated the way her own copy is written, it just fit in perfectly. And I could tell that we were gonna get along just fine. Something else I had gone back and forth on was the audience research piece of things. I have never really done audience research. I’ve done like sent a couple, probably pretty terrible surveys, you know, in my day and used it in the best way I knew how. But I just decided to trust Nadine. She said it was, you know, really helpful, a big deal to do this audience research for a new offer. I was like, okay, let’s, let’s give it a try. And, oh, man, it’s one of the like, I want to do it for everything now. I want to go back to all of our offers we’ve been selling for years and do the audience research now so I can make, make it all even better. I was just like, the direct word for word responses we got from people with their concerns, things they’re excited about things they’re looking for what they want help with what they’ve tried before that hasn’t worked. Having their exact words to both like influence how I’m creating this course and what I’m putting in it. And like what goes into the sales copy like is an absolute game changer. And something else I didn’t expect was how that audience research impacted the rest of the launch process and the rest of the marketing process.
And I guess like what was so what’s so great about it is because I went through and I was able to read and kind of study all of the responses but then Nadine did the hard work of incorporating that into the sales page and into the emails. So those are just so solid, such great pieces of copy and I’m using those now for everything else I do like I had to go, of course, make a webinar for this launch. And I was staring at that blank page. I was like, oh my gosh, this is going to be miserable. And I pulled up the copy document kind of just just for some some wording reference and stuff. I was like, oh, I don’t have to write this webinar because she basically did it for me in the registration page copy that she wrote for it in the emails she wrote to promote it. And then I was able to pull from the sales page for the course to like I came up with very little content for for what needed to be included in the webinar. Like I flushed it all out more, of course, and like added added the more detailed strategies and things like that. But I didn’t have to figure out what should be in there because she already did it. And it was oh, man, that’s like maybe one of my favorite like unexpected benefits. I made writing 37 pages of webinar scripts and notes a whole lot easier. So we’ll definitely do that again. This was such a great launch and it was a great program. It was something they needed. But I owe so much to Nadine, the amazing copy, the amazing audience survey. I was just so good. So good.
So starting with numbers from the webinar, the webinar registration page that Nadine wrote converted at 85 percent for our warm audience, which is wild and converted at 50 percent for Facebook ads. That’s for a webinar. That’s just unheard of and wild. It’s so good. I love it so much. The webinar itself, which I outlined based on Nadine’s copy and the audience survey, converted at 20 percent for live attendees and then 10 percent total. I didn’t even know those numbers happened with webinars anymore. So that was just really wonderful, too. And then our launch numbers were great. I didn’t really have a gauge on like what conversion rate to expect from our email list because this was a program we were launching that’s totally different than the topic we usually teach. But our people were so excited and they resonated with everything and they were so excited for the results. And we’re like echoing back what was said in the sales page, in the promo emails and all of that. So it was really great. And all of this performed well enough for us to use on Evergreen, which is very exciting for me because that means I don’t have to revert anything. We also had some sales come in from our main email list who wasn’t signed up from the webinar. So all the promo emails Nadine wrote for the program, we also sent to people who didn’t register for the webinar. We had 15 extra sales. So $15,000 in additional revenue came from that. And just something else that stands out for me, apart from the numbers, is that this launch felt fun. And if I was the one working on all that copy, it would have been getting done like the day beforehand. It wouldn’t have been good. The results would have been way less. Like the launch would not have been able to be fun. So I’m just excited to start the next thing now and let it be fun again and see what else Nadine and I can do together. Man, this is a great experience.”
Alright, wasn’t that amazing? what I loved most about Krista’s account is not only did obviously working with me make the launch a lot easier, but it made everything fall into place. Obviously the results were amazing. She smashed her goals out of the park, but
The whole process felt fun and it gave her tools and strategies to turn this offer into a success story without ever having run it. Because we talked to her people, we went straight to the source and yeah, gave her everything to make the pre-launch, the launch, and the offer design a breathe. and I just want to call out at this point that.
Admitting to yourself that you need an objective perspective, someone else to come in and do the groundwork for you doesn’t mean you’re lacking skills or experience. Krista had at that point a whole bunch of successful launches under her belt, her offers were working, she knew how to launch, but some of the most experienced business owners I work with still have blind spots because.
That experience that comes with successful launches builds assumptions that you know going through the motions, repeating what you’ve done previously is going to work for a new offer as well. And often it doesn’t. So when you’ve been in business for years, you start filling in those gaps and you start assuming that you know what your audience wants to hear because you know they’re the same people, slightly different offer, same thing, right? But
Hearing something once or twice is not the same thing as actually checking it against whether that is true for your audience in this instance and in relation to this offer as well. Your customers don’t have your context and they don’t know what you’re assuming about them. What they do is they experience the result of that assumption. And if that assumption is off your whole launch and your whole offer.
simply won’t tickk all the boxes. So what does being an objective observer actually mean? So I came in as someone who knew of Krista, who knew of her existing offers, who is an online business owner as well. So I had some insights, but I looked at her business and her offer and her audience from the outside.
That was the genuinely valuable piece in this puzzle. As an objective observer, I wasn’t smarter than Krista when it came to her offer and what she’s delivering, but I removed the assumptions from the equation and
I unpacked patterns, I uncovered messaging gaps. So things that are so hard to see as someone who has worked in a business, you know, for 10 years.
so what I could do is take the survey responses and what Krista’s audience was telling us and look at it without preconceived assumptions and without lining it up with what I thought was true about Krista’s audience. And that’s exactly what surveying her audience did for the project, for the offer creation, for the pre-launch plan.
And for the messaging, it replaced assumptions with actual data. And that data shaped every single piece of the launch that followed. As Krista said, like the webinar produced itself. The messages in the pre-launch emails hit home. The conversion rate was so high for that landing page
Because it spoke to the core of what her audience was experiencing at the time.
I want to be honest with you at this point here because admitting to yourself that you need an objective perspective and that you need to hand this pre-work over to someone is a lot less about tactics but it’s more about being willing to admit to yourself that you simply can’t see your blind spots. And it takes a level of humility.
which can be hard, particularly when this is the first time that you’re inviting an objective perspective into your business and into your processes. if you are someone who for the past 10 years has been soldiering on yourself, who has been diagnosing your own funnels, this process takes a little bit of work.
Admitting to yourself that now is the time to hand over your customer journey or your offer design, you know, your audience research to someone else. And while it is a collaborative process, obviously, that execution and that analysis piece and actually being able to listen to what the objective observer, in this case me, is telling you, that definitely comes with humility and a learning curve.
and while it’s tempting to think that success means you figured it out. Like in Krista’s instance, you know, she knows how to launch, she knows how to run courses, how to bring things to life. But success in one offer doesn’t automatically mean it transfers to clarity for that next step, whatever the next step is in your business. And the willingness to say, I’m too close to this, I need an outsider’s perspective is a
Business skill that definitely is worth acquiring. So where to from here? If you listened to Krista and myself and you have realized that you potentially are at the point where you need an objective perspective, I have two options for you that touch on this deep work that I was doing with Krista.
as part of this project. So if you want to hand it all over to someone like Krista did and have me do the groundwork for you, we can do that together inside the Intensive which is my 360 degree view of your offer.
We are going to start with deep audience research. I’m going to uncover the gaps for you, the opportunities, the beliefs that need to be shifted, everything that we uncovered for Krista. And I’m going to give you all the moving pieces that need to fall into place for that customer journey to gel and come together beautifully. So that is in a done for you capacity.
If you are someone who likes to DIY but you still want to have that strategic piece to come before you executing, or you already have the moving pieces in place and you know you know it’s simply not working, we can do that together inside the Incubator where you get access to me one-on-one on an ongoing basis via Voxer. it includes customer journey audits and brand touch point critiques.
So it’s a high-touch experience where we brainstorm together, we troubleshoot together, and we help you fix what’s not working or design your next big thing together. And I have just added brand new AI tools into the Incubator. So if you want to DIY that audience research piece while tapping into my framework, there are two powerful tools inside the Incubator.
The first one is an audience survey creator, which gives you totally strategic and totally bespoke questions specific to your offer and the audience that you want to survey. So you can design your own audience survey based on my framework. And the second tool then helps you to analyse the raw data again based on the things that I look out for, and it gives you powerful patterns.
quotables, beliefs, etc. And what it does, because I don’t want it to replace our conversation and our brainstorming, it gives you powerful prompts and things to bring to our next Voxer session. So while you’re doing the groundwork yourself, we are then going to take what you find, brainstorm together and go through that process so you can DIY your own messaging, your own webinar, etc., with strategic groundwork.
that goes before it. So yeah, if any of this resonates with you, if you’re not quite sure where to start, please reach out, DM me on Instagram, or send me a quick email, and we can go from there. We’ll be continuing this customer journey theme in next week’s episode.
thank you so much for tuning in this week. Hopefully, this has been eye-opening for you. If you are stuck in the rut of assumptions. and it has given you permission to invite a different perspective into your business, and it’s shown you the power of doing just that. I will be back in your airports next week.
