A bit of anonymized industry gossip for ya:
A course creator I know approached me recently about promoting his upcoming product launch. It’s a productized Version 2 of a successful live training that sold out a few months back.
(I won’t say who this course creator is exactly, but maybe you can guess.)
The course creator in question is planning the launch of this V2 for some time in January.
Somebody else I know, Chris Dyson, who I’ve taken to calling “the wizard of auctions,” got wind of this news. And yesterday, Chris threw up an idea:
Why not skip the product launch… and run an auction instead?
Why not indeed?
This morning, I sat down and wrote up 10 reasons why auctions can legitimately beat product launches:
#1. Auctions have inbuilt social proof of demand and desire.
This is something you have to work hard to generate in a launch, and even then it’s not 1/100th as credible or powerful as in an auction.
#2. With an auction, instead of guessing what price the market is willing to pay for your offer, you find out directly.
Often, it’s much, much more than you might sell the same offer for in a launch (eg. the $31k winning bid in my auction last week).
#3. If the price the market is willing to pay for your offer is lower than you thought, an auction allows you to adjust on the fly.
On the other hand, a launch of an offer that’s priced too high is likely to be a total flop. (Trying to lower the price in an underperforming launch is likely to put a kind of stink on the offer, and make things even worse.)
#4. Auctions allow you to skip creating the funnel (sales copy, upsell pages, etc).
All you need is a post that lays out the offer, along with possibly some goofy wrapper around it to make it even more fun (eg. my “POOL PARTY” theme from the auction last week).
#5. Running an auction forces you to think about the real (and sexy) outcome your audience really wants.
Yes, it’s still possible to botch this or skip it altogether. But the very structure of an auction at least forces you to think about it, however fleetingly. A launch does nothing similar, which is why so many people launch such crap offers.
#6. An auction allows you to make much more money overall.
Not only is the price likely to be higher (point 1 above) but auctions allow customers to pay for and buy much higher offer packages, even if they are not interested in the lowest-ticket, “front end” offer you are selling, as is typical in a product launch.
#7. Auctions are fun and exciting and audience-building.
That was my main conclusion from my recent auction. Yes, launches sometimes work out like this too, but more often than not, launches are neutral or even negative, if you do them the way most do them.
#8. Auctions are hot and new.
They won’t always be, but they are right now. And there’s value in hot and new.
#9. An auction allows you to successfully sell the same core product, to the same audience, a few days or weeks later, for another boost in sales.
That’s much less likely with a launch.
#10. Auctions can, or so I hear, be repeated more frequently to get the same results.
I can’t confirm this directly. But the experts on online auctions say, you can run the same auction every quarter, and it will work just as great. On the other hand, from what I’ve experienced and seen, run the same launch every 3 months, and you will get dramatically lower results.
I talked to the course creator who was planning the January launch.
He said he’s definitely open to the idea of skipping the launch, and doing an auction instead. We’ll talk some time in the next few days in more details, and we’ll see what happens.
What about you?
Are you planning a launch?
Did any of my 10 reasons above make you get a bit jealous about the idea of running an auction… and a little wary of doing your planned launch?
If so, hit reply. Tell me a bit about what you’re planning, and I can tell you if I think you might have a winning auction on your hands.