# The Inside Track on Thousands of Successful Product Launches

Channel: Rob Walling
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C7oji3yCd0Y
Duration: 13 min
Language: English
Words: 2761
Transcript page: https://viewrankai.com/tools/youtube-transcript/C7oji3yCd0Y

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[0:00] [Music]

[0:07] [Music] yeah so my name is Ryan Belk and I work at Gumroad I was gonna give a brief explanation what comer it is but I think maybe everyone already knows we're a digital commerce platform that empowers creators to be able to sell what they make directly to their audience and what I want to talk to you talk with you about today is data and specifically the data that helps you go from the ideation of a project or a product that you're working on to the actual launch of this product because data can be really really valuable when you're looking at numbers and case studies when you're

[0:45] gearing up for a product launch or even after you've launched a product and you're thinking about how to maybe improve it it can be really valuable and sometimes this maybe looks like taking a look at past data from your past product launches sometimes it's maybe emailing some friends and saying hey you guys have a similar product I would love to hear about you know things that you've seen work really well and then also be reading blog posts there's a lot of people here that share their numbers publicly so you can read about things that have worked really well for them but today I want to to sort of lift the

[1:12] veil on the data that we have around product launches around pricing or on conversions because we have millions and millions of interactions with thousands of different creators ranging from ebook authors to people selling courses to films all the way up to people like Justin Bieber and Coldplay and Bon Jovi and everything in between and so we had this amazing amount of data on what works well with selling things online in terms of in almost every sector that but specifically I want to talk about conversion pricing things related to launching and gearing up for a launch of a product and so I've sort of siloed these into three specific topics and

[1:51] we're gonna spend about three minutes on each of these topics and the first one is pricing so as you're gearing up for a product launch for thinking about launching something how many of you have heard this always steer your pricing so most of the room has heard this a lot of people today have talked about it and yesterday there's been a lot of blog posts written about it and the reason is because this works and it works really really well for driving additional revenue for a product launch but one of the hardest things about tiered pricing is figuring out what those tiers should be and here they are so these are the best

[2:27] performing price tiers on gum Road for people that use sort of a three priced here for launching a product and I didn't put absolute numbers in here because this is gonna change a lot depending on what you're selling so if you're selling a book you know the low the lowest here might be fifteen twenty thirty forty dollars but if you're selling like a course that creates a ton of value for maybe people that are wanting to learn how to design their own web applications or something similar that low tier might be fifty a hundred two hundred dollars but the important thing is the multiples is making sure

[3:02] that there's significant distance between your prices so your three tiers shouldn't be fifteen twenty and twenty-five that would be an example of bad price tearing and this is what we've seen work best is this one x two point 2x and 5x and that 5x might seem really high but that's actually on the low side of what we see do really well so some people were priced their top tier at ten times higher than what their bottom tier is and we'll look at the data into that in a second but it's really important to distance these tiers out and to have a very very expensive package almost

[3:32] irregardless of what you're selling and again the reason why this tiered pricing are people say to always to your pricing is because it works so on average people that use tiered pricing on Gumroad make five times higher than people that launch a product was just a single price point or a single package so 5 times more revenue just by creating three different tiers of products and then what about the top tier so it can be really easy to think that that top tier especially if you're pricing at five six seven eight times higher than your bottom tier it can be easy to feel like that's too expensive people aren't going

[4:05] to buy it maybe it's it's a ripoff or maybe there's not enough value there but if you do a good job pushing a lot of value into that package what we see is that 62 percent of the revenue from a product launch on average comes from that top tier so there's a lot less until in terms of total sales number of sales the volume is a lot less but because of the price because it's five or six or seven times higher it actually generally makes up for a majority of the revenue from a product launch there's a lot of case studies and people in this room that used to your pricing that you

[4:35] can talk to they were be able to sort of validate this data for you number two I want to talk about the pre-sale process and not the pre-sale process in terms of actually selling pre selling the product but pre sales meaning the things that you're doing and gearing up for launch and the number one thing you need to remember when you're gearing up for launching a product or even after you've launched a product is that emails are gold they're incredibly incredibly important for you regardless of whether it's a SAS app or an info product or book whatever it is emails are incredibly incredibly important and it's incredibly important

[5:08] to build an email list a dedicated email list in addition to whatever your normal newsletter list is for or whatever product you're going to be releasing and the way to get those the way to get those email addresses is to incentivize people to give them to you so how many of you have seen a launch page where someone said hey I'm launching this thing that's booked this product whatever enter your email address to hear more updates or whatever how many of you have seen that almost everyone in this room and when I see those sometimes I put my email address in but other times I just say huh you

[5:38] know I'll probably hear about that on Twitter I don't really want to get a bunch of emails from that person maybe one of my friends will email me about it when it comes out I don't really need to get my email but if I go to one of those pages and it says hey if you give me your email address then I'll give you 20% off when when the product comes out if you buy in the first say 12 hours I'll give you 20% off I'm much more likely to put my email address into that field and get into that list another way that people do it is they'll maybe give

[6:01] me the first chapter of the book for free or the first you know a few minutes of the film or the first you know section of the course or any some sort of past product that they've worked on I'll get that for free in exchange for getting on their list for a future product and these dedicated email lists they work really really well just like tier pricing they're incredibly powerful so products that launch to dedicated email list and so this is product launch to a dedicated email list vs. products that just launched by hey here's a blog post here's my new product you know some Twitter Facebook sharing all that kind

[6:34] of stuff on average three times more revenue from the product launches that go to a dedicated email list versus just sort of the standard channels so incredibly powerful incredibly important and how many of you guys have either heard of or read any of Sascha griefs stuff okay so a few people so Sasha is a designer an author from France who lives in Japan and his most recent book is called discover meteor it came out last year and what he did with the launch of this is a really great example of how all these things come together and how powerful they are and so Sasha built a

[7:09] dedicated email list he told everyone that you could get I think he gave a launch discount or maybe the first chapter for free if you gave it email us if you made your email address to get on his dedicated list for this book and he promoted it through blog posts through sort of marketing it to the meteor community he's a genius marketer so he did a lot of things really really well miss and the conversion rate on this email list and this is not like a click-through of you to purchase conversion rate this is the percentage of people that were on the list that ended up buying the one of one of the

[7:37] copies of his book was 15% so every hundred people that he got on his list 15 of those went on to buy his product and again he did this really really well he did a lot of drip marketing he did a lot of follow up emails to people that weren't converting so this is very high but he had 15 percent conversion of a total people on the list that went on to buy and the average purchase from these people was over $65 because he used tiered pricing his top package was two or three or four hundred dollars and so the average amount that these people were spending were $65 which is almost

[8:10] double the average purchase of people that didn't come from his dedicated email list they just found it on Twitter or through a blog post or through a friend and these numbers are impressive and it's it's it's very cool what he did but it's even more impressive when you combine these two numbers and when you realize that his average revenue per subscriber from his email list was over $9 and a this is important because it shows how key having a dedicated email list is and how much work you can put into getting a new subscriber if you're gonna get $9 for every single one but also if you're doing any marketing

[8:41] leading up to your launch and you're trying to build that list if you can get a number like this it allows you to back into how much you can spend whether it's ads or retargeting whatever it is to get a new subscriber onto your list so emails are gold they're incredibly important for product launches for sat for everything you're doing but specifically when you're gearing up to release a product and that sort of period before you launch dedicated email are absolutely huge number three three minutes on this is the actual launch and so we have a lot of data on on product launches on you know people that are

[9:15] launching products whether it's an album whether it's an info product whether it's a book it's a film and there's a lot of things that people after the fact see that they come to us and say hey you know I didn't realize this was gonna happen or I wasn't expecting this or hey this was this happen is that okay is that normal and so hopefully this section can sort of give a little bit of ideas of what you can expect sort of the average way that things play out so the first thing is revenue distribution and specifically if you're launching a product this can be really really

[9:43] surprising and it's something that you can combat really well and when you see this curve in a second you'll see why you want to combat it but this is the the average revenue of a new product launch over a couple time period so the first 24 hours generally 55 percent of the revenue on average render from a product launch comes in that first 24 hours the next week twenty percent so another twenty percent of revenue coming in that next week and then the next month after that another fifteen percent of the revenue and so you see that 75 percent of the revenue from a product launch on average comes in the first

[10:17] like eight to ten days and again this is not what you should shoot for you should shoot for flattening out this curve and there's two people here there's probably more than two people but two people here that do this really well and it found ways to flatten out this curve both within their ecosystem and by sort of creating content that drives a lot of sustainable and ongoing revenue or Josh Kaufman and Brandon done so highly recommend reading their stuff or talking to them about how they've been able to combat some of this and then the second piece from the launch is the conversion rates and so there's a lot of everyone

[10:51] has audiences in different places there's social channels there's blogs there's email lists there's places like Reddit hacker news all these things and you can use all these to market your launch but it's important to know what the conversion rates you can expect are from these different channels so starting with YouTube we see average conversion on YouTube about 2.2 percent and this is much lower than the average across you know all products on camera they're seen Twitter a little bit higher 5.4% and then Facebook 6.3% so this is you know and the average across all social channels is maybe somewhere around 4% again much lower than the average across all products on

[11:30] government but then what about email the average conversion for products marketed to emails to an email list is nine point four percent and this isn't the Stata talked about earlier so this is actually view to purchase conversion so people that are clicking through an email to a product landing page and then purchasing nine point four percent on average so it's almost double what you see from social conversion and that's the reason why emails are so incredibly important then what about hacker news any guesses on where hacker news comes in in terms of conversion rates one point two percent I can't tell you how many product launches we've seen where

[12:07] they're a post or the actual product has gone to the top of hacker news and it generates tens of thousands of unique visitors to the page and it's great for getting traffic and scary for getting email subscribers but it's not great for selling stuff I've seen a lot of people get to the top of hacker news get 50,000 uniques from it and not sell a single product from the traffic that came in from that so hacker news is not going to be your number one number one source for marketing and email social if you can but email is definitely the way to go so real quick to review pricing tier your

[12:40] pricing the pre sale period emails are incredibly important during that period and then in terms of revenue distribution the wheelhouse for that is the first ten days again you want to try to flatten that out think about ways that you can do that but that's sort of where moat the bulk of the revenue is going to come in if you just launch a product using sort of a standard launch marketing so thank you guys so much I'm Ryan at alright Gumroad is my email address and at Dell cuz my twitter handle so we'd love to be helpful in any way that I can feel free to reach out

[13:08] thank you guys so much you [Applause] [Music]

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