(BTS Update) Soft Launch blew my socks off 💣 🧦 🤯

It's been a little over a week now since I soft launched this new Skool community. I thought I'd share with you all what's happened since opening up the doors on 1 September.

My plan was to open up to the first 100 members for free and then switch over to paid once we hit that (which I anticipated sometime this week or next). We hit 102 members before I could switch over, within 24hrs of opening the community! 😱 🎉 🥹

Here is the breakdown of stats so far...

Members: 156

Paying Members: 23

👥 Balance of Members: 31 (personal invites due to paying members of other memberships - 64 invites still pending)

🎉 When we hit the 100 free members I gave out a gift of $50 Credit to 2 people who were the 100th members (because including me, there kinda was 2 people - the 100th and the 101st and I felt that was the most fair approach). I'd like to do more of these for future milestones.

Monthly Payments: 10 x $1/monthly

Annual Payments: 13 x $9/yearly

Course Sales: $63 ($5 Donation + $9 Workshop)

💵 We hit cost-neutral for the $99/monthly Skool fee on Thursday (day 4)

First 7 Days Conversion: 39.43% (151 sign ups/383 visitors)

📈 Discovery Ranking: Best result so far #761 on Wednesday (day 3)

Active Members: 150

💬 34 have already created an intro post (with info about their collab preferences), there are 10 collaboration listings already shared and 7% of members are already at level 3.

➡️ Next steps: Hard Launch with a Challenge (Bootcamp probably) to promote the $1/mo community + my $27/mo membership at the end of the month.

1️⃣ But first, this all happened so quickly and predominately due to the creation of a FB chat group (aka a holding group kinda like a waitlist) for the (177) people who showed interest in migrating over from my existing free FB group.

Because of this, I actually haven't even written any proper emails or posts to share about this new community. And I'd like to increase the ranking as it's now slipped down to #913 as of today - so I have to plan out some more posts in the community + record some 'how this works' videos.

Additionally, I have some courses to set up, because again... this all happened a lot quicker than I expected and I'm now behind in delivery 😬

👀 How you can take note for your own future collaboration events from what I've learnt:

Create some pre-launch buzz with a holding group and keep them updated. I could've done more in the lead-up, but once I was able to share more and when I opened the doors that chat group was going off! This really helped me as well to get excited about this launch, and it created buzz within the community as well.

If you do pre-launch well... Be prepared for things to kick-off a lot quicker than you anticipate and be available to 'ride the wave' of excitement. I was blown away by the response and some days I couldn't keep up with the intro posts - in fact, most I've only been able to like (and not comment) because of this.
Track the data, even if it's just screenshots to start off with and then you can capture it in a table later. I was screenshotting the data from the Skool app each day, mostly because I was excited to see the progress (but in the back of my mind I knew it would be useful) - I missed one day last week (Sunday) which was silly of me. But regardless I now have 9 days of data from this pre-launch and I'll keep tracking this daily to watch for patterns and what I need to do. For example, I can see the discovery page ranking dropping, so I need to do more to encourage you guys to engage more/keep engaging.
Take note of the cheerleaders in your community and keep them in mind for future collaborations or partnerships. In skool we can see and track this through the leaderboards, but you can also tell when someone is a cheerleader because they're commenting on all your posts - how can you reward that behaviour?

Any other lessons you can notice in here that I've missed? Share them below 👇🏻

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