How we sold out our course in 6 minutes:

And had hundreds more demanding to get in after we sold out.

In November: Tested demand and sold out 50 early birds in 57 minutes.

In December: Added 2250 people to a waitlist for the remaining 127 spots.

January 2nd: Sold out in 6 minutes.

And my DM’s have been constant with people asking to get in.

Here’s how we made the launch of the Un-ignorable Challenge (a 21-day group challenge to learn to build an audience) a huge success:

1. Great partner

2. Naming

3. Priming

4. The Curiosity Gap

5. Novelty

6. FOMO

7. Demonstrating expertise

8. Social proof

9. The “fresh start”

10. Even more urgency

11. Mystery

Let’s dive into each.

1. Great partner

First, we did the course with an incredible partner, Katelyn Bourgoin.

She’s a buyer’s psychology expert with a social following of nearly 150,000. A newsletter of 30,000+ (and growing fast).

And she’s honestly one of the smartest marketers I’ve ever met.

She has proven to be an expert in audience building.

And she also knows and is able to teach the psychology behind WHY people like a piece of content, and WHY they make buying decisions.

And how to engineer a course that keeps people motivated to become creators.

She’s the perfect partner to teach audience building.

2. Naming

When we created Un-ignorable, we wanted a name that we could own. A name people hadn't seen before.

One that conveyed the core idea of audience building.

We drew inspiration from creators like Dickie Bush and Jack Butcher and their courses:

• Ship30for30: It tells you you’ll be shipping 30 pieces of content for 30 days.

• Build Once, Sell Twice: It succinctly encapsulated the idea of creating scalable products rather than unscalable service businesses.

We went for Un-ignorable because it conveyed the idea of becoming a figure that is impossible to ignore.

And it’s a word that no one says. Making it easy to own.

3. Priming

Once we had the name, we started using it throughout our content.

Katelyn started using it in her social posts.

I started using it in the growth tactics I share in Demand Curve’s 63k+ person newsletter

This prepared people for what was to come.

Un-ignorable became a familiar term. It slowly seeped into our audience’s mind.

4. The Curiosity Gap

We did the early bird launch on Cyber Monday.

On Sunday, we teased our email list with Un-Ignorable by poking fun at the brands that do constant sales around Black Friday—an indication that they’re not hitting their sales targets.

We spoke to WHY they weren’t seeing the demand they expected.

Then we teased that something was coming tomorrow.

This intrigued people and made them lean in to hear more.

5. Novelty

People are used to being sent to well-manicured landing pages.

For our early bird sale, we sent people to a Google Doc.

Not even a Notion page—an ugly old Google Doc.

This made it stand out. Who even does that?

And, people skim websites. They read docs.

This allowed us to pitch Un-ignorable in a narrative format.

Start with the problem: The pain of pouring time into content that no one reads. And then completely losing motivation.

We then reveal Un-ignorable as the solution to this pain.

All while the # of spots tick down:

6. FOMO

For the early bird, we offered 50% off for 50 seats.

The reason we chose Google Docs is that they show how many others are looking simultaneously. Visitors could see that 90 people were vying for only 30 remaining spots.

And we manually updated the number with each sale.

They were gone in 57 mins. We only had ~300 people waitlisted at the time.