One of the first conversations we have with a new client is about what we’re not going to do yet.
They usually arrive wanting to see something. A new landing page. Fresh ads. A webinar title. That makes sense. A page you can click on feels like the launch is moving, and a document doesn’t.
So we explain why nothing gets built for the first one to three weeks, and what happens in that time instead. This piece is that explanation.
Where the rule comes from
Two of us spent years on the launch team of a global education company. Every launch there took six weeks: two weeks of strategy and buyer psychology, then four weeks of building. We ran two launches a month on that rhythm, and no launch started building until its strategy was signed off.
You’d expect a team that launched that often to cut corners on the thinking. It was the opposite. The thinking is what let it move fast, because nobody had to rebuild a page halfway through when someone realised it was speaking to the wrong person.
We’ve kept that rule everywhere we’ve worked since, and adapted it to every client. Today we call it Phase 1, and it comes down to four documents. The founder signs off each one before anything gets built. When the launch has a live event, a webinar or a challenge, there’s a fifth: an interview about the event itself.
What the four documents decide
Each document exists to answer a decision that, left unchecked, quietly becomes a guess.
- The product overview decides what is being sold, and why from you.
- Market research decides where the product stands next to everything else your buyer is seeing.
- Avatar intelligence decides who exactly it’s for, in all their versions.
- Positioning decides what you promise, the offer, and the funnel that carries it.
Skip one and you still make that decision. You just make it by default, under launch pressure, and you find out whether it was right after the money is spent.
1. The product overview: “Why you, why this”
A funnel is built to sell a product, so we start by understanding the product better than anyone except its creator.
You’d think every founder could explain their own product in a paragraph. Most can’t, because they’re too close to it. So we run an interview we call “Why you, why this”, and it has two halves.
The first half is about the person behind the product. Who are you, who do you help, and what makes you credible? What connects you to this product, and why do you want it out in the world? Together those answer the question every buyer asks without saying it: why should I learn this from you?
The second half is about the product itself. What’s the one transformation it promises? What does life look like before and after? Who is it not for? How is it different from everything else on the market, and why does it actually work?
The founder answers in their own words and as specifically as they can, because vague answers produce vague copy. Then we fill the gaps from everything else: the course itself, transcripts, past webinars. And we go through the product ourselves, the way a buyer would.
This is also where the funnel starts to show itself. A high-ticket program delivered live with coaching usually sells through an application and a call, not a price on a page. A lower-priced, pre-recorded course might sell straight from a webinar. The funnel follows the product, never the other way round.
For a telemedicine brand there’s no author to interview, so this becomes a deep dive on each product instead: what it treats, what’s in it, and which claims we’re allowed to make. In a regulated category, one wrong ingredient in an ad is a compliance problem, not a copy problem.
2. Market research: where you stand
Your buyer never sees your launch on its own. They see it next to everything else they’ve been offered that month.
So we look at three things. The market itself: how aware people are of the problem and of this kind of solution, and where the opening is. The competitors: we go through their funnels as a buyer would, read their ads in the ad libraries, sign up to their emails, and put screenshots of all of it on one board. And where you stand next to all of that: why you, and not one of the others.
We also look at the founder’s own content. Their best-performing posts show which topics the audience already cares about. The audience has voted with its engagement, and it costs nothing to read the result.
AI has made this part much faster. A research document that used to take weeks now takes about two days. Reading it didn’t get faster. Every page gets read, every source is listed, and the founder checks the facts, because they know their industry better than any prompt does.
The trap here is copying. A competitor’s page often works because of what sits behind it: thousands of reviews, years of customers, a name people trust. Copy the layout without that and you get a page that looks successful and doesn’t sell. So for every idea we find, we ask one question: can this apply to us, and how?
3. Avatar intelligence: who buys, in every version
“Women, 35 to 55, interested in wellness” isn’t an avatar. It’s a targeting setting.
Most businesses have one main buyer and several variations of that person. For a program that trains beauty professionals, the main avatar was a woman a few years into her career, good at the work and still financially unstable. Underneath her we found five variations: still employed in a salon, working alone without a system, running a small business stuck at a ceiling, working abroad, and stuck at low prices.
For each one we map the pain points, the dreams, the frustrations and what an ordinary day looks like, as specifically as we can, because that detail ends up in the headlines. For high-ticket offers we go further and ask for 30 to 40 recordings or transcripts of real sales calls, from people who bought and people who didn’t. The people who didn’t buy give you the objections in their own words.
The variations then become the audience segments for paid ads, each with its own angle. The salon employee and the woman stuck at low prices might buy the same program for different reasons, so they shouldn’t see the same ad.
We once audited an education company in a local market selling high-ticket programs, over €2,000 each, built step by step with coaching. The programs were excellent. The problem was upstream: the workshops that sold them promised something else and pulled in an audience the programs weren’t built for. We rebuilt the strategy for each author. Fewer leads came in, and the sales calls got stronger. Founders tend to look at the first number and worry. The second one is the one that pays.
4. Positioning: where it all comes together
The last document is a marketing deck: the strategy for the whole launch, built from what the first three found.
It covers how sophisticated the market is and where the product sits in it. It looks at the problem from both sides, what the buyer thinks it is and what it really is. It maps the beliefs the audience already holds. And it defines the product’s unique selling proposition, the one reason to choose it.
This is also where the offer gets decided: the price, the bundle, any discount, and how long it stays open. All of it comes out of the strategy rather than out of a meeting the week before launch.
And it’s where we sometimes say something a founder doesn’t want to hear. If the research says the topic they love won’t sell, we tell them before anything is built around it.
How this works when you work with us
In a Launch Pack, Phase 1 is the first one to three weeks, depending on the launch. Nothing gets designed, written or set up until the founder has signed off all four documents.
In a Growth Partnership, the same principle runs at the level of the whole business: the first month is an audit, a strategy and a roadmap, and only then do we build.
Either way, you do this once per product. When you relaunch six months later, you don’t start over. You go back to the documents. They also become a strategy library for everyone who touches the product, the copywriter, the ads specialist, whoever makes the social content, which is how every asset ends up telling the same story.
None of it is a guarantee. Phase 1 gives you decisions that are written down and checked, so that when the market answers, you can tell what it’s answering.
When a client wants to skip it
Sometimes a founder asks us to go straight to building. The launch date is close, or they feel they already know their buyer.
We understand the pressure. But skipping Phase 1 doesn’t remove those decisions. It only means they get made as guesses, under deadline, by whoever happens to be writing the page that day. A conversation about the avatar costs a lot less in week two than after the launch.
So we’ll shorten it when the launch allows. We won’t remove it.
A short version you can run yourself
If you’re launching without a strategist, answer these honestly before you build anything:
- Can you explain what your product changes for someone in one paragraph a stranger would understand?
- Who is it for, at what level, and who is it not for?
- Have you gone through three competitors’ funnels as a buyer, all the way to checkout?
- What do they have that you can’t copy, and what’s your version of it?
- Why did the last five people who didn’t buy say no?
- Can you say in one sentence why someone should buy this from you, now, instead of what they’re already looking at?
If one of them stops you, that’s the part to work on first.
Want to see where your launch is guessing?
On Wednesday 11 November, Simina and Sara are running a free live workshop on the four guesses that sit underneath most launches that don't sell. About 90 minutes on Zoom, at 6 p.m. Madrid (CET), 5 p.m. London (GMT), 12 p.m. New York (ET) and 9 a.m. Los Angeles (PT).
And if you'd like Phase 1 done with you on your next launch, apply to work with us.