There’s one sentence we hear from experts more than any other: “I did everything right and sold nothing.”
Usually, they’re telling the truth. The landing page was clean. The emails went out on schedule. The ads ran, people registered, and a good number of them showed up live. If you went through the launch with a checklist, every box would be ticked.
And still, the sales didn’t come.
When that happens, the instinct is to look for what broke: the page, the ad, the offer slide, the close. Sometimes one of those really is the problem. But across the launches we’ve run, and the ones we’ve been brought in to fix, the cause usually sits somewhere less visible. One decision, made early, was a guess. Nobody checked it. Everything after it was built well, on top of it.
A launch is a stack of decisions
Every launch stands on a handful of decisions made before anything gets built. Who it’s for. What problem it solves. What the title promises. Which funnel it runs on.
Get those right and a fairly ordinary page can sell. Get one of them wrong and the best page in the world is selling to the wrong person, or promising the wrong thing.
The hard part is that a wrong decision doesn’t look wrong. It looks like a decision. You made it with confidence. Maybe a mentor agreed. Maybe it worked for someone you admire. So you build on it, and you only find out it was a guess when the numbers come back.
Two of us spent years on the launch team of a global education company. We ran two launches a month, and every one took six weeks: two weeks deciding, four weeks building. Nothing was built until those decisions were confirmed. That team launched more than any other we’ve worked in, and it was also the one that spent the most time deciding. The checking is what made the speed possible.
The four guesses we see most often
When a launch looked right and didn’t sell, it almost always rests on one of these four.
1. The need: “People want this.”
A lot of expert products start from what the expert wants to teach. That’s natural. You know the material, you love it, and you can see exactly how it would help.
The guess is that the market sees it the same way. If people don’t already feel the problem your product solves, or they describe it in different words than you do, no amount of marketing will make them want the solution.
The check: what problem does this solve, in your buyer’s own words? Not yours. Theirs.
2. The person: “It’s for anyone who…”
When a product is “for anyone who wants to grow”, the marketing ends up speaking to nobody in particular.
There’s a second layer, too. Some of your buyers already know they have the problem and are looking for a fix. Others don’t know yet. They need completely different messages. Show an offer and a discount to someone who doesn’t know they have the problem, and you’ve skipped the part where they decide they need help at all.
The check: who exactly is it for, and do they already know they have the problem?
3. The promise: “This title is good.”
The title of a webinar or workshop does more work than anything else in the launch. It decides who shows up before anyone sees your offer.
We once ran a workshop called “Double your income.” It did what a title is supposed to do: people registered, and people showed up. Then the sales calls sold nothing. Nothing was wrong with the execution. The title had filled the room with people looking for more income, and the program wasn’t built for them.
Everyone liked that title. That’s what made it a guess. It was chosen because it sounded good, not because anyone checked who it would bring in.
The check: who would this title bring into the room, and are those the people who buy?
4. The funnel: “It worked for them.”
This is the one we see most from experts who’ve taken a course or two. Someone you admire runs a five-day challenge, or a webinar with a particular structure, and it works. So you rebuild it, section by section.
But a funnel isn’t a template. A webinar fits some products and some buyers. A challenge fits others. And the funnel you’re copying often works because of what sits behind it: years of audience, hundreds of testimonials, a name people already trust. Copy the structure without any of that and you get a launch that looks right with nothing holding it up.
The check: why a webinar, or a challenge, or something else, for this product and this buyer?
Why it’s so hard to see your own
If these were easy to spot, nobody would make them. Three things get in the way.
The first is that you’re too close. You know your product so well that the gaps fill themselves in. A buyer reading your page doesn’t have that.
The second is pressure. Once a launch date is set, decisions get made in a hurry and never revisited. Building feels like progress, so the deciding gets squeezed out.
The third is newer. AI can now produce the page, the email sequence and the ads in an afternoon, and they all look finished. It’s very good at building on whatever you give it, including a guess. It won’t tell you the title is attracting the wrong person. It will write you a better version of the wrong title.
We use AI every day, for research that used to take us weeks and for first drafts. But every decision it touches still gets checked by someone who has seen it go wrong before. That’s the part nobody can do alone, because you can’t check your own guess.
Try it on your last launch
Take your last launch, or the one you’re planning, and answer the four checks:
- What problem does it solve, in your buyer’s words?
- Who exactly is it for, and do they know they have the problem?
- Who would your title bring into the room?
- Why this funnel, for this product?
Now go back and mark every answer you can only support with an opinion: “I think”, “I feel”, “it should”. Evidence is what buyers have told you, what the data showed, what happened last time.
The answer you marked is probably your guess. It isn’t a verdict on your expertise. It’s the place to look first.
We have one rule for every launch we run, ours included: never build on a guess.
Go through it with us
On Wednesday 11 November we're running a free live workshop on exactly this. We'll go through the four guesses with real examples from launches we've run, and you'll check your own launch while you're in the room.
It's about 90 minutes, live 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). You'll leave knowing which guess is most likely sitting under your next launch.