Beta Launching with Joey Ragona

You’re listening to the Kajabiverse podcast and today’s episode is all about taking the overwhelm out of your online business, simplifying your life and releasing your new course or membership with a gentle Beta Launch.

When you're just getting started all the talk of funnels and lead magnets and paid ads and launching, can be enough to put ANYONE off, but it doesn't need to be that scary!

Sure, in time you'll likely want to add more bells and whistles to your strategy, but the first time you launch your program it can be as simple as some genuine conversations.

Joining us in today’s episode to tell us all about how he uses beta launches for his own programs & also teaches it inside of ATLAS, is the amazing, Joey Ragona from Strategic Business Academy

Highlights from this episode:

🎙️ Relationship Building over Funnels and Automations

🎙️ Where to put your time & energy

🎙️ Building a "container" of ideal clients

🎙️ Starting conversations with invisible people

🎙️ Curation of contacts to make it easier at the "back end"

🎙️ How much "runway" (time) needed for a Beta Launch

🎙️ Repurposing social content for emails

🎙️ Email frequency

🎙️ How many students do you need for a Beta?

🎙️ No fancy slides, no sales page, no pre-prepared training modules!

Links mentioned in this episode:

Joey's Free Business Training

Take the Dream Business Assessment

Learn more about ATLAS

Email Joey

About the Host:

Hello! I’m Meg Burrage, a Kajabi Coach and Launch Strategist who combines her love of all things Kajabi and Digital Marketing, with family and adventure.

Aussie mum to 3 young kids, married to a grumpy Dutchman, and living currently on Anguilla in the Caribbean, I leap out of bed every morning to help others achieve the online success, freedom and flexibility that I am so grateful to have in my own life.

In this podcast, we look deep beneath the surface at how some of the most successful Kajabi Heroes, the superheroes if you will, are generating 6 & 7 figures annually and how their strategies can be applied within your online business.

Oh….and if you’d like help in building out any of the funnels and strategies we discuss, be sure to check out Funnel Club!

Social Media Links:
Facebook | Instagram

Thanks for Listening!

Thanks so much for listening to our podcast! New episodes are released monthly and we'd love for you to share it with others who you think might benefit.

Transcript

You are listening to the Kajabi Verse podcast and today's episode is all about taking the overwhelm out of launching with a simplified approach to beta launching even when you're just starting out with zero audience. Now there are a million courses out there teaching us various launch strategies and funnels. In fact, I teach funnels to my own students, but a lot of those techniques are quite advanced.

You might come to love them like I do in time, but if for right now you just wanna keep things simple and complexity free, then a small beta that you feel using just real conversations with a select few people might be just the solution. Joining us in today's episode to give some insight into how he goes about Beta launching is the lovely Joey Ragona from Strategic Business Academy.

Joey teaches the beta launch technique to his own students inside of his Atlas program and today he's sharing with us a good dose of reality. That might be just what you needed to hear. For those people who are listening in to this episode who were brand new to Joey Reg's world. I mean like firstly shame on you, but apart from that, can you give us a little rundown of what it is you're up to and who it is that you help?

Well, well that's a big question. I guess most of the time I am helping heart-centered changemakers. Usually coaches and practitioners who are online, who are already kind of in the weeds, they've tried something, hasn't really worked for them, they've hit the dip, they've crashed, they don't know where to go, they're not ready to give up. Cuz as you know,

some people want to give up when things don't go right. But these are, like I said, change makers. They have a mission and now they need specific guidance to remove all of the overwhelm complexities and all that thing. And I just make everything simple for them and help them 10 x their business really, really quickly without any overwhelm whatsoever. Like in terms of when I say overwhelm,

exhausting launches, emails and all that stuff, automations that we all love to do, but we think that it needs to be in place now. So I hope that gives you an an idea of like who those people are. Now, obviously we're chatting on the Kajabi verse podcast, but the people that you help in your world, they're not necessarily Kajabi users.

Have I got that right? Yeah, that's right. Most of them are because those words I hang out with. But yeah, they're just online entrepreneurs. Most of them are using Kajabi though. Okay, and and then your program itself, would you call it a membership? Not necessarily. Because when we're talking specifically about Atlas, which is the basic,

the cohorts, they're, they're constantly going. And when someone pays for that, they pay one time and they're in forever until they get that promise, which means I'm just walking with them making sure that they get that promise of the investment back, which is five times their money, right? So it's kind of a membership because they continue to come back as many,

many times as they want to. There's always new up-leveling of the program, but it's not like a regular monthly thing where they're paying me recurringly and I don't add things into a membership area. Like here's a new training. So the membership part of it that I would look at is I'm there every single week basically. And you can come in and we can have a discussion and we have a brainstorming session.

So that's the kind of the membership piece of it, but they're not paying as a membership. Okay. So Joey, we're chatting beta launches today and launching with email funnels and keeping things really simple because I see a lot of people who, you know, they come into this world, they want to beta launch their program, they've got no idea where to start and building out a funnel.

And for a lot of people they don't even know what a funnel is. So if you were chatting to someone inside of your program who's starting from scratch, they want a beta launch, they've got no audience. Can you outline for us what steps you would take just to keep things really simple? Just as a preface through this, like I'm not against automations,

I'm an automation geek. I love it so much. I love piecing things together, but the people that come into my world, they're overwhelmed with it and they think that that's what's needed. And what I did was I ripped out, or I didn't rip it up, I just stopped all the funnel or the major automations that I was doing to try and make things work and focused on the relationship building,

which means that I need it to be very simple in the communication or quote unquote email marketing launch beta type of thing. So I just want to put this in the context of what we're talking about here, which will make sense as we go through. So there's a couple of ways we can look at this. I think the context first comes down to the person themselves on where they're going to show up to build the relationships.

So we can look at this two ways, whether it's paid to get in front of audiences or not. At the beginning of the of the process, I'm always about not, it's a slower process, but a lot of us don't have the time and money to put into cold launches and all these other things and that's where the funnels have to come in and all these other things.

So that's really overwhelming. So you're gonna put time in somewhere and I believe it's always about putting in time into building the relationships. Now a beta launch in my world is not a $97 launch. It is a 500 and over launch and even 500 to me is a low launch. So let's put that into context. That means if you're following my lead,

it would be you don't need very many people to make a five figure launch or even a four figure launch. Like if you wanna make $5,000, it's not really that difficult. Five people and a thousand dollars, right? And that might freak a lot of people out who are starting, which used to me as well. But this goes to the relationship piece of it.

We can talk about that. Secondly, cuz I want to go back to the original question, which is you need to hang out in places where people are, where your dream clients are in order to showcase your talents so that they reach out to you and you can build a container for them. For me personally, the way that I do it is basically I moved them into my own Facebook group.

Now I don't have the Facebook group as a, okay, once they're in, let me start bombarding them with sales. That's not the key. And it doesn't mean that I never offer anything, but it's very, it's rare, but it's there to showcase what I'm talking about. Like, let me help you, let me ask questions. So that would be how I'm building that container.

When people get into my Facebook group, one of the things I ask is, can I have your email because I want to gift you something, which is usually a, a live workshop with me. So they get an extra bonus that's kinda like a one-on-one thing. So they truly do get a gift. But in building my email list at the same time,

My question is how do you get people initially into the Facebook group, you know, cause obviously we hate, you know, all those cold comments that come out of nowhere into your dm, some random person inviting you to their Facebook group and you think, God, you know, I, I don't even know who you are. But how do you go about starting those conversations to even invite them into your Facebook group in the first place?

That's a really great question. And part of Atlas is what I teach this is it's the invisible people that you're really gaining trust with. And this is the hardest part about it all, because I never cold email, I never go in and say thank you for, you know, responding to my thread in Kajabi. I'd love to get to know more about you.

I'd never do any of that stuff. And I totally against that. What happens is, if you do it the right way, if you showcase your talent and actually go in and help people go figure and not expect anything from it, then I promise you, and you either have to believe me or you don't. That that the invisible clients, which I call them dream clients and training,

they're always watching you and those are the people that are looking at what's happening in the thread. So let's say you and I were conversing over a thread in Cjab or something and I'm helping you or I'm answering your questions, it's probably not you who's going to reach out to me. And that's the mistake because then you know, other organic marketers might suggest,

well reach out to Meg now that because she's warm to you, she's, she knows you and that would probably get under your skin. You know, it might work a couple of times, but more than likely it's gonna be like, I didn't ask you to DM me, so I don't do that. It's when someone else, let's call her Kim,

riches out and looks at our conversation and said, I love what you and Meg were talking about. It's kind of along the same lines and you know, I'd just love to talk to you or, or that's just the conversation. It just opens the conversation. That's how it happens. So it's not a great concrete strategy to say this is exactly what's gonna happen.

If I spend two hours in here, I'm going to gain 10 people on my list. So I'm just a big believer of abundance of giving so that the right people see that that's what I'm truly about. And then they reach out on their own and that's how they move from a chat, let's say into my Facebook group. And by the way, I don't invite everybody in that chat to my Facebook group because I'm all about curation,

which makes everything easier at the back end. The more I I focus on who's the right person at the beginning and make it harder for them to get into my world, the easier it is for me to offer them later because they've been curated. I love it. So if somebody's starting like from scratch and they think, okay, I'm gonna go and create myself a Facebook group,

create myself a container and grow my audience in there ahead of my beta launch, how much time do they need to give themselves to, to get enough people into that container? That's a really good question too. And there's no standard answer for it, but I would start with three months. I would say that a three month window of you constantly going in and helping would begin to be build that container.

That doesn't only mean that you're in groups or something. And by the way, you can't be in multiple groups. That's another thing I figured out was just focus on one or two. That's it. Like be truly helpful because what happens is you, you become an authority in the group. People get to recognize you. And then the other thing is too is if you're all over the place,

nobody knows what you do. And that was a big mistake of mine too because you're probably the same thing. We have a lot of skills and we can talk about a lot of things. So we become the jack of all trades and people like, that's fantastic, thank you for your help. And then nothing was really happening. My nothing was growing because nobody really knew how I could help them.

Once I focused in on this is what I ab absolutely do and only focus in on those conversations, the right people looking for that help were like, you really know what you're talking about. I think I need to speak to you. And so it took around three months for me to really start getting any traction there. And so I continuously do that.

And then just so your listeners understand this, this is not something that you see like multiple leads coming in every single day. If that's what you're expecting, it's this is not gonna work. That's where you might want to go to a paid and figure out something there, which we could still talk about being cool and rather than, you know, bringing somebody in and trying to force them to buy something that,

that's cool too if you want to try that. But I find it easy, a lot easier to just do it this way because that's my superpower is like talking, helping people and showcasing what I can do without selling anything. So it's about three months. About three months, okay. So we get them into the group and then we offer them some kind of valuable gift and in return they give us their email address.

Yes. Where do you take it from there Serving? They go on my email list and they serve in both places. So I show up in my Facebook group every single day and at the beginning of it, it's not gonna be very engaging because it's only you. So I would encourage you to get maybe a friend like Meg to come in and go between each other.

Like I'll ask a question and you answer it or you like it or then you an, you ask a question the next day and I'll answer that and for the two, three months or whatever, or two months, it's only you and me. But people are watching that again, it's the people watching going, oh this is kind of cool. This is not all about them selling something,

it's they're really helping each other or they're giving value and then you just repurpose that stuff in your email as as well. So because not everybody is looking in the Facebook group every day and same thing as email. So where can you show up the most to give the most value and then repurpose that time to put it into an email or vice versa. That is an excellent strategy cuz you know,

something else I think of is, well, how nervous my students get when it comes to actually writing email copy. Like what am I going to write about? I'm not a copywriter, you know, it's the writing the emails ahead of a launch is the bit that takes everybody the longest amount of time they procrastinate for weeks about writing those email sequences. But if you can repurpose,

you know, information that you're putting into your Facebook group, then I think that's an excellent strategy. Yeah, I think that a lot of the times, a lot of my content right, comes from answering questions. And this is important because I think that everyone listening to this, in my opinion, it's you need to be doing something that you are really experienced that and you know it in your sleep.

It's not just something that's like, ah, what else? Let me try this thing or I'm going through the same thing. You have to have that experience because then you can naturally just go into any conversation without any prep notes or anything like this. Like today, there's no prep notes I have, you can ask me anything you want about beta launches and all these things.

And I'm pretty sure I've got the answer and because I, I do it every single day. And so the way that I respond, here's another tip is every time I'm responding, as you know, you can tell by I haven't shut up yet since we talked. So I talk a lot and I write a lot, I write a book, like I'm basically writing a 350 word or 700 word response.

It would be crazy for me to just post that and forget about it. So there's a process in my system. So when I write a post or response to you, I copy it and I put it into my database, to my notion database. So I, I always have data and it's tagged. So if it's talking about a beta launch or an email beta launch and I'm like,

let me look for it. I know what your question is and I know what I've answered and I can easily take that and talk about that in an email. Here's how you do a beta launch in an email or something. So if you're posting in your Facebook group every single day, are you emailing your list every single day? No. And I'm not posting in my group every day.

It's not that at the beginning of it, it was a little bit more where I'm posting or I'm just adding value. Even if it's just a quote, like I love this quote, it gets so easy to create content. Like honestly for me, look at the books behind me. I can pick any one of those books, take a passage and go,

this really resonates with me. What about you? Like it's so easy to do these kind of things and then the group takes over. But when it comes to emailing, it's at least twice a week and if not three. So I'm trying to be in front of them all the time, but not overly in front of them. But they need to see that I'm giving them value,

which comes to the easy beta launch, which I'm sure we'll talk about through the email. All right, so the beta launch is coming up, we're touching base with our list a couple of times a week. Is there any set structure that you're following ahead of this launch coming up? If you're familiar with the product launch formula, something like that? No,

I don't do that. What I do is, it's pretty simple. Everything I just told you now is all about the thing that I could teach them, right? So the emails are all geared around that and it's kind of warming them up around three weeks before my launch. Then I'm using a, by the way, this is coming up in a couple of weeks.

It's always related to the email itself. It's not a specific beta or launch email. It's always relevant, it's always relevant to what's happening in my world. Now are there some that I might repeat? Sure, because that was a really great email and I might use that. But remember this is a live launch for me. It's not a a sequence that is automated.

They don't go into an automated sequence. It's always done from the broadcast type of emails. So I'm always talking about what's relevant to the market at that point. And then it's more of a, by the way, if you liked what I just talked about up there, I'm having a cohort coming up that kind of relates to whatever I talked about in the email.

And that's how I do it. There's really no sequence structure to it except that I'm going to start introducing the idea that it's coming up in a couple of weeks. And then all I ask for is if you wanna know more about this, let me know. And that's what they do. Then that goes into a conversation. You ask them to just hit reply and let you know.

Or do you encourage them to go and jump on a wait list? They don't go on a wait list. Okay. Yeah, they don't go on a wait List. Any reason you wouldn't put them on a wait list? Because I'm curating them because I again want the right people in my group and I want responses and I want people who are, who are ready and able to move ahead.

A wait list is just like, yeah, just let me know. I'm kind of interested. And it doesn't mean that every single person replying to me is, is going to buy or move on, but it's more of an engaging conversation because in those conversations they sell themselves. It's how that conversation happens. And so again, because I'm doing a thousand dollars launch or whatever,

a thousand dollars person, I only need 10 people if I wanna make $10,000, right? I don't need a lot of people on a waiting list to go to a webinar and a launch series. Again, there's nothing wrong with all that stuff, but for me it's just like, I'm just gonna do what I do every day. Go help in a group,

go to my Facebook group, help their take some of that information, email every single week and then put a little bit of a PS by, by the way, I'm doing this thing. Anybody want to talk to me? Let me know. That's it. So my brain is continuously focused on help, help, help, help, help offer a little bit.

And then when the, when the email comes in, it's like, yeah, here's some questions. Let me ask you and have a conversation. I love It. So it's pretty simple in my, in my world It is so simple. Okay, so with any luck you get your 10 people, they just hit reply and say, yes, Joey sounds perfect.

Like tell me more. And you have that one-on-one dialogue with them and then invite them to enroll when it's ready. That's Right. If you don't hit the numbers of people clicking reply and opening the dialogue, do you inside of a beta launch still go into your full-blown sales email sequence? There is no sales sequence. Look, there's no sales sequence. That's the whole point of this.

What I think you're asking me is what if you don't get enough people in the launch? Right? Okay. So the answer is I still go through Only three people have opened the dialogue and you think, oh, can't run my eight week program for three people. I do at the beginning of the beta program, it's not about making money, it's about learning.

If your beta is validated and you, you are actually gaining from them being there with you. So I, I look at this always as as abundance. Like okay, these three people now are going to tell me exactly what I'm missing if I, am I not communicating something right? All these things. So it helps me be clearer in my marketing messages later on.

I can't tell you how many times I've updated my sales doc, my Google doc, that's how I basically sell it. And because of all the conversations that come through or the questions that come through, I'm like, this is brilliant. This is what I gotta put in. And that Google Doc sells a $3,500 program. It's a Google doc maker, there's no sales page or anything else like that.

So think about that. And all that language came from the conversations inside the beta, whether it was with three people or 30. The lower the group the better because they feel, they feel connected and feel heard. They just feel more connected to you With a beta, do you create your program as you go along or you know, cuz a lot of my students are perfectionists and they would feel really nervous about not having the program ready to go when they open the doors to sell it.

So they try and prerecord and edit and make perfect all their module content. Whereas I'm sort of more from the, the train of thought that I'll just, I'll just create it one week at a time and we'll just keep, you know, just two steps ahead of the students and that'll be fine. So what's your approach? Yeah, I'm with your approach,

which maybe two weeks, maybe two weeks, I might have some kind of the slides ready to go, but definitely some kind of an idea or a mind map of an idea. But here is the biggest part at the beginning of the beta and it's still, even to this day, I, I don't, I'm not sure if it's on there cuz I,

this is my ninth round of doing them. But I think for the very first ones, definitely there was a a paragraph in there that says this is a beta. And what this means is I have no idea how this is gonna run. This is how I think what I'm gonna teach you. And by the way, there's no detail on what I'm gonna teach.

It's more about, I'm gonna show you the message navigator, I'm gonna talk about the dream client dna, which helps you do this. It just gives you the tools. It doesn't tell you module one's gonna be here. Module two is this, I don't do any of that. So I'm basically forewarning everybody a this is probably gonna break, there's gonna be many things that are not working in the system,

in the emails, all these things. This is a beta for a reason because you're here to help me design this and it's only for those ki type of people who can handle this type of thing. So I'm very upfront with everything I do so that I can release that pressure of trying to be perfect and something to say, well I I didn't sign up for this.

Where's the fancy slides? Where's all this? Or your, I didn't get your email or the link was broken or whatever. I'm like, you, you know that this was the way it was gonna go. I can't tell you how many times make I've put out like next week I'm gonna talk about this. And then the next week comes in, I'm like,

you know what? I was doing the slides and I thought this is not the right one to put in. So here's what we're gonna talk about today. Nobody in the last three years has ever said, you duped me. You screwed me. This is not what I signed up for. They were happy that I was adjusting things as I went. I love that because I think it,

it goes a long way to relieving the pressure that people put on themselves. You know? Or I just, I can't launch this until it's perfect. And of course we know it's never gonna be perfect, but the amount of pressure that you put on yourself the first time you launch a course, it's crazy. Yeah. And the one thing I learned from Dan Sullivan was that first of all,

our 80% is someone else's 100%. That's the first thing. The second thing is that, and this wasn't from Dan, this is from another, I forget who this I learned this one from, but it was about the beta, which is that every time you put out a beta or you're doing a pro a program, even if you've been doing things for 25 years as a practitioner or something,

cause I get that a lot to you. This has worked for 25 years and I'm like, it doesn't matter because everything is a, in this is an assumption, even if you don't think it is, everything that you put in a slide or you're outline is an assumption. And the reason for the beta is to validate that assumption. And I guarantee you that you're probably missing something or the way that you're teaching it doesn't translate well enough.

So they're gonna ask you questions. And that's why I love betas because I'm thinking, here's what they need to know. And you know, as, as well as me and, and I'm sure every one of your students is that they're an expert and we forget the basics. Sometimes we think that people already know that, but sometimes they don't know it and they're asking clarity questions,

you are like, huh, they should have known that. But then you put it in and your, your program becomes closer to being perfect, but it will never be perfect. But if you go in with the assumption that, or actually the, the knowledge of that, it is an assumption of what you're teaching that needs to be validated. It's so much easier.

How do you go about pricing your beta Joey, you know, would you be a fan of the big discount for the first round or would you prefer to just charge what the, you feel the program's worth and perhaps they're invited to come back for the next round as well? All beta users get a, a founder's price. So I, but I don't use discounts,

I use gifts. So the first thing you have to do is what is it worth? Like what is it truly worth someone? You need to have that price first. So I just told you that Atlas is $3,500. Right at the beginning of it, I still said like that was three years ago. I said this is going to be $3,500. And the first Beit around users were in at a thousand dollars.

And here's the other part of it, every single time that the beta was launched, it went up. So they know that this is truly a one time price. I don't mess around. Everybody in my world knows that when I say something, it's for real. There's no catching ba bait and switch and all these other things. There's no trickery. It's like this is going up and this is the price you're gonna get.

You get rewarded for that. I think that's good and I think it can be tricky, I think to put your prices up. Especially if you do say, oh I'm gonna put the prices up. The price will go up with every beta, in your case you started at a thousand. If you didn't get the numbers the first time, when it comes to the second time to launch the beta,

you can feel a little bit uneasy about putting the prices up. Yeah, well that means that you, you don't have things nailed. Like this is the hardest part for me to talk about. Even in my, in my group. Cuz we talk about this all the time and they're like, well, nobody wanted it or nobody paid for it or whatever.

And I say, well everything that goes wrong in our business unfortunately is our fault. And it's very hard to swallow. So you're not talking to the right audience, you don't have the right offer, you haven't done the enough research on the thing. Like all these things. It's not just about like this is a great topic that people are talking about.

Let me go do this, you just haven't nailed it yet. And that means you gotta go back to the market. So that's a tough one and it's a tough one to swallow. Let me talk about the going up every time. Like that's kind of the plan. It didn't mean like there was I think two times Meg where I didn't raise the price from one cohort to the next or Yeah,

there's one time I didn't do it because it was during like, well the pandemic was majorly happening. I think it was in the January of whatever it was of 2021 I think it was. So I didn't raise the price then, but normally it would just go up. And here's the other thing too, to your point, you will begin to get less people coming in as the price goes up.

That's just the way it is. But that's the reason why I'm totally a fan of premium pricing. So imagine at $1,500, if I got X amount of people, whatever the math is, and let's say whatever, there's 10 people there and then it's $3,500 but I only got five people. Like I dunno if the math really works out, but you get where I'm going with this,

right? I'm making the same amount of money and I only need people over here. Yeah. What's the perfect number of people for you, Joey, inside one of your programs? 20. Okay. E even in my own programs I sort of think, geez, I'm never gonna have a kind of program that's got 300 plus students in it because, you know,

I, I would hate not to be able to help everyone on that individual basis. Yeah, 20 to 30 is is probably like the range. Like if I had 25 people, I wouldn't say yeah, I'm not gonna take another five. But when it gets over like 30, 40 people, I don't want 50 people in my, in my group.

Yeah. Even though it's great money and all this, like you said, I just cannot handle that many conversations because everybody, it's not that everybody wants to get on their spotlight seat or have a a time, you know, with a one-on-one, but you have to have it open for them. Hmm. And they, they don't want to feel like they're in this void.

Yeah. For those people who are sort of thinking, oh look, I don't have time in my life to go and run a live program. I'm just going to create something that's evergreen and you know, I'll follow everything that Joey's saying, but I'm not gonna turn up live to teach it. You know, I'll grow my audience, I'll create my container and then I'm gonna release my all year round.

Yeah. Evergreen program and people will just join. Any words of wisdom there? It didn't work for me. Like, I mean I believe that the way the world is going with online is experiential programs and we've been sold the fact that Evergreen is great, which is, it is, there's certain pieces where we can turn evergreen eventually, but because of how much we are disconnected now with everything going on and it's getting even worse,

the human element is so important. And that's why I believe, and I've proven it to myself and everybody that's in Atlas over the last three years, is that if you're gonna show up and do like a q and a call anyway, let's say this is sometimes they build that in. It's like, here's four weeks and I'll show up twice a week and answer questions.

Why not just do it every single week or just do it the two weeks live and show up and serve those people. And you can still have the evergreen component cuz I do have that, I still have like a Monday evergreen component, but that came in after version five because I wanted to make sure that everything was right. And that's the other part of it because I found that when I was doing it before Meg,

is that I was creating things and then put it out and then I would get feedback or I'd learn something new or something and I was just too lazy to go back and rerecord the dang thing again. I'm like, that's good enough, leave it. And it never really transformed anybody. I can tell you that every single time I do these, which I,

I just love them so much cuz the people are great that I'm learning so much and it helps me always kind of recreate, it's not reinventing the wheel, it's just tweaking the next piece of it. Oh, that's a really good way. I answered that question about this. Let me add that in so the next time it's gonna be even better. And that only makes the next people coming in even happier.

So to me it's all about showing up and serving, which is the reason why your prices need to be higher because you need to leverage your time. And if you're focused there and you're, you know, selling a lower priced piece over here in Evergreen and launches and automation, great, that might work. But I find that everybody in Atlas has tried that.

That's basically where they're coming from. They're all, they've all tried that one and it didn't work and they're like, I can't believe how easy this one is. I, I have an email through yesterday actually from a lady who I think I better send in your direction cuz she reached out to me and she said, look, I haven't been able to sell this course at all.

You know, like I have not monetized it at all. I'm about to give up. I've put a hundred thousand dollars into coaches and sales copy and got social media people and all the things and this program is not selling. And I went and you know, I asked her for the link and I went to have a look at the page and you know,

it's, it's positioned as a six week program, but it's six weeks of self-study with no live element to start right now, $297. And I was like, oh, I'm really sorry to tell you, but I don't think that that's going to sell. You know, I think maybe one day an evergreen version could eventually sell, but when you are just starting out,

I would highly encourage you to go back and think about running this live. 100%. Remember, I don't know if you've read Russell Brunson's book years ago he was talking about like when webinars, I think, I'm not really sure if webinars are still that popular, but when they really were one of the shakeups that the industry was looking at or everyone reading it,

he said, you have to do like basically a year of webinars live before you put it on evergreen. That shook the whole industry up too. Like what? I gotta show up live into the webinars. So it's the same thing here. And I can tell you that I've had handfuls of people in Atlas tell me, there's no way I would've bought this had you not been in here because here's maybe the mindset shift that everyone needs to hear.

People are not buying my program, they're not buying the group program, they're not buying how to email or how to talk to people and how to sell. They're buying my insight and guidance specifically for them. That's what they're buying. So yes, it's kind of coaching and everything, but they're sort of, they're buying the methodology, they're buying, how does Joey do this?

But I could easily put that into an evergreen, but they would not complete it. I can, I promise you that. And you know as well as I do, how many times have you seen people or the stats say, well people only go to module two and they never finish the course. Well there's a reason because they're not guided enough, they don't know and they're bombarded with every program trying to promise them the same thing.

Whereas when you go in because of your brilliance, experience, knowledge, expertise, all of that, and sit with them and train them on something and say, what are your questions about this? Where can I help you? Where are you stuck on these things? You tell me something, I'm like, okay, and I get you out of the weeds like right away on that call live.

Everything changes for you. And that's the power of this. So you're willing to pay for that, right? You're paying for someone's guidance. That's what masterminds in marketing or or like, like big coaches are all about. It's you're paying for the coach for their, their guidance. It's same as if you went to go pay Tony Robbins on how to sleep better or how to get outta productivity.

You're paying Tony Robbins for his 40 years of brilliance and that's what people are paying you for. I think you're spot on do, and I think that is a reality check that a lot of people need to hear because we are sold this idea that we are just gonna go and create these evergreen courses that will generate passive income while we're sleeping. And people,

so many people in this industry just don't wanna put in the effort of the time to go and deliver a live program and then they're surprised why it's not selling, Right? It's where do you wanna spend your time? And I think that this also translates into one other point here, Megan, this is so important that I believe that we need to focus on one thing and one business,

one area at least until you get to a million dollars. That's it. And this is all you live and breathe and talk about. The more you do that, and it has to be your superpower by the way too, something that this is easy for me. And if you do that, not only do you get known for that because that's all you talk about.

It's like you talk about it every single day and it lights you up because it's, it's part of who you are. Like all the stuff we're talking about here, I could talk about, as you can tell 24 7 about this stuff and you can ask me anything and I'll come at it from all kinds of different angles and perspectives in order for you to push through to the breakthrough.

Does that make sense? So if you don't get something, I'll come at it from another angle so it does get you through the next phase. If it was something that I was just trying to make money at or like whatever, how many times am I gonna repeat myself here and it would drain my batteries? That's not good. So I understand if someone is just like,

I'll just do this because I can, you know? And that's probably not your audience, but I've met a lot of people like this and they're like, I'm just gonna set it and forget it and make a whole bunch of money. Cuz that's what they said. I can make money while I'm sleeping. But that's kind of true. If you want it by you're dealing with all the other back ends,

the refunds or this and that. Anyway, that's a whole other rabbit hole we can go down, but Joey, I could keep you here all day asking you questions on this stuff. You clearly know so much about it and I think for a lot of people out there listening, it doesn't matter how many questions I ask you on this, there's gonna be more to ask.

So for those people who are, they're resonating with everything that you are saying, how do I tell them to make contact with you if they're interested in learning more about Atlas? Well, we can give them my email address or we can invite them to the Facebook group. Whatever's good for you. My email address. Alright, can I give that? Yeah,

we can give your email address. You wanna give it right now or shall I put it in the show notes? Yeah, You can put it in the show notes and I'll give you a a link to my Facebook group and they can join there and Okay. Hang around in my universe and ask there if that's okay with you. Absolutely. Well thank you so much Joey for coming in and just pulling back the curtains on what it takes to have a successful beta launch and I guess putting in perspective for us what successful actually means.

There are none of these crazy numbers and I had a hundred people through my first launch and six figure launches straight off the bat because I think the non rose tinted approach is so much better for people who are just getting started. Thank you Meg. I really appreciate this opportunity and just sharing my knowledge because really I just wanna stop people from sacrificing their life.

That's what happens a lot of times is they're trying to build this thing out and and looking at other people's sandboxes and playing in their sandbox when you really don't need to. You can just create something that is built around your life first. And it doesn't need to be a lot of numbers, make it simple and then grow later, but simplify first. And even if it's one or two people,

it's all good. Brilliant. Thank you Joey. We will have you back anytime you'd like to raise us with your presence. I will get you back in for another episode. I appreciate you. Thank you. All right, thanks Joey. I hope you've enjoyed our podcast episode on beta launching as a simplified strategy for enrolling students into the first or next cohort of your online program and all without the overwhelm of overly complex funnels.

If you'd like to learn more about Joey and his Atlas program, I'll put some links in the notes below and if you'd like to join us for a live mini Atlas masterclass with Joey, why not join us over inside a funnel club?