Niharikaa Kaur Sodhi

June 14, 2024

SHS #113: I Lost $5391+ With This Mistake

Reading time: 5 minutes

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Dear reader, you should know this.

You should know this because most online content tells you about wins to be ideal, inspirational, and whatnot.

Because then you'll buy something.

But I owe it to you to be real and to always show you both sides of the coin. I've learnt from others' mistakes and wins so I must give back and discuss my wins... but also my failures so you can learn from them.

As most of you know, I'm currently in the middle of running Summit 21...

I've cut down from 4 to 2 cohorts this year to build my solopreneur course.

But I messed up my entire marketing.

Resulting in losing at least 9 applicants, so that's a minimum of $5391.

And I was expecting more considering it's the last cohort of the year. So in my projection, even if I took only 5 extra people, it would be a total loss of $12,579.

I messed up because I followed the big names who get $50K in sales on a weekend launch. And while I've lost this money, I'm still grateful it happened. You'll soon know why.

What worked so far

The current cohort is the eleventh one.

Previously, 9 out of 10 cohorts sold out.

What helped here was:

word of mouth
talk on LinkedIn a bit
email a little bit for 6-8 weeks

And while word of mouth still happened on and off platforms (I don't tell them to write this btw):

I still messed up.

Wanted to shake things up a bit

I know this sounds like I'm spoilt, but Summit 21 has been selling like hotcakes since we started.

Even with the price increases, people hop in because of the value it adds to them.

And so my genius self-thought - why not shake things a bit? 🤦🏻‍♀️

This led to a new strategy

I created this plan:

And sent lots of emails to thousands of people.

Tens of thousands.

Shocking results

They're not all bad. Okay, just one, the first one is good.

1/ Unsubscribes

The one unsurprising thing that I am happy about is people unsubscribing.

I'm currently paying $1790 a year to run this newsletter.

Every month, I delete people who don't open emails in 3 months. I've deleted over 6000 subscribers in the past 4 months.

So people unsubscribing saves me hundreds of dollars :)

Once I cross 20K subs, I'll have to pay $1990 a year!

2/ ZERO sales from the landing page

No one bought the course directly from the landing page.

Most people sent me money via UPI or Stripe.

This has NEVER happened before.

3/ Less diversity

This is the cohort with the least diversity, for the first time, we have North America and the U.K. missing from our cohort.

That being said, it's really warm and I'm personally finding the calls fun with a few people as opposed to 3x the amount.

Maybe it's because as a person IRL as well I prefer cute dinners over big parties.

Why it didn't work (learn from my mistake)

These are all assumptions drawn from the comparison of previous and current cohorts and marketing.

1/ Email list overlap

One of my readers was kind enough to send me this feedback with a painful subject line and showed me what her inbox looks like:

Now, I have an email list on Gumroad as well as Convertkit. The one on Gumroad builds automatically when people buy my products or grab my free Side Hustler Checklist.

I don't add those people from Gumroad to ConvertKit.

Plenty of people are on both. Like another kind friend who sent me this:

Now, while I did this earlier too, the frequency was much lesser.

This time, the same emails were sent at the same time and there were too many emails.

This was outright spammy.

2/ Too many f'in emails!

Need I say more?

3/ Last minute for CBC probably doesn't work

I've always got last-minute sales for Summit 21. Most of them hopping over on the weekend when we start on Monday.

Most sales for any products come last minute because people are busy contemplating before that but when the gates are closing they need to make a decision ASAP.

So they hop in.

However, a cohort-based course

takes significant time
requires active participation
has live calls

Some people plan in advance and free-up their calendars for it.

Sadly, I didn't give them this time, this time. I always have, but I thought maybe I was overthinking and it doesn't matter.

Biggest lesson learnt

Don't fix what wasn't broken.

I did all this because I was bored with how the same strategy sells S21.

If it sells, it works.

And I tried to fix what was never broken for the fun of it.

Bad move.

Lastly, this is for you:

What works for others may not work for you. I know sending too many emails looks cringy but it gets in lots of sales for most people. I'm just not one of them, and maybe some of you aren't as well.
Don't be an idiot like me trying to fix what isn't broken. If something is going well don't disrupt its flow, let it flow,
Failure is a stepping stone to success. At least I won't do this for my solopreneur course now, which was the plan 😉

Thank you for reading and I'll see you next week at the same time :)

Whenever you're ready, here's how I can help you:

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