Hey Reader,

Today’s newsletter is a bit different: I’ll take you on a journey behind the scenes of my recent launch for The Profitable Content Engine workshop.

We’ll go through everything: what worked, what didn’t work, what I F-ed up, my emotional state (spoiler: it wasn’t good), and more.

BTW, I've packaged everything (including Convertly Lab, but without me awkwardly sharing my browser tabs this time) into an evergreen masterclass you can binge-watch anytime. If you've ever struggled with content overwhelm or 'blank page panic,' this is exactly what you need. Grab it here!

A couple of caveats to this launch story:

• This is not a “steal my launch strategy” thingie. You can, of course, borrow things from it, but I urge you to make sure they make sense for you before doing so.
• I aim to be as exhaustive as possible. However, when you’re very involved in something, you tend to miss things that others might deem important but to you, they’re trivial. If there’s something you’re curious about, reply and let me know, OK?
• This is a very “mid” story. I didn’t make 6 figures from my workshop. I’m not writing it to brag; I’m writing it because I know we all need more stories like this.

Before we dig in, a quick message from our partner today, one of my favorite newsletters right now. If you value critical thinking as much as I do, you’re going to love it!

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Subscribed to Idea Sled? Cool, let’s get on with our story. First, the numbers.

How many people registered for The Profitable Content Engine workshop

26 people registered in total:

• 11 in the first 30-ish hours, mainly because the first 10 seats came with a 20% discount.
• A few in between the first and the last day
• The bulk of the registrations occurred in the last two days, including a couple who registered after we went live. Living life on the edge — I love it!
• 18 of them bought a higher plan or an upsell offer.
• The majority of sales came from the waitlist (people who explicitly said that they wanted to know when registration was open). There were ±60 people on that waitlist – some of them opted out, others joined at the last moment, and so on.

26 registrations means 0.64% of my email list. However, I think it’s more accurate to calculate based on your open rate. Since my open rate hovers around 40%, this takes us to 1.6% of my audience opting in.

Am I happy with the number of sales? Honestly, no.

It’s on par with my typical conversion rate for new products but I thought this one would attract more people because:

• Content is a broader topic, so I was expecting more people to be interested in it than in Inbox to Income, which is all about newsletters. It’s fairly similar to Audience Accelerator — a topic that nearly everyone in my audience cares about.
• My audience is larger than it was when I launched Audience Accelerator.
• I had strong “I need this” signals, which is why I built it in the first place.

I have my suspicions as to why the number of registrants was lower than I had expected. More on that in the F-ups section below.

Overall, though, I’m calling it a success. The Profitable Content Engine will live on as an evergreen product and there will be plenty more opportunities to sell it.

Let’s look at the launch strategy:

Phase 1: pre-selling and pre-suading

I knew I wanted to do this workshop for over six months when I realized that all my strategy sessions had at least a couple of content-related questions, with some being entirely content-focused.

While it’s clear that there was demand for education and information on this topic, I needed to make sure that my audience was willing to invest in this.

Six weeks before the workshop date (June 19th), I switched to creating content-related content almost exclusively — I know, very meta.
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• All my newsletters were about content or AI for content because The Profitable Content Engine workshop comes with an AI-powered writing assistant.
• My social media content mirrored that.
• For four out of these six weeks, I asked for a micro-commit instead of a sale. I asked people to join the waitlist so they know when registration drops.
• The waitlist CTA was embedded in all newsletter issues and many of my social media posts. Important: topic alignment was crucial here. I needed a natural segway to say “and if you care about this topic, we’ll dig even deeper into it during the workshop”.

Personalized pre-selling

I wanted to make sure that this workshop answered real, throbbing pains. So here’s the flow I created for the people on my waitlist:

→ When someone signed up by clicking a link or through a dedicated form, an automated email was triggered. This email contained a poll that asked them what was their biggest content-related challenge. This is what it looked like.

→ After voting, everyone got assigned a tag. I used those tags to send different emails depending on what they had answered. For instance, if you answered that it takes you too long to create content, the email you got would talk more about how the workshop solves that challenge than the other ones.

Side note: the Kit system is lovely but imperfect. For a vote to be registered, the user needs to confirm it on an external page. A lot of people skip that step, which means that not everyone’s vote was registered. For me, this meant I had to write 4 different emails: one for people who didn’t vote/whose vote wasn’t registered, and another 3, one for each poll option.

Yes, it was a lot of work. And yes, it was worth it.

Personalized copy works like a charm IF and only IF you don’t BS your people. All versions of my (pre-)sale emails were true. I never promised a fix I didn’t offer.

During the pre-selling phase, I emailed the people on the waitlist once a week and kept promoting the waitlist to the others.

The selling phase

I opened registration 8 days before the workshop with a bonus: 20% off for the first 10 seats.

• The people on the waitlist got first dibs — on a Wednesday. They bought 8 out of 10 seats.
• The other 2 were bought on Thursday, when I announced the workshop in my regular newsletter. Overall, it took a little over 24 hours for the discounted seats to sell out. I see this as a win.
• Lastly, I announced that registration was open on social media. I always do this because I want my email subscribers to have first dibs on everything.

During this phase (8 days):

• I emailed the people on the waitlist 3 times
• I also emailed the people who clicked on the link in the newsletter but didn’t buy.
• I featured it in my newsletter twice.
• I never emailed the full list. Many people told me this was a mistake. Perhaps it was, but I still want to keep some sort of newsletter hygiene and avoid sending emails too frequently.

TL;DR: I came up with a personalized system to email people based on their pain points, and it worked! Overall, I wrote over 30 different emails about this workshop. Everyone on the waitlist got a 5-8 emails, depending on when they signed up and when they bought.

Fun facts

1. There was no one, not a single buyer from outside my email list, even though I wrote about the workshop on social media. Some people may have bought after seeing a social media post BUT they were already on my list. This is a great time to shamelessly plug my masterclass on building a profitable newsletter — grab it here if you want a channel you can depend on for sales.
2. The first and last days were the biggest ones in terms of sales. This is pretty common, but what I didn’t expect was people buying AFTER the workshop started.

OK, now let’s do a post-mortem on it — time for the juicy stuff: what crushed, what crashed, and where I royally screwed up.

What crushed

The workshop itself went without any major hitches. Last time, I couldn’t share my screen, and I did the entire thing without slides. Screen share worked this time, and so did everything else — I’m counting it as a win.

The attendants were amazing (thank you again!). They had great questions, and they helped me demo Convertly Lab, the AI-powered writing assistant live.

The feedback was great too! Live attendees seemed to love Convertly Lab and the entire workshop and the testimonials that came in so far are stellar. Still working on collecting more of those.

What crashed

Attendance (number of registrations vs number of live participants) was low — more on that in The F-ups section. I expected that because I knew there were four people from Australia on the list, and the workshop was very late for them. I hope you enjoyed the replay, friends!

Since I see my Australian audience growing, and especially since I love working with Australian people, I need to find a way to make it easy for them to attend new workshops. I can’t fight time zones, but perhaps I can find a solution that works across continents.

Another thing that worked against me was abysmal social media reach. Organic reach is bad anyway these days but some of my posts about the workshop got as few as 200 views — even those that didn't have a link.

This is out of my control, so I'm not dwelling on it too much.
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Where I F-ed up

I made two major mistakes.

The first one is the reason why I think sales were lower than expected: I talked a lot (too much!) about the AI-powered writing assistant.

I essentially got high on my own supply. I was SO damn excited about it and about how it surpassed my expectations that I couldn’t shut up about how it takes you from vague idea to goal- and pain-aligned content.

While that’s all true, people are kinda fed up with AI solutions that promise the world. I tested a ton of marketing and content bots, and most of them were…meh.

The people in my audience probably did too, so they were less excited to hear about yet another custom GPT.

In fact, three people wrote to ask if this was an AI-centric product BEFORE buying. They got their seats after I assured them AI was probably less than 15% of the entire show.

If you check out the landing page, you’ll notice that the custom GPT is mentioned but not featured as prominently as it was in my other marketing assets, which is a more accurate reflection of how I structured the workshop.

Still, this created a fracture between emails/social media and website copy. I know better, and I still did it.

The second one was choosing a really, really bad date. I initially wanted to do the workshop on June 12, a week before the actual date. But, at the last minute, I switched to the 19th because I wanted more runway to promote it and pre-sell. If you’ve been through The Profitable Content Engine, you already know how important that is.

I stand by that. Still:

• June 19th is a bank holiday in the US, where most of my clients are. This explains both the low sales and the low attendance.
• It’s too late. By June 19th, people have summer and holiday on their minds, not learning.

Other than these two massive F-ups, there were minor glitches that I don’t sweat too much because they’re inherent to any live event, especially one run by a team of one:

• When I shared my screen to demo Convertly Lab, I forgot to open it in a new window, and everyone got to see my 79 open tabs. Someone who watched the recording told me it gave them a panic attack 😅.
• I lost my train of thought during the live a couple of times but, again, I think that’s normal if you’re not reading from slides. It is, right?

As far as I know, this was it. But, if you went through The Profitable Content Engine (live or recorded), I’d love your honest feedback. Hit reply and let me know! I’ll be running more workshops in the future and I want them to get better and better.

A personal note (skip if you’re not in the mood for TMI vibes)

For some ungodly reason, I was a ball of anxiety before this workshop. The human brain is fascinating: this was NOT my first workshop, nor was it on a topic I felt insecure about. In fact, I’ve been in the content game for over a decade; I also run a content marketing agency — so this is my favorite playground. I know this shit.

Still, Monday to Thursday before the workshop, I aged in dog years. I lingered over all the apocalyptic scenarios you can think of and occasionally considered refunding everyone and telling them that the workshop is cancelled.

I pushed through, but it was far from easy. I blame it on exhaustion — I hadn’t had a proper holiday for a year before that workshop. I won’t make that mistake again.

Post-workshop, I felt this hangover-like crash. I wrote about it on LinkedIn and my awesome people told me it has a name: the Comedown Effect. Massive thanks to the brilliant Bryan Yates who gave me genuinely helpful ideas in a single comment. Thank you, Bryonce, it really helped! (BTW, if you don’t know Bryan, you should fix that.)

I’m telling you all this because I know I’m not the only one whose self-confidence varies or entirely disappears when you need it the most. Wherever you are in your business, these things are normal — you can’t ride the same high forever.

And yes, it happens even to Fortune 500 CEOs and solo business operators who look like they have all their ducks in a row. Ducks are weird and hard to herd; no one can have them in a row constantly.

Here's the big takeaway: launches (and ducks) are messy AF. They're a lot of work, too — don't let anyone fool you that a half-assed email and a social media post are enough. But you don't need perfection — you just need to strategically lean into what works and pivot from what doesn't. And, for the love of god, don’t do it on a bank holiday.

Want to skip the chaos and jump straight to creating profitable, binge-worthy content (without existential dread)? Get the Profitable Content Engine masterclass — it's evergreen, anxiety-proof, and guaranteed to keep your ducks reasonably aligned.

​Grab your access here and spare yourself from aging in dog years.

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That's it from me today! See you next week in your inbox. Here to make you think, Adriana ​

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