From Terrified of Webinars to Confidently Marketing and Making Her First $1,000
Does the idea of talking in front of a group of strangers to launch your product terrify you? Have you hesitated moving forward with your product idea because the thought of articulating it to others seemed daunting?
You’re not alone. For example, my student Laura Watson told me last week about how she often overcomplicates things to the point of overwhelm, and she’s felt like she was the only person in the world struggling to make these big, scary decisions.
“My biggest terror would have been hosting my own webinar, and I knew I needed to do this to launch my membership program effectively, but I was terrified! I knew I was going to need some extra help, and even just how everything was broken down in VALIDATE really took away a lot of the overwhelm for me.”
Laura is an online watercolor painting teacher through her business, Laura Watson Art, who specializes in painting botanicals.
She wanted to launch a membership site and start earning recurring revenue from her business, but it felt overwhelming and scary for her.
“The problem I was trying to solve by joining VALIDATE was not knowing what to focus on when validating a business idea and also just drawing it out way too long. I'm a perfectionist and I'm a detail-oriented person, so that can be a real benefit to me, and it can also be my greatest downfall.”
Before making the investment in VALIDATE, Laura wondered if the process would work… Would she hit the targets? Could she make her first $1,000 and validate her business idea?
Well, she did.
The progress Laura has made since VALIDATE is huge! When she started, she had her website and a YouTube channel, but what she really wanted was her own personally-branded paid membership site.
Through VALIDATE she was able to put that site together — starting with figuring out the best platform to use to creating the content, and making it all the way to hosting her first webinar, something that was her greatest terror and hesitancy before.
“I had a goal of a minimum of 5 members joining, I really wanted 10, and anything extra would be amazing. If I had 12 people join, then I’d break past the $1,000 mark. I sold 12 memberships, so I got my double digits, my 12 people, and I grew past that $1,000 mark! It was exactly what I’d hoped for.”
This goes far above the money for Laura, however. The webinar solidified that what she had to offer was something people wanted, and for the first time it felt like she had a real, true audience and business.
“I’d still be dreaming about the membership site if I hadn't joined VALIDATE. I'd still be hemming and hawing about whether I should do it, how I should do it, what I'll be like if I did it, will it work?”
An obstacle Laura faced AFTER her launch that she didn’t expect was a hard hit of impostor syndrome, as she thought the success she found must have been a fluke.
“I almost overwhelmed myself because I hit all my goals that I got to the point where I was like, now what? I feel like when you do hit your goals, there needs to be some kind of disclaimer to be like, ‘Hey, it can be really overwhelming to succeed.’ I wasn't expecting that.”
Here’s Laura’s recommendation for VALIDATE:
“If you are really passionate about your business idea and you want to see if it will work for you, then VALIDATE is a great way to do it because it either will work or it won't, and I think that so many people just get stuck dreaming of if it would work or how would it work, and you never go all in and push through the hard part. That's what helped me, and that's what I would recommend for someone else, so they can just get over it right away and move on to the next step.”