When it comes to creating a digital product, we spoke to launch strategist Steph Taylor on the podcast and asked how to get your product on the market at a certain time, if there is a certain time to create a launch, and how to make your launch super successful.

What’s the ideal digital product launch timeframe and plan?

I generally would say 60 to 90 days. You should start to educate your audience around what they need to know in order to be ready to buy your product. For example, if I’m launching a membership in July, that’s going to be about 3 months prior to starting the process of getting them to that point to be ready for what you’re creating.

It’s also about positioning you as an authority. So sharing lots of value with them, getting to know them, having them look to you as the go-to person for your area of expertise. And then, it’s also about growing your audience because this can take a long time.

But if you’re consistently posting every day on Instagram for 90 days, you’re going to grow your audience a lot quicker than if you’re just showing up once or twice a week. So it’s really like 60 to 90 days of consistently showing up, consistently delivering value, consistently educating your audience. And then when you do get to the point where you’re actually introducing the product, then by that point, they’re like, “this is a no brainer for me”.

Do you have any secret sauce tips for anybody looking to launch?

Talk to your audience. Really listen to what your audience has to say. Listen to the words they use. Listen to the feedback they give you, even if it’s not what you want to hear. Because sometimes we’ll only hear the good part of the feedback, but we’ll ignore the bad part. And that actually ends up making a big difference. How they describe the problem might be very different to how you describe the problem because you’re the expert. They often don’t know what the problem really is.

My mentor, James Wedmore uses this analogy, where he says, imagine your audience is walking around with a headache. The problem is that they’ve got a headache. You’re an expert, you know that their headache is caused by dehydration. But if you went to your audience, and you said, “Hey, would you like a cure for your dehydration?” They’ll say, “No, thank you, I’ve just got a headache”. So it’s really about learning how to speak your audience’s language. That’s my biggest secret sauce tip.

What if they have initial objections to your product?

You have to learn to pre-empt your audience’s objections. So taking the same analogy, you’ll say, “Here’s a pill for your headache”. And they’ll say, “Oh, but I’ve tried lots of other pills, and none of them have worked yet. So why is this one going to work any better?”. You can often find those objections or excuses disguised as questions.

For example, “Will this work for me?”. These kinds of questions. The best place to answer these objections is in your Frequently Asked Questions on your website. When you look at my FAQs, these are all the exact questions that I had from people. It’s such a simple way to do it, but it’s so effective.

Any other personal advice to anyone with a business or side hustle?

Don’t be so attached to the outcome that you don’t enjoy the journey. That’s probably my biggest tip. For so long, I was just so focused on hitting goals. So now for me, this has been a lot of slowing down and spending a bit of time doing things that I enjoy, not focusing on working 12 hour days, and hustle, hustle, hustle. It’s been more about enjoying every day, rather than just trying to get to the next destination.

You can listen to the full episode in the player below: