• Potential customers can buy whenever they are ready — you never risk disappointing someone who’s decided to buy only to discover your course is unavailable. 
• Once your infrastructure is in place, relatively little work is required to support the promotion and selling of your cou...

Here’s what it looks like when broken into phases: 

1. Pre-launch — Let people know you have a course coming. Invite them to sign up for an interest list if they want to be notified when it’s available. 
2. Enrolment — Continue talking abou...

• Since your course is only available at particular times it’s easier to create a sense of excitement around your launch 
• The cart closing deadline creates natural urgency that will help people who are on the fence decide to buy (or not). 
• Once you’ve launched like th...

• You can test demand for your course (and the results it helps people achieve) before spending a lot of time upfront working on all of the course materials. 
• You can get early feedback on your content, allowing you to adapt in real-time to students’ needs and create a more robust...

• This type of launch typically doesn’t make much money for the course creator. 
• You still may need to recreate some of your content when you launch more formally (although the underlying concepts will have been “road-tested”). 
• By their nature, these types of launche...

1. Since people can purchase the course whenever they wish, there’s less of a sense of urgency. Some people who would have bought under a more time-pressured launch model will fail to buy. 

• To get the best performance out of this model you need your marketing to be highly ...

1. Pre-launch — At least two weeks before the course is available to buy, start educating your audience about the problem that the course solves, before moving into more overt promotion. 
2. Cart open — Once the shopping cart is open and the course is...

• Option #1: Beta → Limited Window → Evergreen: Start with a beta launch to test the demand for your course and get some early feedback to understand any shortcomings.
• Option #2: Evergreen + Limited Window: Another option is to follow an Evergreen model for most of the year but promote...

• Launches like this are intense and you can find yourself exhausted by the end of the process. If you’re launching several times a year, burnout is a real danger. 
• This model draws a lot of your time and attention (unless you have a team running them for you) and it’s difficult t...

The beta launch is a low-key launch designed to put your course in front of a small test audience. The idea isn’t to maximize your initial class size or indeed your revenues but to test demand for the product as a whole. This is best for:

• First-time course creators who...