Transcription
Just imagine for a very short moment that you have been working on a single project for three to four months. You have released a big new online course or a big workshop, a book, or whatever it may be, then you want as many people as possible to find out about it right now. You want to celebrate a real party where people find out how hyped you are, and then you repeatedly see different processes that you naturally have to follow from a marketing perspective. There are some deadlines, there is FOMO, there is scarcity. You have to be present everywhere, you need testimonials, and you blast it all out, and your launch is truly one of the best you've ever had. And I believe, and hence the provocative title, that 2026 will slowly but surely see the end of these phases. The whole topic is called launching. You've probably logically recognized it from the title. We're talking today about why launches will become obsolete in the coming years, and I think 2027 will already be the start of this. We might know, perhaps not everyone knows it, but some of you know from the fashion scene back then the so-called drops, which still exist today. This means we have a new collection right now, and it's being heavily promoted with an email waiting list. You always see it with big brands, with hyped brands, yes, it was also often the case with YouTuber brands. I still remember Justin from back then who had the brand Peso. He only worked with drops, and the goal was to sell out as quickly as possible. And if you look at all these hyped brands today, they all have the so-called essentials, meaning things you can actually always buy. And precisely that is probably one of the best combinations currently. This means you have individual smaller drops, individual smaller launches, individual smaller cash flow drivers. In the long term, however, you always have the evergreen assortment. It makes sense why every company currently still launches, even Apple with its live events. And it also makes sense to have a cash flow that is more predictable, where you know exactly, okay, this month I'll send out 10 emails and I'll gain ten customers from it this month, to keep it simple. And if I've gained 120 customers a year with this strategy, then I'd like to have 200 customers. So I'll do two more launches or two drops. All good. This is the model that currently works. However, if you look at the numbers for launches, they are currently at an absolute peak, which for some is already starting to tip. This means anyone who isn't dealing with the latest topics, such as the newest AI trends or something similar, will already notice that their launches are starting to perform worse. And of course, if you combine a launch with the absolute trend and hype, you can earn an unimaginable amount of money. But if you simultaneously have a launch for a topic that isn't quite as sexy, where people don't feel the pressure to have it as much, then a launch might not make sense for you and your company anymore. And it's precisely about this whole topic that I want to talk to you about today, because in the last days, weeks, perhaps even months, I've repeatedly received the message, not just from my clients, but also random messages, that the launch didn't go so well anymore. I still have, as I said, individual outliers where you can clearly see, okay, wow, they're completely taking off and the launch is still working there. But for the majority of people, launches are starting to get worse and worse. They have the same effort as before. They may have even improved things in some cases, meaning they've slightly improved the copy or are even working with a deadline this time. This means the product can perhaps only be bought at this very specific time, which is one of the biggest purchase drivers of all. And I switched in 2025 and haven't launched since. For me, there were a few more practical reasons. My launches were always good. However, I had already noticed in 2025 that they were getting worse. Even within my core target group, they were getting worse. So, there are quite different reasons for that. Perhaps I can go into that a bit more. For me, it was more that I knew my wife was pregnant, and I wanted to work a bit more calmly the following year, and that's why I changed my entire business model back then. Nowadays, my business model is geared towards annual licenses or monthly subscriptions. This means you can buy my course as a monthly subscription, right? I take it out now and then, but currently, there's the monthly subscription and the other is the annual license, where you're part of it for a whole year. Yes, and then I changed everything, automated the onboarding, basically everything more or less, built my own AI for it, so that the people who are in there can work as autonomously as possible, realize themselves as much as possible with a community, of course, also with live calls and everything else. At the same time, however, through this annual license membership, I've created a predictable income, which is a huge advantage in my situation now with a small baby. This doesn't have to suit everyone, right? But for my situation, it was simply fantastic. And since then, I've only done evergreen. So, you've probably heard that a few times from me or from others or whatever. Evergreen simply means, in relation to content, that you only have content or you only create content that you can use again in the same way in terms of idea and concept, or what is a bit more complicated evergreen is, you first create, for example, 10 emails, then check retrospectively which of them were good. Yes, if seven were good, you rewrite the three until all of them were good, and then you never change these things again and always try to send people into the funnel from the front, so to speak, so that they go through this flow. Hopefully, these aren't too many foreign words for you, but most of you know these words. Yes, if not, feel free to write it in the comments. You can't always say everything in German in marketing because it's simply colloquial. When I talk about an email flow, people who work with emails always know what is meant. And for me, this evergreen has stabilized so clearly in the meantime that I basically have just as many new sign-ups as I used to sell. Back then, they were one-time buyers, today they are subscription models, and I've actually managed to stabilize my company with this, and it will scale again this year. This means 2026 should actually be the best year for my company again. And all of this with this evergreen thing, right? So, and on the second side, away from the content, there are of course also evergreen products. This means if you focus on things and explain AI tools right now, you can earn a lot of money because it's currently hyped. On the other hand, you yourself have a lot of work with the programs. But if you have programs that are timeless, meaning they are valid for several years, you have the program finished once and can then take care of other things in different areas, to improve conversion, to do something here, to improve your content, to do more, or, as I do, to drastically reduce your working hours. And this whole spectrum is evergreen instead of launch. And I can totally understand if you're just starting out and want to launch a lot to build up cash flow, but at some point, you'll have enough cash flow, and then it's worth slowly switching. For example, take my mentee, whom I'm currently mentoring. He already earns seven figures a year but wants to move away from advertising, more or less. This means I'll just give a number, I don't want to spoil too much, he spends €400,000 on advertising and generates €1 million in net revenue. Now, it would be great if, instead of €400,000 in advertising costs, he only had €100,000 in advertising costs and kept the million. This means we increase his profit through evergreen content. Yes, and perhaps a brief word about myself. New people do find me again and again. I am Sebastian Klaus, and I've been professionally involved in social media since 2015. For years, I was the biggest coach and guru for Instagram tips, and then I specialized more generally in content and funnels. I've won several awards, which you can see a bit in the background here. I've already generated seven-figure revenues with it, and so on and so forth. I've had over 25 individual product launches with incredibly great results. I've achieved six-figure, almost seven-figure launches, and all of that, well, with my reach, organically, without advertising. So, I've never supported a launch with advertising. I do run ads now and then, but I always have trouble with them, then they don't work, and so on. That's why I'm a huge fan of organic reach. I love it and experiment with it now and then. Now, my regular listeners will notice again, oh, the podcast is getting longer again. If you look, the last ones were always a bit shorter. At the very beginning, they were also a bit longer, at the very beginning of the year. And I experiment with what is well-received. I've found that if I tell a bit more, it has fewer views, but the people who really listen ask me many more questions. So, I get Instagram DMs, I get more comments, and the people, even if it's only half the people, are much more engaged, and I like that. Yes, I only listen to long podcasts myself. I'm not a fan of 15-minute podcasts or anything like that. I want deep dives, I want to listen to someone's thoughts, and just dive in. Exactly. And now, two small calls to action. If you want to learn how I've made money through content, how I've made so much money, for some it's a lot, for others it's not, but for most, seven-figure revenues are probably a lot of money, then you can always do it for free. The latest and most up-to-date free workshop or webinar, or whatever it's called, is always in the show notes or, if you're on YouTube, always in the video description. And if you're already on your way to doing that, please give this podcast a five-star rating and leave a like or subscribe on YouTube, for example. I would definitely appreciate it. Let's briefly get to the topic of what a launch is in itself, just to bring everyone up to speed. I'll cover it with as few words as possible so that those who already know aren't caught in an endless loop of repetitions. So, a launch is explained very briefly: you sell a product for a short period, and the typical process of most launches is something like building a waiting list. A waiting list is actually nothing more than building momentum with people who are generally already interested in this product. A waiting list ultimately has by far the highest conversion rate. And waiting lists are built nowadays either via email, you have your own community, for example, on School, and share a lot there, or it's something like a multi-part video series, which I now prefer. It's a waiting list via broadcast, for example, on WhatsApp. You can create a WhatsApp channel as a company, and whenever you do a launch, you send everyone to this broadcast and share important information there beforehand, get people excited, show behind-the-scenes, and really involve them. Why don't you just do it via Instagram anymore? If you show a lot of advertising content on Instagram, I mean, in your stories and also in your feed, then your reach will always get worse. But if you do that in your broadcast channel, and you have, I don't know, 200 people in there, then you reach actually 198 of them every time you post something. Of course, some will leave here and there, but the people who specifically joined are interested. And you'd rather have 200-300 people who absolutely love and celebrate what you're doing than this mixed reach on Instagram of people who aren't ready to buy right now. It might not be because your product doesn't fit, but maybe they just bought something, maybe the weather is too nice, maybe they just had a baby. I wouldn't even do coaching because I don't have time for it, well, I don't want to make time for it. And all these factors have nothing to do with your product, but they have something to do with your organic reach. That's why you should try not to fuel the waiting list via Instagram. And then, of course, after this teaser phase, where you keep saying something is coming, something is coming, something is coming, look what I'm working on, blah blah blah, and get people a bit excited, the one launch week starts. For example, how can Apple always does just one event, a live event, you can also launch for a whole week. That's not bad either. Nowadays, many do one or two live webinars, which I think is one of the best ways to launch nowadays, because you can funnel all the people to this one appointment, then they have 90, 120 minutes to listen to you, and the conversion is ultra strong. And there are now examples of someone doing a live launch who has 30,000-40,000 followers on Instagram but does a lot of intense promotion with a waiting list for three weeks and gets 3,000-4,000 people into this live workshop. And there are now sometimes seven-figure launches, mid-seven-figure launches, because this concept simply works incredibly well. And then there's always a deadline, right? Because these are usually programs that run for, I don't know, half a year, then there's a fixed entry point, or the product is only available at this specific time, and afterwards it moves into the main product, or or, so there are countless marketing methods to create scarcity and make the hype even bigger. I could talk about launches for days, but this isn't a launch podcast. Perhaps this is something interesting for you, then feel free to put it in the comments or write to me somewhere. If you really want to know how to get the most out of your launches in the coming months, then please write. Ultimately, it's about creating artificial scarcity to increase purchase pressure. So, if you were to bundle launches together, and precisely that could break the neck of launches in 2027, 28, 29, and so on, and that's exactly why this episode exists today. Yes, and if you look back a bit, the topic of launching has existed forever. I myself once read a book by Jeff Walker called Product Launch Formula. It's a small American book. I think it was from 2005. I wrote it down like that. And the whole topic, the launch topic itself, is at least over 20 years old, and every coach in the whole world copies this topic, and one has to be a bit careful sometimes when principles are 20 years old. On the one hand, this can mean that nothing better has ever come along because it perfectly hits human psychology. But it can also be, and we see this currently, that people or the majority of potential customers are saturated if they go through the same scenario again and again. Because you have to consider, normally, if a customer buys from me now, either they've known me for years and are already convinced and are just waiting for the right time, or they look at two or three different programs beforehand and then decide more or less who had the best launch and then buy. That's the decision matrix. Either you observe someone for a long time and then buy at some point, or you are in the launch period, get hyped, and then buy. The problem is, not much happens in between, and you're not very visible in between. No one can buy in between, and if you look at most American bloggers today, no one works like that anymore. So, there might still be a few bloggers who focus on launches. Most are increasingly switching to their own communities, where the product is always sold as a soft call to action, but you only sell your transformation and your brand. If you look at people like Dan Co, he has an evergreen product. If you look at people like Justin Welge, Hosi, etc. Hosi also works with launches now and then, but ultimately his book is not a launch product, but an evergreen product. And many, many people from the business context, I could name 20-30 people for you, no longer work with launches, but with extreme, constant presence. They simply want to be in people's minds as the only possible option as soon as these people are ready, and they don't create pressure. So, if you look at these people, and I did this for this video over days, weeks, sometimes even months, although it wasn't planned back then, I have to be honest, that I'm making this video. If you watch these people for weeks, you get the feeling that you want to live this kind of life too, and then you start to become interested in what they do, what they sell. And if they then have a product that sells this lifestyle, people buy it eventually. For me, it's like this: anyone who follows me knows that I am extremely in need of autonomy. So, I hate any kind of laws, regulations, paternalism. I don't like superiors. I like working alone here. This is my studio, my YouTube studio. It's in the basement. I have a house in the country. I only work 15 hours, sometimes 20 if there's a lot to do. I am a very big, in quotes, family man and have my daughter and my wife and my dog, a dachshund, and so on and so forth. And what I embody is this beautiful, calm family life, because I naturally live it myself, and also with the premise that I earn a lot of money. So, I'm in the top 0.5% in Germany, and at the same time, I'm relaxed and don't impose this hustle culture, and that interests many people, logically. And on the other hand, there's my product, called Zero Hassle Funnel. It fits perfectly. So, you simply learn how to build a funnel with content, and then at some point, you only have to produce your content, and everything else is automated and runs. So. And I embody this, and I don't have to launch it, and I don't have to pitch it. Every single time I show that I work little, it's an indirect pitch for my product, without me mentioning it. And you can imagine that this improves reach. If I never really have a launch, I never really lose a lot of people, annoy a lot of people, and have a lot of people not react. This way, my organic reach on every single platform can continuously increase. There are also, I don't work with trends either, so I don't work with launches in that sense. There are also content launches. I don't know if you've heard of that before. Perhaps a very brief interjection. If you do a content launch, in quotes, you have a lot of evergreen content, but you always have extreme news and hype in between. I did that for a long time. Yes, on YouTube, there was always the video "Instagram Algorithm Update." It came out once a month, with all the new developments. It was always my most-watched video. But for that, I had to research daily. I had to adjust my planning so that something came out on that day. I couldn't go on vacation on that day or in that week, and and that was all too much for me. So, I eventually stopped doing it, and of course, lost views and everything, but the core target group continued to grow. It's not huge. Yes, neither on YouTube nor in my podcast is this core target group, maybe a few thousand people. But that's enough for a million-dollar business. And of course, this whole topic of launching, whether with content or really for your product, also has a certain thrill. Yes, for a launch, I can briefly tell you about one of my launches, it was probably the Content Bootcamp 2023-2024. It was actually the case that in the last hours, I would almost say, definitely on the last day, it was a 7-day launch, and for 6 days, let's say, 100 accesses were sold, and on day 7, another 100, and of these 100, probably 70 were sold in the last 4 hours. And that naturally creates an incredible thrill, it has energy, but usually, you plan the launch to go until 12 AM. This means you're already stressed for a week, and then you might even be out of your time zone if you're in Germany and want to launch at night, and you've worked incredibly hard for months, and then it all resolves with a bang. But sometimes you can't get out of it anymore. I eventually took longer and longer to process a launch, because look, you have three months where you're looking for testimonials, where you're building the product, the website, the landing pages, planning the content, meaning emails, YouTube, Insta, LinkedIn, whatever, you do all of that weeks in advance. I had huge flip charts so that everything went out at the same time. It's like cooking a meal for 200-300 people at once, and everyone has to get it at the same time. So, it's an incredible amount of work. Then it starts with teasing. You tease two to three weeks in advance. This means you have to be online every day. And in the launch week, it's even worse. You use every piece of feedback that comes in immediately to reinforce your purchase. So, it was incredibly time-consuming, and after four months, where you've really gone through it, and in the launch week, you might even work 80-90 hours a week, you're simply blissed out, mentally, physically a wreck, and need a long time to recover. So, and that was also one of the reasons why I eventually stopped. I was totally fascinated by it back then, the energy that arises, and the thousands of questions that come in, and the people, you really notice them hesitating, and then the countdown gets closer, and people get nervous, and then many buy. And actually, from a customer's perspective, it's also true that the people who get hyped up like that are often the ones who are then not satisfied, because they couldn't lean back and think calmly, do I want this, do I need this, do I have time for this, do I have money for this? And these are always the things where you have the most discussions in the end. If you have an evergreen product, and I tell you to buy a product, and you observe me for three months, you have no stress. This means if you buy it, you are sure that you want to implement it. This means you will be more successful, I will be more successful, because you are more enthusiastic about my product and truly have a transformation, and and. This means we don't have this hype window, and yet it's true that I ultimately, as I mentioned at the beginning, sell on average just as much per month as if I were to do launches now and then. It takes a little longer at the beginning, right? Because you first have to get this ball rolling, because sometimes people only buy from me after a year or two. You have to sit out this time, but once you have enough people who are actually interested in your product, this ball will also get bigger. And when it really rolls, it can happen that you sell 15, 20, 30 products in a month out of nowhere, in quotes, even though your reach hasn't increased, and you normally only sell five. I remember back then, we drove to Holland once. We often drive to Bloemendaal aan Zee, and we had just arrived, and I went for a walk with the dog. It was a very short walk in this park, it was 6, 7, 8 minutes long, and when I came back, I had sold three. Evergreen, it was no launch, nothing. And back then, my product cost €222. It was just the Business Booster, it was a self-study course. And then in 8 minutes, I had earned €6,500 with an evergreen system. After that, there were no sales for three days, but the moment, that was simply incredible for me, right? I've remembered it to this day because it's simply so crazy. And now we come to all the reasons why I believe launches are becoming obsolete, because you've naturally heard what's good and so on. You've also been able to read between the lines that it's often very exhausting, but we really have five reasons, in my opinion, that suggest that launches will not function as they do today in the future. And reason number 1 is this audience fatigue. This means, your list, your emails, your followers, they know the game eventually. They know how you launch, when you launch, not just from you, but from everyone. They have all experienced launches and know very well that I don't need to get hyped up. The product will definitely come back. You can, of course, also do drops, as I said, and say it's a limited version. If you sell caps, for example, sure, that's different, but if you have an online product, people know it will come back. You can play with it and say it will be much more expensive and so on, but well. Nevertheless, people know this game by heart eventually and know, well, if he says it will be more expensive now, and then no one buys, he'll give a discount again soon anyway. This means if I wait another four to six weeks, and it suits me better, then I'll go for it. You know, this whole "last chance," "never again," "only available for a short time" thing. I still use these phrases, but I'm constantly expanding them. It just doesn't bother anyone anymore. And actually, you can also read on the internet that open rates and reach in normal launches kill half your business. If you've already launched, here's an example. If I have 10,000 people on my email list and I have a launch in a week, and in that one week I send out 10 emails. On the last day, you do more. During this time, no matter how much these people love you, 500-1000-1500 people will disappear from this contact list because they unsubscribe because it's too much for them that you're sending emails every day. And I swear to you, that of these 1500 people, if you had simply delighted them with a weekly newsletter and given them a freebie now and then, a significant percentage of them would have bought, all of whom you lose, just because you want to make money quickly. Launching therefore means you make your existing audience extremely tired of what you're showing, of what you're selling, and at the same time, you rely on constantly getting new audiences. It's like running ads. With ads, you don't care. You run ads, the system finds new people for you every time, and then there are also markers in Meta ads, for example, how often, the frequency, how often these ads were shown to the same people, blah blah blah. The thing is, if you don't do that and build up 1000 fans who love every email, who love your transformation, who really want to be like you, they will all buy eventually when they can afford your product, when it fits into their lives right now. And then the conversion is simply twice, three times, four times as high in the evergreen area, and then it evens out or smooths out, and you don't have to launch anymore. As I said, I haven't launched for over a year. The last time I launched was in June last year, and I'm earning more now than in all the years before when I launched. This means I can speak from the data, it's almost June now, and I can say that without launches, I'm earning more. So, you used to have open rates for emails in a launch phase where people were still hyped, of 30-40%. Today, people are happy if you still have about 10-12-15% of people opening the last emails. And the last emails are usually the ones that would build the most pressure, and everyone else has already left, has already switched off, they don't want any of it. The principle of the waiting list naturally applies here. Many people will leave there too, but no, that's also very limited if you get few people on the waiting list. Let's say you have 100 people on it. But you theoretically have 10,000 people on your email list, then I'll bet you'll also annoy the email list again with your product, and then many people will leave again. That's always the case, and nowadays it's even the case, we have, and this is now reason number 2, AI makes pure information redundant. Everyone can now plan a launch for themselves. This means launches will be used inflationarily in the coming years because they have already worked extremely well in recent years. And as soon as something starts to be used inflationarily, it annoys the entire market, and you will feel that immediately. I eventually moved away from this Instagram niche. By the way, after Torben Plate, I must mention that, I was the first in Germany to exclusively give Instagram tips. That's how Torben Plate started back then, I don't know if he started completely like that.
had, but back then his channel and also his Instagram profile were geared towards helping you grow on Instagram. I don't know when he had demonstrated that. In any case, that was one of the, it doesn't matter anyway, and I was still doing fashion back then. I was one of the fastest-growing fashion accounts in Germany and naturally, at some point, I specialized in making money from it and then I started giving Instagram tips. I think that was in 2017, and then in 2023, all these guys and women suddenly popped up, all starting to give Instagram tips. Of course, the foundation was already there. I already had 1000 posts by then, and then it spread like wildfire because they saw that you could make money from it. People want to buy that, and new accounts were also rewarded by the algorithm. That means people who just started building an account where they give Instagram tips, even though they had no expertise beforehand, grew faster than me. And at some point, I said to myself, you can all kiss my ass. And all these accounts that exclusively give Instagram tips, they will all disappear, or almost all of them will disappear. You can already see that they are all losing reach because this information about the algorithm etc. is available. I used to make an algorithm post, for which I calculated for four months, informed myself, had interviews with people from Meta themselves. Just to present the algorithm visually once. Today, you can have that created by AI in 2 minutes. And that will make launches worthless. A, anyone can do a launch. B, anyone can sell information nowadays. That happens super fast, and a launch works in the online space precisely because the information you sell is very scarce. But the information itself will no longer be scarce. That means people will increasingly go into communities to connect about the latest things. For example, I also have a community on School for Me in my program and with our live calls. And the information I share there, you can still talk a bit, share experiences, and AI can't do that. That means this pure information launching will disappear anyway, and we are moving more and more towards this community launch thing. And how do you want to make that extremely scarce with a launch? You can say, okay, this community only exists for three months, then it will be dissolved again, blah blah blah. The pure added value of a community that grows together for a long time is that they get to know each other over a long period. I still have participants from my first program who know each other today. I have one, that's a cool story too, just very briefly, one who was with me from the very beginning, and she eventually became the maid of honor for another client of mine. They didn't know each other at all before, and eventually, they became best friends, and she became the maid of honor, and those are things where I say, okay, an information product can't deliver that at all. Point number 3 is the effort versus return, which will just keep tipping over. That means you have a classic launch, if you still have to develop a product for it, yes, meaning the product doesn't even exist yet, and you're doing a launch, then you're busy with that for at least three to four months, and of course, because you've earned little in the meantime, you have to implement an insane amount in the launch. That means the pressure increases, but due to all the daily things you bombard the community with, because of which the algorithm, no matter on which platform, and also the human algorithm notices, I don't want that right now, and your entire organic reach in every area continues to decline, the return will just keep sinking. So, that's the result of that. As I said, there are still types of launches and methods where you have to work incredibly hard, but which also bring in a lot of money, but the normal launch is just dying out more and more. Reason number 4, of course, also has to do with it, trust just collapses. If you do too many launches with an exaggerated promise, then people just don't want it anymore. You can already see that most products that are sold very often are becoming more concrete. That means you have a small problem. There are many people who sell the perfect webinar, or I recently saw a course that was only about creating the perfect viral Reel. You have to imagine that. It was really about creating a Reel on an international stage, building it, testing it, rewriting it, etc., so that this one Reel gets 10 million plus views. That was the entire course, it cost 1000 €. It was about building a Reel. Of course, you also learn all the other things along the way, how Reels generally work, but still, the promises are getting smaller, and these promises are easier to keep. If I tell you, I'll show you how to make money with content and an automated funnel via social media, that's very concrete. But if I tell you, I'm now doing a carousel Instagram carousel masterclass, then for anyone who wants to create a carousel post and anyone who loves carousel posts, that's so much more concrete that people are very willing to pay for it, not as much as for the big program, but very willing to pay for it. I could hold a mastermind or a master workshop in, I don't know, 8 weeks. This workshop costs €299, and you would also get a handout afterwards, and you would also get a small online course, and we would have a live call, a live group call, where I present the whole thing on the topic of how to build the best carousel, how to build viral carousels, how to build replicable carousels? I swear to you, 200, 300, 400 people would buy this thing because it's so incredibly concrete, and because carousels are of course trending and hyped again right now and so on. I could work, work, work, work and earn €100,000. That's predictable, achievable. But if you look at the launches that are out there today, they work according to Jeff Walker's principle from back then and load all this hype with an insane amount of energy through hype, through hype, through hype, and they can't always maintain that in the end, you know, the testimonials are all the same, the websites all look the same, the products all promise the same thing, people don't want it anymore. And it's exactly the same phase as when TikTok was getting bigger. There are eventually two camps, people who only watch short videos, and people like you, now we're somewhere around 35, 40 minutes, who like to sit down or put it on their ears and listen for a long time because they love that deep dive. People who listen to me on the podcast for a long time are rarely the same ones who blast TikToks and Reels 24/7. They are simply not the same people. So, that's an example again. That's why carousel posts would work better for me in a launch than if I were to work on the topic of Reels now, and so on and so forth. So, this is just something that trust breaks down because you're just making too many promises nowadays and scarcity and here something else and then something else. Then there are programs like Deadline Funnel. Deadline Funnel is a program where you can fake countdowns. That means you come to me now for the workshop, and I tell you, this product is only available for the next 7 days at price XYZ. And then you see in every email, when you open them, go to my website, you see every time, oh, a countdown is running down. And when the countdown has run out, you can really set it so that the website changes, the price changes, that the person really sees something else. But if the person simply registered with a new email address and deleted their cookies, the countdown would restart every time. So you're fooling. Nowadays there are tools to fool customers to sell more. So, and that's just something where I say, that's probably no longer contemporary. And reason number 5 is that the platform as a whole simply doesn't play along anymore, because we used to have this issue of reach being extremely follower-based. Yes, so if I say I had 100,000 followers, then I had at least 10, 15, 20,000 story views. I always reached at least, I don't know, 10, 20,000 people with my posts. That was predictable and foreseeable. All algorithms, except maybe for podcasts, work based on interests nowadays. Whether it's Instagram, YouTube, wherever you are, even LinkedIn. LinkedIn is a special case, but all work based on interests. That means your launch post interests no one, and if no one is interested, then it won't be shown to your followers who could theoretically be interested, because the first people didn't react at all, and Instagram sees, well, it's a bad metric, we're not showing it anymore. That means if you have 100,000 followers and you make a launch post where you're selling something, you'll get 30, 40 likes on it. Because no one sees it anymore and no one is interested anymore. That means you're launching into a reach that is immediately throttled from the first post. So you don't do that anymore. That's stupid. As I said, you can work with waiting lists on other tools etc. etc. But you can also ensure that your posts are always interesting for people who follow you and then occasionally point to your freebie, and the freebie is then your actual launch. I've sometimes shown in my workshops that on average about 500-600 people a month watch my workshop without me launching. I always mention it everywhere and look here, look there, look there, and out of these 500-600 people, I have about 65 to 70% viewership, and from that, I have 3 to 4% conversion rate. So I can get my 10, 15, 20 customers for my ZS every month, if everything goes smoothly, right? Especially in spring, I often have the thing that the weather is too good, then fewer people come in. These are normal fluctuations, which you naturally have more with evergreen than with a launch. And with a launch, that would theoretically be reason number 6, the timing is just so incredibly difficult, because if you say, for example, I'm launching in May, and in May, in the exact week you're launching, it's the best weather in 5 years. No one is there. They're all at the outdoor pool, and you miss them all. No one buys your course at 30° plus in the shade because they just don't feel like sitting in front of a computer right now. Anyone who has a choice is outside. And I naturally want to tell you what comes instead, even if you've already heard a bit of it, but ultimately it's the topic of evergreen. That's something you can already incorporate alongside launches or implement completely. And evergreen simply means that every email, all content, the entire funnel, the onboarding, everything, and of course the product, are designed to be usable for years. And many people fail at the content aspect, because you can see here, I'm also doing my podcast anew, yes, it's long, I invest a lot of time, but I don't do anything else. So, on Mondays, I normally do my videos, so this video here, then I edit it, then I'm done after 3 hours, and then I'm off work. The next day, I do my Instagram carousel posts and my individual posts, which come from an idea list that I basically just rework, and I'm done there after 3-4 hours, and then I have everything that's important to me done, because I've already written all the emails. My product is ready, my funnel is ready, and that's it. And that's the reason why I'm usually done with my work by Tuesday. On Wednesdays, I do conversion tracking, take care of my community, and just do a few other things, but actually, I'm always off for the weekend by Wednesday afternoon, and that's evergreen because I'm not planning to do a launch in the coming weeks or months at all. I'm always developing new things for my community, of course for my existing followers, but I don't have to plan a launch. This launch plan alone is so big, it's so much work, I don't feel like doing it. And ultimately, it's always like this, so you have your content like this podcast here. I've told you a few times that I have a free workshop, and I do this workshop anew every quarter, of course with templates etc. that I've already built myself. That means I only adjust the slides in Canva, record it once, edit it once, done. 3-4 hours of work and a new workshop is ready, once a quarter, and otherwise, in every piece of content I create, I always direct people to this workshop. That's it. That's it. And then, of course, over the past months and years, I've continuously improved the conversions, improved the landing page, improved the workshop itself, improved the content. Then I tracked which content brings me the most workshop registrations. I then created more of that, and that's the system I've built for myself. That means my actual current task, my only job, is to sit down every week and create content. Now, you can also just create a bit more content, like I do, and then I always have a 6-week lead time. So, normally, I always have a 6-week lead time in my content and always have emergency content ready, so that if I'm sick, I can just insert it, and that's the evergreen system. I always have finished stories, always have finished posts already. It's pure organization, I don't want to bore you too much with that. The second thing is, as I said, to redo the workshop every few months and then to be active in my own community from time to time. I'm actually there every day and just take a quick look, it's a few minutes a day, and that's it. That's it. That's the actual work that results in the end. That means it turns out that I have about 15 hours left somewhere, which I work on average per week, sometimes a little less, sometimes a little more, but on average it's 15 hours. And I have to say, that's the goal, right? That's almost financial freedom. Exactly. But I don't want to push too much in that direction. I don't want to actively launch it to you right now, but I just want to give you an idea of what's possible. And the second step was ultimately that I switched from one-time sales at some point. That means I used to have my Business Booster, which you could buy once, either in installments or as a one-time payment, it cost €2222 net, then you could buy it and that's it. And then I thought to myself, well, if I have a kind of subscription model, a membership, then the income is even more predictable, which ultimately fits my basic idea even better. And then the only task is to get about 50-60 people in there who stay on average per month. That costs about €300 net per month, right? depending on whether you buy an annual license, a one-time payment, or a monthly subscription. The monthly subscription is naturally more expensive, but you can also stay for only two months or so and then cancel. It's really cancellable monthly, and then you have, I don't know, in the worst case, you have ten people who come in on a monthly subscription, and they all leave again. That's not the case, but just like that, they all leave again, then you get ten again the next month. That means you always have ten people continuously in there, and if you've had that for weeks and months, and your evergreen funnel really works that well, then you definitely have ten people on average with you. So, but not everyone cancels, then more come, then less. There is of course variation in that. That means instead of ten people canceling, only five cancel, then you might have 15 in the next month, then maybe no one cancels, but then only six come in the next month, but then you're already at 20 people, and then something like that can grow on its own from this evergreen content that runs fully automatically in the background, and you have nothing more to do with it. So, it's really as beautiful as it sounds in my case. Yes, as I said, I worked for months and years for it. You can't build that overnight, but maybe that's something where you say, okay, I'd like to have that in two years too, then go for it. So, you don't have to buy my program for that, you have to, well, it's a shortcut, right, but you can still build it for yourself. So, and the four building blocks of such a simple evergreen funnel, I've written them down here, is of course an entry point, right? So, you have some freebie, a workshop, a lead magnet, something that attracts people, that fits the topic, that is of course also evergreen. And the second thing is, you have an email list at the end, a broadcast channel on WhatsApp or somewhere else, a few people are enough there. But as I said, I'm not talking about having Instagram reach, but you always have external reach. Then, of course, you have an automated sequence that serves people after the workshop, right? So, you automatically send out emails, and then you have a clear offer, and that's it. And all you do eventually, once you've built this entire evergreen funnel, is to create content at the front, and then you'll eventually have a lot of time because everything else is done. That means, either you treat yourself to more free time, like I'm currently doing, or you create more content. It's no problem at all. I could also release an hour-long podcast every day because I have plenty of time for it. So, that's no stress at all, and in the coming years, more content from me will come on various platforms. Um, not everything takes more time, you can also recycle a lot. Yes, we're planning to recycle my carousel posts on LinkedIn soon, and so on and so forth, but that's all optional and only helps with the speed of scaling. The company scales anyway with evergreen content, because every single piece of content that is finished, so every single YouTube video, every single podcast is sometimes listened to for years. I recently had someone write to me: "Sebi, I seriously listened to all your podcasts again last week, I don't even know how that's possible. Wow, how you've developed and so on." He really listened to all the podcasts, I think I have 260, 270 episodes, he listened to all of them, and of course, he became a customer. If you spend 9 hours with me every day for a week, you can't help but become a customer, right? I would have completely misunderstood the marketing. Yes, but that's the topic. That means, in the coming years, I at least see it this way, launches will become weaker because, and this is probably one of the main points, if we're honest, people have seen everything. And a person always wants stability and security in their life. We all fear things we don't know. That's why almost everyone is afraid of death, because no one knows what happens. You can overcome that with faith and so on, right? But ultimately, people fear uncertainty. And if you do a launch that is extremely hyped, where you get people in with fear, then they are rarely people who become successful long-term, because they didn't decide to buy out of intrinsic motivation, but they bought out of pressure. And as I said, you do need a little bit of pressure. Yes, you do need to build a little bit of pressure. I'm not against that either. So, even positive manipulation techniques and so on, you can do that, because if you know that you have an extremely good product, then you naturally have to manipulate people a bit further to help them themselves. Yes, if, as I said, if your product is really fantastic, right, which we're assuming for now, but if you overdo it, then in my opinion, you're destroying your personal brand. And perhaps as a thought on that, AI will become stronger and stronger in the coming years, and we as personal brands have the problem that we want to use AI ourselves to scale certain things faster and to get feedback faster, perhaps even to create content faster. And at the same time, it's a huge trend on the personal brand side that you become more and more personal and authentic, and the content is no longer so perfect. So, of course, I briefly edited this video, but nothing else. You don't see any overlays, you don't see any fancy cuts, etc., because the thing is, everyone is currently over-optimizing extremely. But I also said that as an example at some point, people don't want to see AI from other people. Imagine the following. You see an amazing picture. It's the best-painted picture you've ever seen. And next to the picture is an artist. He really painted it with his own brush. And then you take a step further and see a picture that's even better. And underneath it says AI generated. That doesn't bother you, that doesn't move you. That doesn't interest you. The picture can be as amazing as it wants. To your left is someone who really painted it himself, and that's what people are interested in. That means content will become more raw. RAW, they used to call it, so RAW. Content will be raw, because we're all already noticing with the whole TikTok influence, with all these short videos, and now with AI, that we're getting a bit tired of seeing this over-optimized perfect and AI-generated stuff. And that's why podcasts are doing better and better. That's why YouTube videos are getting longer and longer. People want to sit down and watch something longer, and everything that is extremely perfected is kind of bombing. And the counter-argument to that is this evergreen topic, because the entire product, the entire planning, it's all done, and you have plenty of time to engage with your community, create a lot of content, create a lot of good content, and as a personal brand, to have the word "personal" at the forefront again, because I often feel that with personal brands, it's only about branding. What's your avatar? What's this? What are your branding colors? None of that matters to me. I've never looked into it. I have no idea who my avatar is. I realized at some point that more women than men buy from me. That's my avatar, where I thought, aha, okay, yeah, great, thanks. I don't have branding colors, I change them constantly. I do it the way I like it. And I think that's what fascinates people. Otherwise, I wouldn't have so many customers, and otherwise, I wouldn't have sold so much. That means, if you're perhaps approaching the topic of personal brand too intellectually, maybe think more about what makes you tick as a person. And that's exactly the topic that people will eventually find good, otherwise you wouldn't have friends. If you were a person who was completely uninteresting, with whom no one got along, then you wouldn't have a single friend, not a single acquaintance. But acquaintances, if you multiply that on social media, to millions of people who see you, they would multiply a thousandfold, a hundred thousandfold, simply because you are who you are. And I think that's a beautiful, a beautiful closing remark, shall I say, for this episode. And since we've already talked a lot about personal brand, I can already tease the next one. How to build your personal brand for the coming years, despite AI? So, how can we stand out? That will definitely be the next episode. It will be another deep dive because I just love it. I like it. If you've really listened this far, hey, no joke, you should actually rate the podcast with five stars, and if you still haven't had enough of me, then check out my free workshop. There I really explain how I make money with content, how I built my funnel, where the weak points and also strengths are, and so on. Check it out, it's really super helpful. Feel free to follow my podcast here, and if you've seen this on YouTube, please leave me a subscription, leave me a like, leave me comments. I really appreciate engagement, not because I want the algorithm to go crazy, but I like feedback. I just like feedback. Did you like it, did you not like it, because then I can work on it more, right? I can get better for you. Okay, then until next time. Take care. See you then, your Sebifce. Co?