Behind the Scenes: How I Launched My New Software Product Zippy Courses
Last Updated August 21st, 2014

I’ve got a new software product that I’ll debut tomorrow.

It’s called Zippy Courses, and it’s a WordPress plugin that allows you to create and sell online courses…

…But more about that in a second.

First, instead of trying to sell you on how great this software is, I decided to instead share some “behind the scenes” stuff I’m doing to market and sell this new software product.

You might think I’m crazy for doing this. Especially since my competitors are already attempting to poach potential ZippyCourses customers.

But 99.999% of you are good people. And I know you’ll glean insight on how you can use similar strategies to sell your products and services.

Let’s dive in.

Here’s What I’ll Share Over The Next 1,000 Words

I’m going to share three things with you today.

1. I’ll share a proven method for selling anything to anyone. It was pioneered by one of the world’s best tv pitchmen, and I’ll show you how I’m using it on the web.

2. I’ll reveal why starting small is a good thing. Especially if you want to build a long-term business that generates profits year after year.

3. And of course, if you want to be one of the first few people to try out Zippy Courses, I’ll ask you to hop on the “early bird” list right here.

Let’s start with the first thing…

Demonstrability: The Secret to Selling Anything

When I first was thinking about how I wanted to sell this new software product, I knew I needed to take a line from the Billy Mays playbook.

If you’re unfamiliar with Billy Mays, he’s the guy who turned ordinary, and some may even say, boring, household cleaning products into money machines.

How?

By selling them on TV infomercials.

And he did it well.

What was his secret?

He insisted every product he promoted had one key characteristic: demonstrability, or the ability to demonstrate how the product will help people in real time.

Because he knew when you did this right, you’ll persuade people to buy instantly.

Seriously.

As an example, here’s an ad for one of his products called Impact Gel. What is it? It’s a gel that you can put in your shoes, and makes it a pleasure to walk on.

How can you show people how GREAT impact gel is? Well, wrap that stuff around your hand, and beat your hand with a hammer of course. And then reveal that your hand is unscathed. But to PROVE to them how great it is, use that same hammer on a brick and shatter the brick.

Here’s the video:

If that doesn’t show you that impact gel removes the impact, I don’t know what does. It also grabs attention, and immediately persuades people who want to limit impact on their feet to buy the product.

Because if it can protect your hand from a hammer that smashes a brick, it can obviously protect oyur foot from the ground too.

Now I knew, right from the start, that when I was selling this software product I wanted to use demonstrability…

…and that’s what I did.

When you look at the Zippy Courses sales page, I created a video that showed people how to create a 4 module (4 lessons per module) course in about 60 seconds.

Here’s the video:

Why did I do this?

Every other product on the market that I personally tested would take hours to accomplish this same task. So I knew showing people how fast my product could do it would PROVE to them how easy this product was to use.

(I did this mainly because a lot of people were stressed out about how hard other things were to use).

Here’s what’s strange:

Even though demonstrability is a proven sales principle, and when I first launched Zippy Courses in early August to a handful of people, I believe demonstrability allowed me to sell out all of my licenses in 21 minutes, you’ll find most software companies don’t use this strategy.

So silly.

Now you might be wondering, “Okay, that’s great for software? But what about consulting services? Or information products?”

That’s where things get a little more tricky.

But it’s stlil possible.

Just use the “before and after” persuasoin principle. I mean, what better way to demonstrate results other than to show your prospects where your other customers came from and where they are now?

Starting Small: How to Build A 30-Year Business

I did something very different when I first started selling Zippy Courses.

Instead of doing my usual webinar, and an email series that leads up to the sale of the product, I just briefly announced that it was “Coming soon” on Facebook, plugged it with a little text link from my blog, and that’s it.

Why would I seemingly “Half-ass” this launch?

I didn’t want to sell that many copies of the product.

Seriously.

I actually wanted LESS sales.

You see, I just love how Facebook launched. Here’s what they did: They started adding one school at a time.

This was smart. It built scarcity naturally, and that’s great for marketing. But what’s really smart about it is this: it allowed Facebook to slowly test their infrastructure in the real world. And slowly scale it up without creating massive support nightmares and downtime. If their infrastructure couldn’t handle another school, they woudln’t add it. They’d wait. It was genius.

That’s what I’m doing with Zippy Courses.

Instead of allowing anyone and everyone to buy the new plugin, I only offered a handful of licenses and they sold out in 21 minutes. Tomorrow, when I release it again, I’ll also only offer a handful of licenses and it will sell out again.

This isn’t a scarcity marketing gimmick. I’m doing this because I want to slowly scale up my customer base to ensure the software works. Just like Facebook did.

Even though we did extensive testing, we only tested a few different server environments. And we only had a handful of alpha testers (and now a handful of beta testers).

But there are millions of server configurations.

So, sure, I could have sold 1,000 software licenses. That would have been a great pay day. But what if something broke? There’s no way my support team could deal with 1,000 people with broken sites in a timely manner.

However, if I limited it to 25 licenses, we could get back to people as fast as possible.

I prioritized customer happiness and success over revenue. And that’s a good thing for both me and ZippyCourses customers.

Did we expect the software to break websites? Absolutely not. But we prepared for the worst because we weren’t building some “fly by night” money making software scheme. We were approaching this as a 30 year business, and we wanted to do the things that empowered us to build a real business with long-term growth opportunity.

Keeping this in mind, here’s why you should care:

A lot of people get stressed out about starting small. As if starting small is a bad thing.

But if you’re just getting started and you’re landing 5 or 6 or 7 customers. Or maybe even less than that. That’s a GOOD thing.

That’s your opportunity to turn those people into SUPER FANS. And you MUST do everything in your power to make them happy.

Because guess what:

That’s how you’ll start selling 100, 200, or 1,000 sales later on. Those first few early adopters will help spark the tipping point.

The same applies when you’re starting a wordpress blog. Treat those first few readers like gold. Email them personally. Offer to help them personally. You’ll turn one off visitors into fans for life.

Now, About Zippy Courses…

I hope you liked seeing a little of the “behind the scenes” stuff for Zippy Courses.

Now, if you’re someone who creates (and sells) online courses, I’d like to invite you to hop on the Zippy Courses “early bird” list.

It’s going on sale tomorrow at 10am. And like the first time, I fully expect to sell out of software licenses quickly.

Again – it’s not a marketing gimmick. I’m doing this because it’s a necessity when starting a new software business.

If you’re the type of person who doesn’t like to mess with beta products, no worries. We will release the plugin to the mainstream late this year.

But if you want to get Zippy Courses at the best price, before everyone else, then I suggest you do it tomorrow.

Go sign up for Zippy Courses prelaunch list right here.