Today I’m going to take you behind the scenes of my most recent launch, and if you missed it, that means you’re not on my email list. What are you doing? Head to thekarareport.com/newsletter to get on the list so you’ll find out anytime I’m launching something new.
In this episode, I’m going to talk about how I did a launch. It was very low-lift — a messy beta group, not all my T’s crossed and I’s dotted. Was it scary? Yes. Was it successful? I think so. I’m actually going to share the numbers, which is something I usually don’t do on account of, I don’t know, vulnerability. But I’m sharing them because I think it really explains conversion rates, realistic expectations, and what it looks like to have an email-only launch. So let’s just dive in.
Table of Contents
The AI Blog Sprint Is Here!
Okay, so first let’s talk about the offer. I launched a membership called the AI Blog Sprint. The promise is that we’re going to blog 12 times a quarter. Once a week, we get together and basically create the blogs together in one afternoon using an AI blog tool I’ve developed. You fill out a form, it spits out a blog post, and then you take that post and make edits (hopefully fewer edits than you’d need with traditional ChatGPT).
The goal is to make blogging a lot faster, while also strategically building content that fits top of funnel, middle of funnel, and bottom of funnel. Once a quarter, we map it all out and get the blogs done. That really is the core of the offer.
Throughout the quarter, we might do some challenges but this is a beta, so I’m trying to pare things back to the main feature. Maybe one week we do a Pinterest challenge, or go through how to do SEO on your general website instead of just blog posts (something I think more people should do, but that I don’t offer as a service). Maybe one week we update old blog posts that are on the cusp of performing, or that are getting traffic but not bringing in leads. I’m thinking one challenge per quarter, max, I don’t want this to become way more work than you signed up for.
People always say they want more information and value, but do they really? If you sign up for something low-cost, you typically don’t expect it to require hours of work. I want this to be really focused: it solves the problem, it gets people blogging, and the tool is designed with my brain on the backend. I’ve built in prompts that are conversion-focused and SEO-focused — you’re not necessarily seeing any of that as a user. You’re just filling out a form: who’s your ideal client, what’s your tone of voice, and so on. And it does the work for you.
Launching “Messy” With a Google Doc Instead of a Sales Page
If you’re new to my world, you might not know this, but I don’t really launch new things. For the last three years, done-for-you marketing services have been my main bread and butter. I did create a blogging course — I want to say around 2022, though I honestly can’t remember if that was the original version or an update. My very first course was a catchall of marketing, and honestly, it was maybe okay in 2020 when it launched. But those kinds of courses are just useless now, in my opinion. There’s too much to know about marketing to cover it all effectively in one place. That’s my hot take.
One of the reasons I’ve been hesitant to put educational products out into the world is that I don’t want to sell something you’re not going to use. I want people to actually blog. With my general marketing course, I had about 10 people in it, and around five of them ended up hiring me to do it for them. Which, great for me. But it made me feel like the course wasn’t truly empowering people to do it themselves.
The course was good enough that they trusted me — but that wasn’t the goal.
My Social Media-Free Launch Plan
I had about a month’s worth of launch emails planned, most of them already written, and I was planning to send one or two a day. I also had about three weeks of podcast content about blogging lined up, plus three YouTube videos planned. March was basically going to be a heavy “this is why you need to blog” month. I thought I was going to have to convince people.
As it turns out, people didn’t need convincing. People already know they need to blog — that was my big takeaway.
The Timeline of My Latest Social-Media Free Launch
On timeline: I finalized the offer in January, but I started working on the idea back in October. I say that because I think we sometimes have really unrealistic expectations about how long it takes to bring something like this to life. I was working on it consistently — probably an average of 10 hours a week. That’s how long it takes when you’re not rushing.
And part of what made it take longer is that I wanted to build something genuinely new. If I had launched a blogging membership with a monthly training, a monthly coaching call, and a Facebook group, there’s nothing wrong with that — but we’ve all seen that model a million times. It doesn’t necessarily excite people, at least not around blogging. That’s just the go-to membership model. Something more familiar might have taken less prep work than building something from scratch.
There were also a few things I wanted to have in place before I even started launching. Some of this I count as time spent on the offer, you might not, but I’ll explain it anyway.
Making Sure I Could Give Myself Ample Launch Time + Bandwidth
First, I did a real audit of my agency systems to make sure I actually had the bandwidth to take this on. I did a podcast episode about this — episode 90 — basically titled “you’re missing out on thousands of dollars because you keep obsessing over passive income.” I really stand by what I said there.
People keep trying to build the membership, build the course, sell the digital product — and it doesn’t end up being profitable because they don’t have the bandwidth to stick with it long-term. I didn’t want to make the same mistake I’m telling you not to make.
There’s also the reality that launching something like this splits your audience. Now I have two audiences in my mind: people who can’t afford to hire my agency (or who want more control over their content), and people who are a direct fit for agency work. There’s absolutely overlap, but when I only had agency services and one audience, it was simpler. I can see it getting more complicated over time.
My hope is that people join the membership, build their business, eventually run out of capacity, and then hire me. Not immediately — but if you’re in the membership for two years and you’ve built a multi-six-figure business, you do eventually hit a ceiling, and I hope I’m the person you call.
So the other big thing I focused on before launching was locking down my agency systems. I’m still in the middle of that, honestly, because I know that as the membership scales, the agency side has to become more and more airtight. I will not sacrifice the client experience there, that’s my bread and butter, and that’s where I’m making the most money right now.
Updating my blogging course
I also updated my blogging course — a complete tear-down, ripped to the studs. I watched every video, took all the notes, and decided what I wanted to carry forward. And just to clarify: you can’t actually buy the blogging course on its own right now.
I talked about this on my email list. I was updating the course even though I had no real intention to sell it separately. I wanted to honor the people already inside it, because it just wasn’t as current as it could be.
The foundation of SEO and blogging has stayed pretty consistent, but there are AI nuances the course didn’t address at all. I created it in 2022 and ChatGPT wasn’t really a thing yet, I think I was using Jasper at the time and I just didn’t feel good about a blogging course that didn’t mention AI at all, especially when people were still buying it occasionally and I was giving it away as part of summit all-access passes.
When I was finalizing the AI Blog Sprint offer, I decided to just include the course, and I felt really good about that decision. Members can take it if they want to — they don’t necessarily need it, given the way the tool works on the backend — but that’s something I’ll communicate more clearly in the next bigger launch.
For this one, it was a beta, and I just wanted my warmest people in there: people who know me, trust the process, and are willing to iron out kinks with me. It’s not like I threw something half-baked together. I’ve done a ton of work on this. But there are always things you work out as you go.
Knowing The Social Media-Free Launch Needed To Be Done By Q2
I had started on all of this at the end of Q4 and into early Q1, and by January I was starting to feel a little stressed. The offer wasn’t fully finalized, the course wasn’t completely updated, and I knew I needed to launch at the beginning of Q2 or wait until Q3 — because this is a quarterly membership, not monthly. You start at the beginning of a quarter.
February hit and I caught myself doing what I think we all need to watch out for: procrastiworking. Suddenly I was finding every reason not to actually work on the launch. It was too early to promote, but I wasn’t sure what else to do, so I was doing things like testing the tool and tracking how the posts ranked — which, honestly, did end up helping me in the launch.
But in the moment, it was just the endless list of things I felt like I needed to do before putting it out into the world.
One thing worth noting: my site already has high domain authority, so I knew I’d be able to write blogs with the tool and see ranking results pretty quickly — faster than someone with a brand new site who might need to blog for three to six months before seeing meaningful data. So I did get useful feedback fast on how the posts were performing.
My Social Media-Free Launch Goals
Now let’s talk about my goals for the launch — and to understand the goals, you need to know my audience size. This was an email-only launch, and I have 274 people on my email list. In the online space, that feels tiny. But I love them. They’re 274 of my favorite people.
When you’re setting goals, you have to be realistic. The general rule is that 1–3% of your list will buy. You can go deeper into the data — ideally 30–40% of people are opening, maybe 5% are clicking — but broadly, that’s the benchmark. So with 274 people, my absolute minimum goal was four sales. That’s roughly 1% of my list.
I knew that if I sold fewer than four spots, it was a sign something needed work — either the offer itself (maybe people just don’t want a blogging tool), or the positioning. Converting at less than 1% over a three-week launch with roughly 300 people in my audience would mean it was back to the drawing board.
My ultimate goal for the launch was 10 members. I don’t think I set a hard cap when I first started, but once the launch was in motion I decided to cap it at 15. The reason is that the whole point of a beta is to actually look at the data: what times work for calls, how many people are showing up, whether people are participating in any challenges or weekly prompts, how their blogs are performing. If I had too many people in there, I wouldn’t be able to do that properly.
And I want to be really clear about this: I genuinely care how people do in this membership. I want to know they’re blogging and seeing results more than I wanted a higher headcount. That was really important to me.
When I set 10 as my goal, I was thinking that would be roughly 3–4% of my list — which, given the makeup of my audience, felt meaningful. My list is small, but a big portion of it — maybe around 70 people — are current clients, past clients, or people who have been in my world for a long time.
Another 100–150 or so came in through summits. And people who find you through a summit are typically considered lower quality leads (not a judgment, just an industry reality) because they signed up for a lot of lists at once and don’t really know you yet. They don’t convert at the same rate. So hitting 10 would have told me: people genuinely want this.
Looking at conversion rates and knowing this is an offer I eventually want to run ads to
One more thing about my goals. This is eventually an offer I want to run ads to — because I’m never going back to social media. Okay, never say never, but I’ve been off for about four months now and I have zero desire to go back. Sometimes I’ll see a trend and think, “oh that’s cute,” and then I close the app and forget about it entirely. My life is so much better.
The AI Blog Sprint is my scalable offer — something I want to be running long-term and eventually putting ad spend behind.
But for this launch, I deliberately didn’t run ads, and I also pulled back on promoting it heavily through the podcast or YouTube. I didn’t want cold traffic inside a brand new offer. I wanted people who had been following me for a while, who were familiar with me, and who would give me honest feedback and trust the process.
A warm audience also just has a different experience than someone brand new — not that a cold audience’s experience is less valid (in some ways it’s more valid, because it shows how the offer holds up without the influence of your personal brand). But for a beta, warm felt right.
Soft-Launching To Past Students First
I soft-launched first to the people who had just received the updated blogging course. About a week or two before the official announcement, I sent them a note dropping a hint that something new to help them implement the course was coming soon — and I gave them a considerable coupon code, because in my mind, the course is part of what you’re getting in the membership, and they’d already paid for it.
Then on a Sunday I sent a cheeky little “this can’t wait till Monday” email to that group. And on Monday I launched to my full list with an “it’s here” email.
Four people signed up in the first 30 minutes. I was texting my friend Laura, completely freaking out. I was not expecting that at all. By the end of the first day, I had nine sign-ups, plus a couple of people who had emailed me questions — one of whom signed up the next day. So in my head, that’s basically 10 people on day one.
What I learned is that my audience are quick action takers. We always hear that most people sign up on the last day — but I didn’t have a hard close, just a “when spots fill” deadline. The momentum after day one was more like one person a day, even though I was sending one to two emails daily. And honestly, it makes sense.
I was launching from a Google Doc. No sales page — I’ll have one for future launches, but this was a beta and the offer was still being refined. To buy off a Google Doc, you have to be a certain level of warm. The warmest people jumped in immediately, and people on the fence didn’t have enough to push them over.
As a bit of a data nerd, I’m genuinely curious whether future launches will always perform best on day one, or whether as the offer gets more established I’ll start to see the classic pattern: strong start, quiet middle, surge at the end. We’ll see.
Validating My Email List
As I’m recording this, I literally just sent the “beta’s full, my heart is so happy” email. Last spot is taken, and I love that for me.
One more behind-the-scenes detail: something that had been quietly nagging at me about my email list was how many generic Gmail addresses I had — not businessname@gmail.com, just like sallysue@gmail.com. I wasn’t sure if these were business owners.
Then three of my 15 members came from Gmail addresses, and as I’ve gotten to know them a little better (yes, I did a little light stalking because I am that invested in your success), several have said things like “here’s my business” and I’ve been genuinely surprised. I had no idea.
So that was a validating reminder that my list actually is full of the right people — I just couldn’t always tell from the outside.
What I Learned From This Social Media-Free Launch
All that to say: I did not make six figures on this launch. But I consider it a huge success. I have the number of people I wanted. I love who’s in it. And I’m genuinely proud of myself for launching something before it was perfect, because that is not my natural instinct. I’m a perfectionist. I would have happily run this through with imaginary people forever so no one could ever see the messy. So the fact that I hit publish anyway — and that people trusted me enough to say “if Kara says it’s going to be good, it’s going to be good” — means everything to me.
But I also want to add a dash of reality here, because you know that’s kind of my thing…
This offer is not profitable yet. I have spent more on it than I’ve made from it.
I invested in a coach and program in January — someone I thought could help me formulate the offer — and I’m so glad I did. I don’t think I could have gotten to the final version without her. And I just want to say: we are so close to our own businesses. It is so hard to see it clearly from the inside. I’m not saying everyone needs a coach. I’m just being transparent that I paid more for that program than I made in this first launch and I am completely at peace with that. I still consider this launch a huge success.
Now that it’s out in the world, the AI Blog Sprint is a huge focus for me this year. In my goals episode I said I was keeping it close to my chest, but I can talk about it openly now. The agency side is absolutely not going anywhere — I love my clients and I love doing the work.
I’m not trying to turn myself into a coach. What I want is to help you get blog posts done, written, and live. I want you to get clients from them. I want you to finally close the open loop that’s been telling you to blog. That is literally why I get up and go to work every morning.
The way I’d describe this year is: getting my reps in.
I don’t really care how much money the offer makes right now. I’m planning to run ads to it eventually, and if it breaks even, honestly, I’m fine with that. This year is about perfecting the offer, getting people real results, and building something scalable — and that takes time. I want to be realistic about that.
(And to be clear, I’m not so altruistic that money doesn’t matter to me. I’m a business owner. I want everything I do to eventually be profitable. But that’s not the primary goal for year one.)
I’m planning to launch this three times, once a quarter, and my focus each time is getting the right people in, getting them results, and continuing to refine the offer. I’ve already hired someone to design the sales page (Ellie from Ellie Brown Branding, who did my overall branding), so I’m actively investing in this.
I keep coming back to episode 90 on this, but I think it bears repeating: people chase scalable income without being truly ready for it. Everyone will tell you to launch the thing, go group program, go scalable, make it passive. Nobody tells you what it actually takes. In my opinion, this is what it takes.
You might want to invest in a coach. You might want to budget for ads. It’s probably not as simple as making a Canva PDF guide during your baby’s nap time, whatever those ads are telling you.
Anyway, that’s all for this week. Talk to you next time.
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