When a founder brings me a launch, the first thing they want to talk about is usually something they can see. The landing page. The ads. The webinar title.
I understand why. Building feels like progress. A page you can click on feels like the launch is happening.
But most of the launches I've seen struggle were decided before anyone built anything. The page was fine. The ads were fine. What was missing was the work nobody could see: knowing exactly what was being sold, to whom, next to what else, and why anyone should choose it.
I once joined a launch halfway through, after all of this had been skipped. The landing page, the ads, the webinar and the sales page each described a slightly different product, and the sales didn't come.
I call that work Phase 1. It's the part founders most want to skip.
Two weeks of thinking, four weeks of building
I spent six years at a global education company. A launch there took six weeks: two weeks of strategy and psychology, then four weeks of execution. We ran two or three launches a month like that, and no launch could start without the strategy.
The company that launched the most was the one that did the most thinking. The discipline is what made the speed possible.
I didn't invent my process. I took it from there, kept refining it everywhere I worked after that, and adapted it to every client since. On my launches today, Phase 1 takes one to three weeks, depending on the launch. It comes down to four documents, and the founder signs off on all of them before anything gets built. If the launch has a live event, like a webinar or a challenge, there's also an interview about the event itself. I'll write about that one separately.
1. The product overview: why you, and what you're actually selling
A funnel is built to sell a product. If you don't understand the product deeply, you can't sell it, and you can't work out what the funnel needs to be.
You'd think every founder could explain their own product. Usually they're too close to it to see it clearly. So I start with an interview I call "Why you, why this." It's the backbone of everything I do on a launch.
It goes deep into two areas.
The first is the person behind the product. Who are you, and who do you help? What makes you credible? What's the story that connects you to this product, and why do you personally want it out in the world? Together, those answer the question every buyer has, even if they never say it out loud: why should I learn this from you?
The second is the product itself. What's the one transformation it promises, and what does life look like before and after? What are the concrete outcomes? What is it not, and who is it not for? How is it different from everything else on the market? And why does it work: not what it teaches, but what makes people actually get the result.
The founder answers in their own words, as specifically as they can, because vague answers produce vague copy. Then I fill the gaps from everything else: the course itself, transcripts, PDFs, past webinars. And I go through the product myself, the way a buyer would.
Strip it down and the whole interview answers three questions:
- Why you?
- What does this product really change for someone?
- Why this, and not anything else on the market?
I don't move forward until those answers are crystal clear, because this is where I start reverse-engineering the funnel. Once I understand the author, the product and how the two connect, I can see what kind of launch it needs. Is it a high-ticket product? How is it delivered: live, pre-recorded, with coaching? A high-ticket program usually sells through an application and a call, not a price on a page. The funnel follows the product, never the other way round.
For a prescription brand there's no author to interview, so this becomes a deep dive on each product instead: what it's for, what's in it, and which claims we're allowed to make. In a regulated category, a wrong ingredient in an ad is a compliance problem.
Everything you build after this describes the product. If the overview is wrong, every asset is wrong in the same way.
2. Market research: where the market is, and where you are in it
Your buyer doesn't see your launch on its own. They see it next to everything else they've been offered this month.
So once I understand the product, I look at the market around it. For the last three years I've done this for every client I work with, and I look for three things.
The first is the market itself. Where is the industry sitting in relation to this product? How aware are people of the problem, and of this kind of solution? How far has the category already spread, and where is the opportunity? When I worked with a coach and nutritionist in a smaller European market, I first needed to understand how people in that country see health and fitness. When I launched an AI program in a local market, the questions were how aware people were of AI, how far it had already reached, and where the opening was.
The second is the competitors. Who else is selling to this buyer, and what are they offering? I go through competitors' funnels as a buyer would: their pages, their ads in the ad libraries, their offers and prices. I sign up to their email lists to see what they send. Screenshots of all of it go on one board, so we can see the whole market at once. For the coach, that also meant understanding how many other coaches were already out there.
The third is where you stand. Next to all of that, how is this founder different? For the coach, everything came back to one question: why this coach, and not one of the others?
I also look at the founder's own content. Their best-performing posts show which topics the audience already cares about. The audience votes with its engagement, and it's free.
AI made this part faster. A research document that used to take me weeks now takes about two days. What didn't get faster is reading it. I read every page, the sources are listed at the end, and the founder checks the facts, because they know their industry better than any prompt does.
The trap here is copying. A competitor's page often works because of what sits behind it: thousands of reviews, years of customers, a name people already trust. Copy the layout without any of that and you get a page that looks successful and doesn't sell. So for every idea we find, I ask one question: can this apply to us, and how?
3. Avatar intelligence: who buys, in all their versions
An avatar isn't "women, 35 to 55, interested in wellness." That's a targeting setting.
I call this part avatar intelligence, because one avatar is rarely enough. Most businesses have one main avatar and several variations of it. For a program that trains beauty professionals, the main avatar was a woman a few years into her career, good at the work and still financially unstable. Underneath her we found five variations: the one still employed in a salon, the one working on her own without a system, the small business owner stuck at a ceiling, the one working abroad, and the one stuck at low prices.
For each variation I map the pain points, the dreams, the frustrations and what an ordinary day looks like. In their own words, because those words end up in the headlines.
I start from how the founder describes their buyer in the "Why you, why this" interview and build from there. For high-ticket offers I go further. I ask for 30 to 40 recordings or transcripts of real sales calls, from people who bought and people who didn't, and I sit down with the sales team. Don't skip the people who didn't buy. They give you the objections, in their own words. AI helps me do all of this much faster now.
Avatar intelligence also gives me the audience segments for paid ads later on. Each variation becomes its own audience with its own angle. The salon employee and the woman stuck at low prices might want the same program, but for different reasons, so they shouldn't see the same ad.
I saw what happens without this in an audit for an education company in a local market, selling programs by several authors. The programs were excellent: high-ticket, over €2,000, built step by step with coaching and daily activities, and designed for people at a specific level.
The problem was upstream. The workshops that sold those programs promised something else, and they were pulling in an audience the programs weren't built for. The promise, the product and the people coming in didn't match.
We rebuilt the strategy for each author's vertical. Fewer leads came in, and the sales calls got stronger. Founders tend to look at the first number and panic. The second one is the one that matters.
4. Positioning: the marketing deck that sums it all up
The last document pulls everything together. In practice it's a marketing deck: the strategy for the whole launch, built from what the first three found.
In it, I go over market sophistication, to understand how aware the market is and where the product sits in it: is it first to market, or arriving after everyone else? I look at the problem from both sides, what the buyer thinks it is and what it actually is. I map the beliefs the audience already holds. And most important of all, I define the product's USP, its unique selling proposition.
This is also where the offer gets decided. The price, the bundle, the discount, how long the offer stays open. All of it comes out of the strategy. Skip the strategy and you still make those decisions. You just make them as guesses, under launch pressure.
It's also where I sometimes have to say something a founder doesn't want to hear. If the research says the topic they love won't sell, I tell them before we build anything around it. That conversation costs a lot less in week two than after the launch.
Last week I wrote about a workshop called "Double your income" that converted well and sold nothing on the calls. That title was a positioning decision. It chose who showed up before anyone saw the offer.
When you need all of this
You need the full version whenever you create a new product from scratch.
But I'd recommend it to anyone with a product they already sell, too. I can almost guarantee that most founders have never done the whole exercise: understanding each of their products this deeply, and reverse-engineering the funnel from it. So do it for every product you want to sell.
The good news is that you do it once per product. Once it's documented, relaunching that product six months or a year later doesn't mean starting over. You go back to the documents and build from there.
The documents also keep working after the launch. They become a strategy library for everyone who touches the product: the marketing team, the ads specialist, whoever writes the copy, whoever creates the social media content. That's how every asset ends up telling the same story.
And none of it is a guarantee. Phase 1 gives you better assumptions, written down, so that when the market answers you can tell what it's answering. It doesn't make the market agree with you.
If you're doing it yourself
If you're launching without a strategist, you can still do a lighter version. Before you build anything, try to answer these honestly:
- Why are you the right person to create this? And can you explain what it does in one paragraph a stranger would understand?
- Who is it built for, and at what level? Who is it not for?
- Have you gone through three competitors' funnels as a buyer, all the way to the checkout?
- What do they have that you can't copy, and what's your version of it?
- When did you last hear a buyer describe their problem in their own words?
- Why did the last five people who didn't buy say no?
- Can you say in one sentence why someone should buy this from you, now, instead of what they're already considering?
If one of them stops you, that's the part to work on before you build anything.
Over the next few days I'm going deeper into three of them on LinkedIn and Instagram: the avatar, competitor research and the product overview.
If you skip strategy, you're not saving time. You're winging the offer.