MC36 – Leveraging Buying Frenzy – How to Create Interest and Curiosity for a Launch
Every big launch you’ve ever watched worked on you the same way. The free video series showed up in your inbox. You started looking forward to the next installment. By the time the cart opened, you weren’t deciding whether the product was good, you were deciding whether you could stand to miss it. That feeling wasn’t an accident. It was machinery, and in this session from the Classic Masters Course, Dave Wood takes the machinery apart in public.
This is a session about launches at every scale: the classic guru product launch, the way Empower Network itself launched, and the promotional cycles you can run on your own list, whatever size it is, without burning it out. The point throughout is mechanism. Interest and curiosity are built, on purpose, in phases, and once you see the phases you can build them too.
How does a classic launch build a buying frenzy?
The big product launches you see all over the internet follow a super simple process. For about a week before anything is for sale, the seller gives away lots of value, typically something like a four-video series, and everybody promoting the launch slams traffic at it. Two things happen in that week. The person selling gets edified, because they’ve spent days giving away free training. And, this is the key most people miss, the free material is genuinely usable: people can take it, apply it to their business, and get results before they’ve spent anything.
Dave’s analogy is putting a can of tuna out for a cat. The cat comes back the next day, and the next, for the rest of your life. Free value that actually works is bait and proof at the same time. Then the cart opens, and now there’s a window, everybody knows the cart is only open for a week, then it closes. So the buying comes in three surges, the open, the middle, and the very end, when fear of loss peaks. Value up front, a defined window, a hard close. That’s the anatomy.
What did Empower Network do differently?
Empower couldn’t use a closing cart, so they replaced it with time and mystique. They decided on a launch date and started a Monday night call roughly six weeks out. On those calls, they talked about the problems they’d had in their businesses for years and how they were going to solve them, and they told nobody what the thing actually was. Then they invited people to a secret launch meeting to find out. NDAs, secrecy, the whole thing.
People flew in from all over the world to a little hotel room, thirty or forty of them, and every single one got in and bought all the products. Dave is emphatic about why: not the pitch in the room, but the six weeks of prep before it. They spent three days showing that group what to do, kept it very simple, showed them why it would work, and that group of thirty became ten thousand people within a month. His own scorecard on it: it would not have worked if they’d just tried to slam the launch. It wouldn’t have worked without the free calls, and it wouldn’t have worked without the prep time. The value and the momentum did the selling before the meeting ever started.
The secrecy itself was an asset, the same “go get a secret” principle from earlier in the course. A promise of hidden information pulls harder than an explanation. And Dave points out that they never stopped running this play: events, contests, product releases, all of them run as promotional cycles with value, mystique, and a hard deadline, while people who never build a cycle wonder why nobody feels urgency to buy from them. He adds a side note worth stealing: if you’re building a list, start a standing team call of your own. He’d kept something running Monday nights at nine for three years, and some people had been on it the whole time, people who would follow him into anything, because the call itself is a value cycle that never closes.
How do you run cycles without destroying your list?
Here’s the part that applies to you the week you read this. You cannot just sell to a list all the time. Every time you run a hard promotional push, what Dave calls a slam, your open rates drop, and if all you ever send is buy-links, they keep dropping, from twelve percent to nine to seven, until nobody is reading. But the opposite failure is just as common: people who only ever help, sending free stuff forever, with a list that opens everything and buys nothing.
What I’ve done for a long time is I’ve cycled my list through a promotional cycle back to a slam cycle… what I’ll do is I’ll slam my list to get them to buy, and then when I notice the open rate drop down a little bit, I change it back to a value cycle until the open rate goes back up, and then I start slamming a promotion again until the rate goes down, and then I go back to the value, and it just goes in a cycle like that, eternally.
The open rate is the gauge on the dashboard. When your list is opening a lot, it’s time to sell. When opens sag, it’s time to give: testimonials, personality, free content, stories on the blog with a quiet buy button underneath, until the rate climbs back to where it was, and then you slam again, that fast. In practice Dave found you can run a ruthless mini-slam about once a month without damaging the list, and something massive about every ninety days, when you’re selling something genuinely new and want a rush of buyers.
Why ninety? Because ninety to a hundred and twenty days is about the total attention span a focused person can sustain in an intense building cycle. Very few people on earth can go hard longer than that without a peak to aim at. It’s why the company ran an event roughly every hundred days, and pre-sold the next event at the current one, converting a linear grind into a loop. And the same physics govern your warm market: the people who build big teams through family and friends don’t call grandma four times a week about their deal. Dave’s standing example is a legendary trainer he’d watched give value constantly, for years, videos and free help every single day, who then backed one launch, and a list of twenty thousand people outperformed lists of half a million. Responsiveness is a battery. Value charges it. Selling drains it. The cycle is just learning to read the meter.
How do you launch when it isn’t your company?
A team leader named Lawrence then explains how he rode the company’s launch as an individual affiliate, because this is the version anyone can run: when you enter a business, that’s your launch. He built an extreme amount of value with his audience first, and never told them what was coming, because he genuinely didn’t know all of it himself. He went as far as promising to solve a problem he didn’t have the solution for yet: I don’t know if I can provide this, but if I can, imagine what it would do for your business. Curiosity, honestly manufactured. Then he launched with almost nothing technical, two videos, a vision, a strong call to action, and urgency.
The part most people skip is what he did next: he never stopped. Where his old company held one event a year and watched everyone drift away within ninety days, he inserted every new person into a rolling cycle, always pre-selling the next event. He made access itself the scarce thing: I only work with people who are serious, and if you’re not at the event, you’re not that serious. At the event, no distractions, undivided attention. Between events, a small outsourced team handled the follow-up calls. Two videos, some copy, a button, and a calendar. The strategy is knowing what to do, not owning technology.
One warning from Dave closes the loop: the new-launch play doesn’t run forever on the same audience. Beat your list to death with it and they simply stop opening the emails. After you’ve been in a while, you have to let up and change it up, which is exactly what the slam-and-value cycle is for.
This session pairs with the next one in the Classic Masters Course, where the launch principles get shown through one team member’s thirty days of pure action. If you’re new to it, the entire Classic Masters Course, this lesson included, is available for $99 at the Classic Masters Course.
Map your next ninety days now. Pick one date for a real promotion, schedule the value that charges the battery before it, and give your audience one secret worth waiting for.