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The excitement is palpable. It's time to LAUNCH your first productized service out into the world.

If you've been following along with the 4-part, Your First Product series, you've already come so far. Here’s what we’ve covered:

• Part 1: How to prep for your first productized service

• Part 2: How to build your first productized service

• Part 3: How to create a landing page

• Part 4: How to launch your first productized service (today’s post 📌)

If you're just tuning in, make sure to catch up on the first three parts so you're all set for today’s launch playbook.

Otherwise, today we’re getting you launch-ready with the checklist you’ll need knock out in order to click publish.

Here we go!

Your launch checklist

To ensure everything is primed and ready for launch, here are the 3 checklist items we’re going to break down today:

1. Customer onboarding sequence

2. Marketing across various channels

3. Smoke testing the end-to-end customer experience

1/ Customer onboarding sequence

Your customer onboarding sequence is an automated series of post-purchase communications that you’ll send to your customer.

A great onboarding sequence will:

• Welcome your customer to the product

• Empower them to achieve a quick win using your product
  (minimize time-to-value)

• Help them overcome common roadblocks and limiting beliefs

• Provide bonus content to ensure their success

• Encourage them to keep going

• Provide exclusive, customer-only resources

• Inform them what to do next

Aside from enabling and supporting your customer, onboarding also benefits your business.

Your onboarding sequence will keep you and your business top-of-mind, long after the customer’s point of purchase. It also provides a bridge to drive sales of related products and services — cross-sells, up-sells.

Now that you understand the goal and intent of an onboarding sequence, let’s walk through creating them.

Onboarding format & tools

Email: Many onboarding sequences are delivered via email automation services provided by email service providers like Mailchimp, ConvertKit, or beehiiv (what I’m using).

Online learning platforms like Podia, Teachable, and Thinkific also ship with automated emailing capabilities; e.g. Podia calls them “Campaigns.”

Text: However, if your audience is mobile-only or mobile-first, you may choose to offer an automated onboarding via text message. There are lots of platforms that offer this service. The one I have experience with is Twilio.

DMs: If the product you’re launching is access to a community, your onboarding sequence may be an automated series of DMs (direct messages).

Discord, Patreon, Slack, Tribe, and Mighty Network all offer some version of automated customer messaging.

If you have multiple platforms, you can leverage a tool like Customer.io to push automated messages across all of them.

Onboarding examples

To help you get started with your onboarding sequence, I organized two resources for you.

My toolkit onboarding sequence

The first resource is an overview of the email onboarding sequence from my Problem Framing Toolkit.

I just rebuilt this sequence recently. It’s version 3 since launching the toolkit 3 years ago. I point this out to remind you that it’s not only the product itself that you’ll iterate. Each touchpoint makes up your customer’s collective experience, and thereby deserves some love and care, over time.

Since my toolkit is built within Podia, I used their emailing capability to send an 8-part onboarding sequence over 24 days.

Here are the emails I include for my toolkit customers:

• Day 0: Welcome email, with access links to their toolkit

• Day 2: Extra content they’ll be delighted to receive

• Day 7: An offer to help them with a discounted coaching call (up-sell)

• Day 10: FAQs to help address common pitfalls and questions

• Day 15, 17, 19: More bonus content to help them succeed

• Day 24: What to do after completing the steps in the toolkit

This was the original sequence: 8 emails over 24 days.

Then, a few weeks after I created that sequence, I added a new email to the sequence to announce an affiliate partner program.

Since I want every customer (including past customers) to know about that offer, I additionally sent it as a one-time broadcast.

As you create new, unique, and valuable content that supports your customer’s experience, you can continue to add them into your onboarding sequence. In other words, your onboarding sequence can last indefinitely. Just to be sure to balance value with offers. I like to shoot for a ratio of 10:1. For every 10 emails I send that contain pure value, I earn the right to send 1 offer (promos, up-sells, etc).

Create your sequence with AI

The second resource I created is a prompt you can customize and feed into your favorite AI chat agent. It will deliver back a solid foundation for you to build on top of. I prefer using ChatGPT-4 because it not only provides superior responses, but it can review links and documents that you supply it with.

Here’s the prompt: