My first book made nearly $250,000. Here's how I did it, but more importantly: How I could've done more if I had ChatGPT to help me!

I wrote the best-selling growth hacking book in the history of Kickstarter. Here's my FULL guide of every step I took to make that happen (and how to use ChatGPT if YOU want to have a viral launch!:

If you want to use ChatGPT for a viral launch, you will love this article.

I originally wrote this in 2016 so I’ll reprint it as it was written, with the addition of how ChatGPT would’ve helped me do much more.

So if you have a product or book you want to launch, you will love this article!

At the time of writing, here’s how it begun:

—

We had just one month to prepare.

It seemed impossible.

Neither of us had ever done anything like this before.

But as is so often the case, once you start, it just “happens”.

I’m writing this from 14,000 feet on a plane from San Francisco to Chicago.

At the time of writing our Kickstarter has a week to go and is set to pass $45,000 in pledges.

We have yet to have a single piece of PR where someone external reviewed or talked about our product, and there are a million things we wish we would have had time to do:

We’ve had no “influencers” raving about us. Have done (at time of writing) zero content marketing. (2023 Note: this was before I had my own Facebook group, before I posted “content” on the internet, let alone regularily)

I see founders with great but unsexy products fail when PR doesn’t give them the initial boost they need.

In some ways, this is a guide for how to hack a successful Kickstarter launch without getting PR.

Why is this important?

Most other Kickstarter guides focus on how to get PR, then get a mountain of PR on day one for a quirky/weirg/unique product, and the rest is just tinsel on top.

Our product isn’t so much sexy as it is useful; this is for everyone with unsexy but useful products. 

As ever with one of my guides, remember no growth hacks will save you if you don’t have a product people actually want.

In our case, this was a product that helps people make more money, so there is a strong case.

How ChatGPT could’ve helped/how I would have done things differently:

Part 1: Would’ve used ChatGPT to create personalised pitches for the top 100 PR / journalists/influencers who might want to review my book, by feeding ChatGPT their blog/Twitter feeds and asked it to mention specific things in the pitch, showing we did our research. This work used to take hours!

Here are the ten things we learned, from pre-campaign to launch. Feel free to use it as your guide :)

Lesson 1: Speak to experts before you do anything

Spend a week reading up how to do successful product launches and kick-starters, to distill the information of experts. Then dive in with people who have done the exact thing you are trying to achieve (never take advice from anyone who hasn’t). 

When Anthony Robbins and Tim Ferriss want to learn something new, they try and find the best people that they know to tell them how to do it

- they don’t read blogs or articles by content marketers.

We spoke to a couple of people who had launched similar products to find out what to do/not do.

One call in particular I remember making an entire page of notes for (the genius Nick Walter). Here’s some of my favourite points from that call, in his own words:

1. Kickstarter’s internal traffic is maybe the single biggest reason one should do Kickstarter over another platform, or just launching the product on your own site. Many projects typically see 25%-50% of their total pledges come from within Kickstarter’s network, i.e. sales they would not have got if they weren’t on Kickstarter
   - This is monumentally important

2. Thank everyone who pledges within 24 hours- I did this as I presumed everyone did, and was shocked to find lots of people who pledged to a tonne of products say this is the first time anyone has ever thanked them.
   I’m pretty sure this massively minimised the number of cancellations I got

3. If possible, bring your Kickstarter goal as low as possible
   - If you’re not near finishing, lots of people hold off in case you don’t hit it.
   You want it to be a party where the product is guaranteed to ship, so hitting it in the first two days or less means you’ll convert at a much higher rate

4. Put in your Google Analytics tag to track traffic- see where sales came from, tagged links etc

5. Put all of your efforts into that first day-if many people donate you have a better chance of showing up on Kickstarter’s internal search

6. Tuesday appears to be the best day to launch, though Monday is also good

7. Introduce a new reward toward to the end of the project to galvanise more bids, and get people to upgrade from one pledge level to the next

8. Weekly updates to backers (more if you get more press).
   Good updates = genuine sentiment, talking about what you’re working on/how the product is progressing, etc

9. On rare occasions approval can take up to a week, so make sure you send it for Kickstarter’s approval in good time.

10. One of your packages should be dead obvious to choose, i.e. a “no-brainer.”

11. Your preview Kickstarter URL will forward to the Kickstarter page when it goes live, so consider doing a redirect from your landing page as soon as the project goes live.

12. Have a site as soon as the auction ends to redirect people to who otherwise will feel like they missed out

13. After 2-3 days of closing you can see whose credit card didn’t work and message them to let them know- this will reduce churn

14. Delivering the goods:
    You can go to the backer report and search by pledge level, and send a mass email to everyone which feels like an individual message.
    This will save you time!

How ChatGPT could’ve helped/how I would have done things differently:

Part 2: Would’ve asked ChatGPT to “act as” business influencers and authors who had had viral book launches, and to critique my launch, point out ways it might fail, and suggest ideas to try to make sure it worked.

Secondly, my friend runs a successful Kickstarter agency.
He has raised millions for clients.
When we (me and my co-author Austen Allred) decided to launch a Kickstarter, I went straight to him to tell him about it.
How I thought it would go: My friend would charm me with stories of his agency and all the PR he could get for us, and I’d eventually relent and offer him money to work on our campaign.
What actually happened: He told us “You’re doing an ebook and video course. You won’t get any PR for this”.
Then he went back to working on his laptop.
Damn, OK so no PR, lol.

We reached out to a couple of people, but we found he was right. Getting press wasn’t the best use of our time.

How ChatGPT could’ve helped/how I would have done things differently:

Part 3: Would’ve gotten a second opinion from the world’s smartest computer about whether we could get PR/influencers, not just “taking my friends’ word for it” (lol)

Lesson 2: Play to your strengths

With no PR, we doubled down on the things we were good at.
In Austen’s case it was writing and utilising his email list, in my case it was giving talks on growth hacking and utilising my community.

All good growth hacks get your users to do the work for you, so we built a viral queueing system using Queueat.com.
Typically startups build a landing page, and when someone leaves their email they say “Great! We’ll let you know when we launch.”
That sucks as the person has shown they’re interested in what you’re doing, you’re gonna leave them in the cold? 

The queue system we made drops them in something like 500th place in a queue when they leave their email.
The only way to get further up the queue is to like our Facebook page, follow us on Twitter, invite their friends by email, etc.
If they finish near the top of the queue, they get bonuses.
In our case it was free growth hacking consultancy, free webinars, free entrance to a secret growth hacking group on Facebook, etc.
In your case it might be early access or free products.
People LOVE gamification like this, and we saw well over 100% uplift (i.e. we more than doubled the amount of people we invited to the queue.
On launch day we had over 2,200 people from the queue waiting for the book to come out.

This was great, especially considering we only turned it on three weeks before launch (we decided on a whim to write the book, so we did all of this stuff very quickly- with three or six-month advance time you’d have a ridiculous number of people in the queue if you worked through this guide. 

We invited our close email contacts into the queue, then sent tweets to our Twitter network, invited my LinkedIn network, and posted in key Facebook groups to get early traction. 

How ChatGPT could’ve helped/how I would have done things differently:

Part 4: Re-reading this promo plan, there were big obvious promotion areas we didn’t do, that a thorough ChatGPT analysis would have at least let me know exist, let alone planning how to execute, and create all social media posts, email pitches, and the plan to make it happen!

Above: Cumulative funds raised. Notice how big the first and last two days are!

The above picture was taken halfway through launch day. Notice how mashed I am from jetlag and not sleeping, ha

Lesson 3: Caveat: No silver bullets

If you’re waiting for the “one strange trick” which set our campaign on fire, you’re not going to get it.
We didn’t create a fake Tinder profile as a girl in the San Francisco area, ask boys what they do for a living, and tell them they could become a startup millionaire if they bought this book
(Yes, many tech startups have done variations of this dastardly “hack” lmao). 

We had a slow, steady, logical campaign hitting up each of our networks and bringing them into the pre-launch community (the queue).
I’ve been telling people for a while now that growing your personal network on Twitter, LinkedIn, email list, and Facebook in particular (your personal Facebook, not a company one) is so valuable.

How ChatGPT could’ve helped/how I would have done things differently:

Part 5: Not trying to go beyond my core audience.

Some ideas ChatGPT could’ve helped me include new promo channels (as mentioned on the last post), more cold emails to people who might be interested in the book, creating a lot of relevant blogposts for hyper-specific SEO traffic, more social media posts

(I posted very little during this launch compared to what I can do (75+ posts a day easily) using ChatGPT.

Every post is another chance for a sale.

I’d never sold a product through my network before, but had been growing my community aggressively for the last year. 

Honestly, it wasn’t calculated:

It’s a no-brainer that your digital rolodex is a key asset.

Once you have the contacts, direct marketing is the key here:

Let every single person in your network know what you’re doing and when it’s coming out.

The WORST thing you could do is send one tweet or one Facebook post and expect everyone to see it.

Most people don’t see most posts.

Lesson 4: Pre-launch campaign

Jeff Walker helped invent “drip-feed email marketing” (or “Product Launch Formula) a few years back, and I’ve still never found a better way to warm an audience up pre-launch.

It goes like this:

Send three emails/messages to your community before you launch.

The first is all about why you’re launching this product- i.e. what it means to you, how it will benefit them, etc.

The second is what the product is, i.e. diving deep into it’s features, and the final email is how they can purchase it, i.e. the release date is coming up in a few days. here’s how you can purchase it.

His book dives into this in a lot of detail, and is well worth reading.

So we used this format to keep our community informed, as well as the emails to everyone in the pre-launch queue. 

How ChatGPT could’ve helped/how I would have done things differently:

Part 6: We could’ve been far more forensic following Product Launch Formula using a ChatGPT prompt like “You are productlaunchformulaGPT. I am going to input my entire pre-launch and promotion for my plan. I want you to reply with every part of the launch can be improved using the product launch formula. The first reply can cover everything in the pre-launch. Please reply with at least 20 bullet points of feedback, and indicate where the plan is true to product launch formula, or could be better.

Every post is another chance for a sale.

The amount of invites went up after every email.

We had no expectations that people would naturally be sharing- people need to be prompted.

Seeing that, we decided to set up a Thunderclap for the day the Kickstarter launched, and supposedly its reach was about 1 million people.

(2023 update: Thunderclap shut down: It used to allow you to have people pre-load up tweets and Facebook posts then it automagically releases every post in the same minute, causing a “thunderclap” across social media. there are alternatives out there)

As we mentioned before, this whole campaign was very last minute, so we actually only invited people to join the thunderclap with 24 hours notice, and mainly to our close network.

(So again, think what you can do with proper preparation).

I also gave one growth hacking talk in London two weeks before and two talks in Canada the week before launch, to capture emails and get people hyped about the forthcoming launch. 

Lesson 5: Sleepless in San Francisco

We made $10,000 in the first four hours.

We had a following which was roughly 50% UK and 50% America, so we launched at 2pm UK time, which meant New York could jump on it at the same time, then L.A. would join in three hours later and the party would be rocking.

I had to get up SO EARLY in San Francisco to get this going but it worked.

Hour one:

Facebook, Twitter, and Linkedin status update that we’re live, immediate replies and troubleshooting.

Email blasts.

Hour two:

Thunderclap (as mentioned above, many people posting about the Kickstarter at the same time)

Hour three:

Tweets going out once every 30 minutes per Twitter account, either to the Kickstarter, or content or podcasts about the Kickstarter.

If a tweet isn’t seen in the first 17 minutes, it will likely never get seen, so keeping a consistent flow of tweets will mean a consistent flow of traffic to the landing page. There’s not much better than consistent, targeted traffic when you’re marketing something. (2023 update: This caused many people to unfollow me. But I wanted them book sales so I went for it haha)

Hour four:

Posting to key Facebook groups & Reddit.

While I posted in some key Facebook groups, my book co-author Austen wrote a “how we hit our target in four hours” post which made it to the top of r/startups and r/entrepreneur on Reddit, and although the point wasn’t just to promote the product it drove a heap of traffic, discussion, and…some sales :)

There’s a slight misconception on what growth hacking is, which people discussed in the Reddit comments.

Growth hacking is often just solid, scalable direct marketing executed in a logical way. 

In terms of hyping up the pre-launch community, we had given everyone who joined the queue a free chapter to whet their appetite

- A movie director used this strategy to get over 200,000 views on his trailer on YouTube.

When you give away a sample of what you’re doing and it’s good, you don’t have to ask them to come over and try your food

- They’ll turn up with a knife and fork on opening day.

On a side note: no sleeping for more than four hours in a row for the first four days.

I bought a week’s worth of food and pretty much didn’t leave my apartment in San Francisco until I left to give a talk in Dallas.

It’s round-the-clock replying to everyone who pledged, questions from all over the world about different pledge levels, and continuing to update your community. 

On the second day, I did an AMA (Ask me anything) with #TechLondon, one of the busiest slack groups in the world.

After that I wolfed down breakfast and did a webinar with Startup Socials.

After that I took a nap for 45 minutes then did a podcast with “The App guy”. The second day was monumental in sales also ($8,000-ish).

If we had more time to prepare and had lined up more days like this, the numbers would’ve been bigger, but again we kind of did this on a whim at the last minute. 

Lesson 6: Bookless book tour/launch party brings the internet to real-life

I gave talks in Dallas, Austin, Houston, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, and New York, having previously spoken in Vancouver and Victoria in Canada, and a pre-launch party in London in the pre-campaign.

Planes from city to city cost around $250 each, so you soon make that back with more on top with just a few sales if you can speak to 50+ people in the room, as well as growing your personal network/email list.

At the time of writing this article, I believed that public speaking was one of the best ways to make a real connection and begin a sales process with multiple people at once, particularly if you’re selling a high value item (like consulting, the main product my company sold at the time).

How ChatGPT could’ve helped/how I would have done things differently:

Part 7: We would’ve crafted city-specific cold email copy and emailed businesses in every city I spoke at to make sure even more people attended my talks and bought the book

We had multiple packages in the Kickstarter which were hundreds of dollars also.

If you don’t know how to start public speaking, do the following: 

1. Search your niche/keywords for every meetup/event on Meetup and Eventbrite, and any meetup Facebook groups. Find anything that looks active/has a lot of members/people attending

2. Message all the event owners through these platforms something like the following: “Hey, your meetup looks great. I give a talk on the 10 things everyone gets wrong in our industry/10 ways to get better at what you’re doing in our industry (insert catchy title herE)”, and I’d love to come and give a talk at your event.
   I will invite my network to attend. Can I come and give my talk at one of your forthcoming events? 

3. Tweet all the event owners at the same time “Just emailed you through Eventbrite/Meetup regarding your event. Hope to hear from you soon!” which will send them over to the page if they didn’t receive it.

4. About 25% of *active* meetups/events will reply positively and you’re off to the races.
   Always mention that you’re looking to give more talks and the audience will help you out by recommending you to others.

5. As for the talk, at a basic level just write down everything you want to say on the slides if you don’t think you’ll remember it or are super nervous.
   Then just riff around it.
   Give away more secrets and value than you’re comfortable with- people will appreciate it, recommend you to others, and even those who could take your info and use it tend to be too lazy and will hire you/buy the book to get one of their staff to implement it.

6. Put your Twitter handle in the corner of every slide and have an intern collate all the positive tweets people write while watching you- killer social proof to get you better talks in the future

7. Have your email on the last slide if people want your slides.
   Now you have their emails to contact them, if you didn’t get them already from the Eventbrite signup.
   Those emails are handy when you have a book to promote! :-)
   (I wrote an updated version of the above article here):

The ultimate cheatsheet for becoming an internet famous public speaker in 2023

1. Below: A list of some of the top referrers, and the £ amount they made us

Lesson 7: Alongside solid methods, have some moon shots too

Marketing is all about trying new things.
The problem with tapping your own community is there’ll always be a limit.
I tried a few different things as experiments.
I went on four or five different podcasts, and could see from the analytics that a couple of them brought some sales, so it’s likely if I had done more there would have been more sales.
I was interviewed on TV/Radio in Los Angeles which was difficult to track but went out to a huge number of people.
Maybe it caused a bump for those few days?
We have so many sales each day & so many sales from that mysterious *direct traffic no referrer information* makes it’s difficult to tell.
We also got into as many peoples’ mailouts as possible- anyone who had a mailout which reached entrepreneurs/founders and was in my close network we reached out to.
This brought some traffic and sales.
For those who didn’t have a mailing list, we asked for social shoutouts.
No one of these methods brought a considerable spike, but as an aggregate they were all worth doing, in the spirit of HUSTLE.

How ChatGPT could’ve helped/how I would have done things differently:

Part 8: We would’ve had ChatGPT craft channel-specific cold emailed more TV/radio/podcasts across America with specific pitches, with ChatGPT trained on the past 50 tweets or blog posts of every organisation we wanted to cover us

Lesson 8: Introducing the one-person mailout

One growth hack we utilised which was extremely manual was one of our secret weapons.
We emailed people who had seen me talk, told them where they could see me talk for free, and let them know the book was out.

This took a lot of time.

Traditional thoughts would have been to bung them all in one mailout and be done with it, but guess what- people are wise to that and your engagement rate will be close to zero. (2023 update: In 2016 there were less off the shelf softwares to do this easily, and I personalised as many emails as I could)

We always ended every email by asking if there’s anything we can do for them or any marketing problem they’re having.
My email got comically blocked up the first few times I did this, with person after person getting free consultancy from me for their companies.

But because there was no mailing list, we landed front and centre in their inbox (whatever you do, you’re likely to end up in the promotions tab on Gmail if you’re sending to a lot of people unless you’re some sort of email ninja who knows every hack necessary, i.e. not the majority of us).

As a side note, Labelizer was AMAZING for tagging groups of emails that you can then share with other members of staff, i.e. you don’t want to give team members or interns access to all of your emails for data security reasons, but obviously you shouldn’t be spending time on manual tasks, so this allows you to effortlessly tag different groups of people and have someone else reach out to them.

Lesson 9: Indiegogo is your victory lap

The minute the Kickstarter ended, we threw up a “The Kickstarter has ended, but you can still buy the package over on Indiegogo!”

This was crucial - Many people just didn’t see the emails sent to them, or social emdia posts in their feed.

If they arrived on the Kickstarter page to buy and couldn’t, you just lost a sale.

So there was a big button front and center that people could click to buy the book on a near-identical layout on Indiegogo.

This pushed us over $100,000 in sales! Landmark achievement!

To continue reading this article, please upgrade to the paid plan!

(You will also receive the entire book as an eBook for easy reading)

The Indiegogo campaign lasted one month.

We continued to blast it to our followers and lists.

Doesn’t sound very “secret sauce-y” but half the time the secret to success is consistency.

We just wanted it more than all the many many marketers who release books on Kickstarter to crickets, or give it away for free.

Then we switched to our own site.

For simplicity, we put the book on Gumroad.

This is where the book made the rest of it’s money.

Me and Austen would periodically blast it to our lists.

At last count it made over $230,000 between 2016 and us finally removing it from sales in 2021.

(The social media bits had started to become a little out of date, though the rest of the book is pretty timeless)

Things we messed up

Just as important as what we did do, is what we didn’t do, or did badly. So don’t do…these:

• Our tagging of traffic on Google Analytics could have been better.
  In all the chaos of getting all our traffic sources setup we didn’t put this in for the first few days and missed some valuable data.
  As ever, prioritising traffic is never something worth regretting, but for optimum performance, knowing exactly where everything is from is so useful in deciding what to go deeper on.

• We started our launch campaign with only four weeks notice.
  This was a side project for us, but if it’s your next startup or business idea, three-six months or more will bring incredible results.
  You can nurture PR, webinar, and podcast relationships, build a gigantic queue, have a weapons-grade content marketing plan, and become a six-figure Kickstarter success story

• We got so wrapped up in all our plans for having a huge first week that we had little happening in the second and third weeks other than my talks.
  Spending more time building relationships would have enabled us to have more external traffic coming in consistently throughout the campaign.
  When we had that crazy first day, I got that naive entrepreneur hope that every day could be like Christmas, and it soon got reduced down due to inadequate planning for marketing activities beyond the first few days.
  Sad!

How ChatGPT could’ve helped/how I would have done things differently:

Part 9: We could’ve had ChatGPT strategically plan activities for every day of the launch, including how to execute many of the ideas we didn’t think of, based on the data ChatGPT has of every successful launch ever!

• I had no content written for content marketing in advance.
  For some reason I thought once the Kickstarter was out, I’d have time to burn some incense, sit down by candlelight and get some good writing done.
  Wrong!
  Next time I’ll have all my articles pre-written and the publications which have agreed to feature me all set up.
  We could also have used these as content to send traffic to from social channels, with Kickstarter ads sitting inside the content on our sites. Content marketing is a much, much easier sell to publications than trying to get a review copy/get interviewed/be featured, partly because a) All blogs need content, and b) It takes the writer a lot less work/organisation/brainspace.

How ChatGPT could’ve helped/how I would have done things differently:

Part 10: ChatGPT could’ve written us unlimited blog posts, social media posts, mailouts, and cold emails, trained on my writing tone/voice/slang/use of emoji’s, so it feels like it’s coming from me. Things would be very different if we were doing a viral book launch again!

• We did basically zero paid marketing. We would have made much much more if we had mastered in.
  We did spend some to try it but just couldn’t get the maths right.
  This would have lifted us to be one of the biggest business/marketing books ever on Kickstarter.

How ChatGPT could’ve helped/how I would have done things differently:

Part 11: ChatGPT could’ve written us a step-by-step guide to an ad campaign, all copy for the text/photo ads, scripts for the video ads for me to execute, and basically make it braindead simple for us to try this lucrative channel (and man oh man, ads were so much cheaper in 2016, if only we had ChatGPT then damn!!!)

Lesson 10: Maybe I’ll do PR next time

I don’t want to leave this article without bringing a few tips on PR, as many founders reading this will find it useful. I’m planning on doing major PR for my next book, have got PR for companies my agency has worked with as well as myself, so I know the basics.
Generally speaking in Kickstarter, your pre-research starts with manually looking at all the similar projects that were successful on Kickstarter (and Indiegogo and GoFundMe if relevant), do a reverse image search on their main image, and see where they got Pr around the time of launch.
(Google them too, obviously, but the image search tends to sweep up everything). Then make a list of those journalists and reach out to them, as if they are interested in Y, there’s a good chance they’ll like X also.

(P.R./influencers would’ve been much easier with ChatGPT, as mentioned earlier)

Conclusions:

It was a fun three weeks, leading to the most important thing I ever launched (It led to my biggest client ever, amongst many, many other wins.

You never know what will happen when you hit that “launch” button, and we were very pinched for time, but solid pre-planning and following the above formula should see most products having a very strong chance of hitting their target.

Be thorough, relentless, and just a little bit cheeky.

As we mention in the Secret Sauce book itself, organic growth is almost always a complete lie.

In 2023…ChatGPT can be your secret weapon to win. And you can tell everyone “It all happened naturally!”
;)
We won’t tell if you don’t!

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