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Welcome back to the Launch Key 🚀
Tuning out election ads, I revisited an unfinished thread from the Spring.
Back in April, I shared John Carlton's four-step formula for anything that sells: get attention, build trust, make a clear offer, ask for the close.
And I covered the first half in a couple of issues. Writing is your moat. Email is the one audience you own.
Here we finally get to the back half of Carlton’s formula.
Let's get into it.
Gmail users may wish to read online since some parts may be clipped.
Comment below and let me know if we're on the right track.
Table of Contents
Pull to Eject
One r/Entrepreneur post, "I made $320K on Instagram last year," drew 2,543 upvotes and 862 comments. Nobody upvotes a follower count. They upvote what the audience turned into.
An audience is an asset. It isn't a business until you offer it something.
Four lists, four offers
Justin Welsh: courses. A former startup sales executive, Welsh went solo in 2019. He posts daily on LinkedIn, sends readers to a newsletter with 175,000+ subscribers, and sells them courses. In October 2023 he announced his one-person business had passed $5 million in revenue. Zero ads. A 92% margin.
Hanna Larsson: clients. Larsson left her 9-to-5 about three years ago. She built 276,000 LinkedIn followers and gave them somewhere to go: HUNTRS. The newsletter brings in clients from around the world. Her marketing budget, in her words: "$0."
Clay Norris: a career he didn't plan. In May I told you how my middle son built Confluence one week at a time. Here's a twist. His readers turned out to be exactly the people venture firms want to hire. That brought him consulting work first, and now a very targeted headhunting practice.
The Launch Key: products. The list here pays through recommendations, a little ad revenue and things I build once and sell multiple times like the Career Portfolio Playbook. I continue to experiment with both paid and free products.
Same structure, four different offers. And notice that none of them is "subscribe to my newsletter." The newsletter is where the trust gets built. The offer is what you sell to people who already trust you.
Make a clear offer
Most experienced people never get past this step. The list grows, the writing improves, and the offer stays vague: "reach out if I can help."
Nobody reaches out to vague.
Name the problem, not the title. "I get Series A companies audit-ready in 90 days" beats "fractional CFO."
Put a price on it. A course, a retainer, a $37 playbook. A price turns interest into a decision.
Make it once, mention it often. One offer, in every issue, in the same place. Repetition isn't pushy. It's how people remember you sell something.
Ask for the close
"I hate selling" is the most common sentence I hear. Daniel Pink found that people who aren't in sales still spend about 40% of their working time persuading others. You're better at this than you think. Here's the short bookshelf, and how each one applies to a list:
Carnegie (1936): be more interested than interesting. Reply to every reader reply. That's where buyers come from.
Cialdini, Influence (1984): people follow social proof. One real testimonial next to your offer beats three paragraphs of description.
Cialdini, Pre-Suasion (2016): win the moment before the ask. Every issue you send sets the frame. By the time you make the offer, the selling's mostly done.
Pink, To Sell Is Human (2012): clarity beats charisma. If you can't describe your offer in one sentence, neither can your reader.
Keenan, Gap Selling (2018): sell the gap between where the buyer is and where they want to be. Write about that gap every week.
When Vialogix moved to gain new customers outside of financial services it was easy to share success stories with real metrics. Sales increases, cost reductions and efficiency for projects we completed at Bank of America could be leveraged for major health care providers or e-commerce companies for instance. I wasn’t ‘selling’, I was just sharing how we already solved your problem for a Fortune 500 customer.
Where it goes wrong
The list becomes a hobby. Years of great issues, no offer. Readers like you and have no way to pay you.
The offer is a menu. Coaching, consulting, speaking, a course "coming soon." Pick one.
Waiting until the list is "big enough." Welsh made his first sales to a much smaller audience. Clay's first consulting work came long before 20,000 subscribers. A hundred readers who trust you is enough to test an offer.
What you can do this week
Three questions. Ten minutes. Write the answers down.
If a reader wanted to pay you tomorrow, what would they buy?
Can you describe it in one sentence, with a price?
Where in your next issue, or your next LinkedIn post, will you mention it?
If the first answer is blank, that's this month's project.
Now go launch something 🚀
You can make more friends in two months by becoming interested in other people than you can in two years by trying to get other people interested in you.
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Old School Wisdom
In 1984, psychologist Robert Cialdini published Influence, built on three years of going undercover in car dealerships, fundraising operations and sales training programs to learn why people say yes. He found six principles: reciprocity, commitment, social proof, authority, liking and scarcity.
Forty years later it's still the most practical book on persuasion ever written. If you've ever sent a newsletter for free, you've already used the first one.
Modern Tools
Let AI pressure-test your offer.
Paste this into Claude or ChatGPT:
"Here's my expertise and my audience: [describe]. Propose three offers I could sell to my email list: one course or product, one service, one retainer. For each, write a one-sentence description and a suggested price. Then tell me which one my audience is most likely to buy first, and why."
Free Knowledge
Justin Welsh's Saturday Solopreneur archive.
Welsh publishes his weekly newsletter free on his site, and the back issues cover pricing, offers and building a one-person business in detail. Start with anything on product launches.
Recommendations
🚏 The Cautionary : Learn to challenge conventional wisdom.
📕 MGMT Playbook : Practical management insights straight to your inbox every Wednesday.
🏢 Retirepreneur : Your guide to turning decades of experience into profitable consulting, coaching, or course businesses, without risking your retirement security.
🗃 Dealroom Business Success Uncovered : Learn directly from billionaire entrepreneurs on how to grow a business. Join a community of 2,000+ innovators.
🧾 Redefining Retirement : Too Young to Retire, Too Old To Take Orders? Yeah, Me Too.
Visual Crapshoot
Launch Key readers – thank you for your support and feedback. I appreciate each and every one of you as I work to build something you value.
Remember, if there's anything you'd like to share — a recommendation, a story idea, or just a note to say hi, hit the reply button and fire away.
