311: Launching Better With AI

Launching a new product or service can be one of the most stressful and demanding times for entrepreneurs. Between managing the workload, meeting deadlines, and trying to achieve ambitious revenue goals, it's easy for work-life balance to suffer.

In this episode, Erin and Steve discuss how AI can be leveraged to launch better and more efficiently, without sacrificing your wellbeing. They cover:

• How AI can free you from emotional attachment to certain ideas, enabling more objective feedback and faster iteration
• Using AI for market analysis and trend research to inform launch strategies
• Addressing team members' fears about AI replacing their roles, and how to position it as a collaborative tool
• Maximizing AI's potential across the entire launch process - from prep work to post-launch analysis
• Overcoming barriers to AI adoption and getting support through coaching 
  

The key is using AI as a strategic partner to create a more human-centered, values-aligned launch process and business.

Download the free "AI Launch Blueprint" here to get started.

Full transcript:

Erin Aquin  0:01  
Welcome to the Superabound podcast with master coaches Erin Aquin and Steve Haase, where vision led entrepreneurs learn to build a generous business without sacrificing what matters most. You are listening to episode 311: using AI to launch better

Steve Haase  0:20  
that's exciting. As an entrepreneur, you always want to get your material out there. You want to have more people know about you, and that means launching. And

Erin Aquin  0:29  
launching can be, I think, one of the most stressful seasons for business owners. There is no other time that I see my clients, like really stressed. A lot of people lose sleep. They're suffering. They are. You know, a lot is riding on a launch, especially if you have your year planned out and you're hoping for certain metrics and certain revenue from those launches. So it can be very stressful, very busy. And because we are not just interested in AI for fun, we are interested in using AI to help you have a more human business. Have those weekends off, those Fridays, CEO Fridays, all of that is really, really important. And luckily, AI is a tool that you can use to make sure that even in those busy launch periods, not only are they more successful, not only is your launch going better than you even expected, but you're also taking that time, you're also getting the the wellness that you need, because you are not behind the wheel doing every single thing during your launch.

Steve Haase  1:51  
And a launch doesn't have to be just your big you know, doors open for a week, money maker for the whole half year. A launch can be creating a new free offer, a new freebie, a new lead magnet, however you like to talk about it. Some people take a month to get that out the door. Some people, if they're really quick and ambitious, can do it in a week, using AI for that process. Can help you do it in a day, even quicker. And so that is something that we're actually going to walk you through, what we call the AI launch blueprint. And we have that available for you at besuperabound.com/blueprint, and we'll walk you through the whole process of how you can take an idea in your head for what could be of lots of value for your audience, what could have lots of new people coming into your business and do it in way shorter time in your voice, up to your standard, with AI as your teammate. And

Erin Aquin  2:55  
this blueprint is going to be free for a limited period of time. So if you're listening to this head over, download that today, because you don't want to miss it. Well, it's free. I mean, I like it when it's free. You can pay for it too. We won't, we won't say no, but this is going to be really valuable for you to have, because it's it's interesting. We were doing this the other day, and Steve said something that I thought was very powerful. As most of you know, we spent the last couple of years together writing a book, and part the most painful part of that process for Steve was the editing process. Because when you have an idea, you Steve, but also you everyone listening. When you have an idea, when you really love something that you're working on, there is an emotional attachment to it. And sometimes as entrepreneurs, we can think our ideas are so good. We can think our words, our copy is so brilliant, we worked

Steve Haase  4:03  
so hard on it. There was brain power and effort come on that has to stay all the energy.

Erin Aquin  4:08  
But if it's not actually serving the purpose, in Steve's case, in my case, for the book, it had to go. And there was emotional energy attached to that when you learn how to use AI to even just do experiments in your business to create your launch plan with you, you're not going to have the same emotional attachment to copy that you've written to content that you've written to ideas that you've had that you pour time and energy into what is that called the when you the loss bias, there's some, there's something when you think, because it's yours, it's so valuable, I can't, I can't, I can't give up my my idea that I I had this beautiful walk, and this beautiful idea came to me. But when AI can Chur out, I. A landing page idea in two minutes, objectively, you can look at that and say, Well, this is crap. This isn't exact. This is not correct. This is not my language. You will so unemotionally in an unattached way, be able to get back in there and give that non human really direct feedback that you probably can't give your copywriter, that you probably cannot give yourself you cannot give your co founder, by the way. So I think it's in this way, even though we're using AI to build a more human business and to launch the fact that it is not a human whose feelings you cannot hurt, AI's feelings, and that is actually very beneficial when you are trying to keep a high level perspective, when you're trying to look through the lens of your vision and your values, it's kind of okay to be no it's more than okay to be straightforward, to be very clear, to Know what you like, to know what you don't like. This as a thinking partner, AI does something that you can't do in a human interaction. Yeah. In fact,

Steve Haase  6:12  
some of my best prompts have been less salesy, less cheesy things that you know, if I had said to a person who put their heart and soul into it, I probably would have had to couch in more flowery terms. But with the AI, I'm like, No, this is so cheesy, less cheesy, and it comes back, and it's like, Oh, I know what that means. And then I get something that's much closer to what I want. I change a couple of words here and there, so that it actually feels like me and feels authentic and it's done, as opposed to starting with the blank cursor. Be like, oh God, all right, let me put something in here, and it's the sunk cost bias where I'm like, I just spent an hour of my life doing this. If none of this is good, I may as well just die.

Erin Aquin  6:54  
Yeah, so this is kind of maybe, you know, we'll go deep into this in the blueprint, the AI launch blueprint, we're going to teach you how to, like, get those initial experiments up and running, but just knowing that as you go into it, that's one way AI can help us launch better, because it is not a person, it is not a person whose feelings were going To be hurt. That's a really, really beautiful thing. And it can also take your information. It can see maybe you're maybe you're trying to launch something that you've done in the past, and you did this last year, but the launch didn't go as well, and you just copied the same launch you did that was very successful, but now this year, for some reason, something's wrong. Well, guess what? You can pop that all of your content, your whole launch plan, in there, and ask AI to make this relevant to the market as it is today, to your people. You can give your AI so much information and really craft something that is true to your vision, is true to your values, is true to what you're going to deliver. But it has a sense from all of these other sources of information as to maybe why that didn't work last time, maybe what needs to be updated, maybe what the market is looking for that wasn't really on the table last year.

Steve Haase  8:22  
So that's just one of the steps in launching better is market analysis, trends research. You can do that as a human, but the AI can do it so much faster. Plus,

Erin Aquin  8:36  
you love research. That's fun, good for you.

Steve Haase  8:39  
Instant scouring all the all the places that you tell it to look it can bring you back an analysis in whatever level of detail you want. And then you, as the brilliant human, as the business owner whose ideas and intention chart the course of your direction, are able to say, this is what I want to experiment with next. This is, this is where I see this pointing to. And the beauty of launching with AI is that, rather than investing all this time and energy into a single thing, it's like steering an ocean liner, right? It's like, okay, we got this giant ship and all this, it's hard to move. If you're able to move super quickly, you can say, this is the next direction I want to check out. You can launch a campaign. You can see how that works. If it works great, you build on it. If it doesn't, you don't have to steer an ocean liner in a different direction, right? It doesn't take you another month to try something new. You can spin up something new based on new research, based on the feedback that you get from that campaign with your kind of superhuman thinking partner guiding your insights.

Erin Aquin  9:55  
And you know, something that's come up when we've we've talked about this with. Some of our clients who have teams is that their teams are very scared of AI their teams are their copywriters do not want them popping in prompts and seeing how easy the content process could be, because they fear that it's going to replace them. And I know that that's, it's a it's a relevant fear, it matters. But at the same time there, if we think about AI, like a collaborator, like, like, kind of an awkward human on the team who is not emotional, does not care about what feedback you give it, it is a tool that could make that person's job better. And I think what you just said about being able to pivot easily when things are not working, hopefully you get a chance to go through that blueprint and you see how to do that analysis in a way where you're starting off better than you could if you were just sitting there mulling over your own ideas with your team. But when we see that things aren't working, now we have a lightning fast way of shifting things, and then you can deploy those beautiful human resources that you have to work with that feedback and not have your team sit there freaked out when a launch isn't going well, worried that they're not going to have a job in six months, but actually say, Okay, this is not working. Let's get let's spin up some new ideas. Let's spin up some new assets. Let's shift how we're doing this. Let's get some people giving us feedback. Let's find out what our customers really want. And your humans can do the human work of that relationship building, of that being supportive, rather than having them just be stressed out and scrambling.

Steve Haase  11:59  
There are so many applications for AI in the launch process. I think the the big challenge even, is figuring out what processes you want to use to actually get the most from it. And it kind of brings me to what is often i It's kind of an axiom in the emerging AI consulting world is you just have to use it. You have to see where it gives you the biggest point of leverage, the most bang for your buck, because you won't necessarily know in advance it might be in the content creation that's kind of a standard one. And we talked about on the last podcast the kinds of effort or direction you would need to go, the kind of the change in mindset to effectively use AI for content. But it's possible on each of these steps in the launch process to use AI to give you that edge, give you that extra little boost, even if it's just five or 10% over 10 different steps in a launch, that's going to be a 100% boost in effectiveness and power in your vision, really coming through and You creating the kind of company that you want, using AI in a launch period. It's, it's, it's a moment of disruption for your business. It's doing something differently. And these moments of disruption give you an opportunity to re examine, what kind of business do I want? Am I really putting my values into practice here, or am I kind of just following what everybody else says I should be doing? And so as you're experimenting with the AI launch blueprint, make sure that you're weaving your own values into the process, so that all of these tools and all of these, you know, bionic brains are actually helping you create a more human business, one that sounds more like you, and is enabling you to have an even bigger impact as a leader and entrepreneur.

Erin Aquin  14:13  
I love that. And I think when we're when we're thinking about a launch, you know, you have that kind of pre staging phase, which AI can just help you with all of that, instead of it taking, you know, a month and a team of people to get every aspect of your email sequence, your social media, maybe your ad campaign, your customer service, Your FAQs, your landing page. Instead of like having all of that take such a long time, you could do it very quickly with the assistance of AI, and then during the actual launch period, having that analysis going on, having maybe your custom chat bot there. And available to answer questions from people who are coming in and interested but aren't quite ready to buy. And then after the launch is over, really getting a a clear picture of what works you know, you can feed in all of the metrics that you gathered through your launch and get a really thorough understanding of what happened, and so we know what did work and what you know maybe we need to tweak next time it is something that is really going to be a supportive part of your team. And I just see so many folks that don't yet understand the power because they hear what Steve just said, and their eyes glaze over and they think this sounds hard. I don't have time to experiment. I don't have time to just try things and find out. Or maybe I'm not that creative, and I don't I don't know how to juggle it all while I'm also trying to come up with this next brilliant idea for my launch. One of the things that we want to do as part of our Superabound coaching offering to all of you is make sure that you are not alone on this journey. Steve and I have both used these tools for a while now. Steve more so than me, because I took a little while to kind of get on board. But we are going to be featuring AI tools helping you get a custom tech stack in our brand new mastermind that starts in January 2025, so that is coming up as well. You can learn more about that at besuperabound.com/mastermind, but make sure you go and get the blueprint right away, while it's free. Over at besuperabound.com/blueprint, we are going to help you get your launches, hopefully more profitable than ever before, but also with you getting through that launch feeling well, feeling like your tending triad did not was not sacrificed. You were able to take time off, you were able to breathe, you were able to, maybe even for the first time in your life, enjoy a launch period. Wouldn't

Steve Haase  17:17  
that be something? hope to see you there.