Testing Products With a Mini-Sale

My wife and I have a little “side hustle” (I really hate that term, but that’s essentially what it is).

It’s called Love Your First Year and, with it, we help engaged couples prepare for marriage.

Yes, it’s incredibly niche, and incredibly focused. We did that for a few reasons:

1. I wanted to show our clients that if we could sell courses/products with that niche, anyone could sell courses/products with theirs.
2. I wanted to test out some of the new marketing and business strategies where there was no real risk to our clients. Again, if it worked there, it would work anywhere.
3. We love helping engaged couples and it’s just a fun thing for us to be able to do together.

We Have a “Flagship” Product

In February of 2021, we launched our course. It took us about three months to write, two days to film, and another 6 weeks to produce and edit with our friends at Green Clock Film Agency.

The course is two hours long and comprised of 25 modules across seven sections. It helps engaged couples prepare for marriage by covering topics like marital roles, communication, conflict, finances, intimacy, and more.

It was $79, and we genuinely had no intention of creating any other products.

One of Our Bonuses Got Some Attention

In addition to the content of the course, we also released a few bonus resources. One of those resources was called “The Ultimate Guide to the Wedding Night and Honeymoon.”

Because our audience was made up of Christian couples, we had many followers who were waiting until their wedding night to... do the deed.

This resource was intended to be a solution to that challenge.

Here it is:

Well, fast forward about a year after the course launch, and we started getting couples asking us for the guide without the course.

They just wanted the downloaded, but they didn’t need the course, our flagship product.

We Decided to Test the Product

Again, we had no intention of offering any other products aside from our course. We had spent hours and hours and hours creating that thing, we knew it was great for our audience, and we didn’t want to pull anything out of it.

But the people had spoken: they wanted to be able to buy the guide separately.

Rather than rolling out a new product with a huge launch, building a sales page, and creating an email marketing campaign, we decided to do a trial run. If it flopped, no problem. If we got some sales? Maybe we could re-launch it in the future.

The Guidelines of the Test

During this test, we focused on doing just a few things. Our goal was to listen to our audience, try out a couple of new marketing strategies, and see how it performed.

In light of that, here’s what we did:

1. We teased the product on Instagram ahead of time. We shared a story that said something like, “We’re considering offering this guide, is anyone interested?” We had an overwhelming amount of “Yeses.” Had we gotten a lot of no’s, we would have just moved on. This also lets our audience know it might be coming at some point soon.
2. We limited the sale to just 5 days (Saturday to Wednesday). Once we decided to sell it, we wanted to create a little urgency and do something different from our primary product which is always open and available for sale.
3. We priced the product low. Our flagship product was $79, so we decided to price this one at $19. It’s high enough that it feels worth it, but low enough that you could buy and not think twice about it.

Time to Offer the Product For Sale

We knew what we were testing and we knew how we’d do it, so now it was time to actually offer the product for sale.

We sell our course through Kajabi, so we decided to make it easy and offer this guide through Kajabi as well.

Bonus: Interested in Kajabi? Check out our comprehensive article titled, "The Beginner's Guide to Creating and Selling Courses with Kajabi"

We created a few assets that allowed us to actually sell the product:

1. The product (1.5 hours) - We revamped the guide, added more content, and added some small details to allow the product to stand alone. Inside of Kajabi, we also supplemented this download with a discount to our course and some blog articles that related to the guide. We wanted the product to feel like it was worth way more than $19.
2. The offer (30 mins) - Next, we needed to create our “offer.” Basically just understanding what we’re giving the customer in exchange for their $19. This was pretty simple... we listed out all of the sections of the guide, what was included, and technical things they needed to know (eg, “You have access for life.”).
3. The checkout (1 hour) - Finally, we had to create our checkout page (FYI, this is called an “offer” in Kajabi... I know it’s confusing). The checkout page had to have a good image at the top, a mockup of the product, and the details of the offer. Here’s what it looked like:

Now that the product was ready to be sold, we put it out in our Instagram stories and sent an email to our list. We also put out a reminder post the day before the sale ended.

That’s pretty much it. The product was now available for sale.

The Results of the Test

Remember, we said our goals were to: listen to our audience, try out a couple of new marketing strategies, and see how it performed.

We were really pleased with the results.

Over the 5ish days of the sale, our audience of around 6,000 followers (not huge) generated:

• 60 sales
• Over $1,400 in revenue
• 3 upsells into our course

We spent about 3 hours creating this product and making it available for purchase, which works out to an hourly rate of around $466 per hour (!!). Not bad for testing out a product!

Almost more important though, we found a product our audience resonated with at a price point they would buy. That’s a huge win!

Wrapping Up

For our little “side hustle,” this was a great outcome for us. Did we get rich? No. Did we make some extra cash testing something out? Yes. Did we give our audience what they were asking for? Also yes.

So if you’ve ever thought about testing out a product, use a mini-sale in the same way we did. You might be surprised by the results.

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