Launch Expert Reveals Her 6-Figure Launch Strategy (with Erica Schneider)

**Justin Simon** (0:00)
Hey everybody, before we get started, I wanna thank my friends at Hatch for producing this episode. You can get unlimited podcast editing and strategy for one flat rate by visiting hatch.fm. All right, let's get in the show.
Welcome to Distribution First, the show where we flip content marketing on its head and focus on what happens after you hit publish. Each week, I share playbooks, motivations, stories and strategies to help you repurpose and distribute your content, because you deserve to get the most out of everything you create. Hey, friend, welcome to this week's episode of Distribution First. Excited to have my friend, Erica, back with us. And today, we are going to talk all things launches, because, let's be honest, even as marketers, most of us suck at launching things. Erica, welcome to the show.

**Erica Schneider** (1:02)
Hey, thanks for having me back. It's good to be here. Last time I was on your show, I think I was still, like, at my parents' house without a microphone. And it was just, I mean, not like my background has gotten much better, but at least my sound has. So that's exciting.

**Justin Simon** (1:13)
That's right. Absolutely. That's all anybody cares about. Exactly. For anybody who doesn't know, Erica has successfully launched many products with probably close to 2,000 total people in these products, maybe even more, well over, you know, probably 100,000, 200,000 in revenue, and all of these things that you've launched. So I thought it'd be really fun to have you come on, not only as like a solopreneur and people who want to launch things on their own, but also somebody who's worked at a company and done product launches and all of those things as well, and just kind of talk through where the pitfalls are for launching things. I've talked to multiple people just in the last week inside of the Distribution First membership, and both of them are launching new things. And each time I've talked to them, I'm like, oh, like, here's some of the things I've learned from Erica. So I'm super excited to have you on, and be able to talk through some of the stuff. So to start, maybe talk me through some of the biggest problems that you see with launches and where people go wrong.

**Erica Schneider** (2:13)
Okay, so by far, the biggest problem that people have with launches is they skip pre-launch. People think, this is ready. I'm going to share it with the world, and everyone is going to fall in love with it right away. Obviously, because it's the best. But nobody except for you or the people at your company, if we're talking about in-house, know that you've been doing anything really cool behind the scenes. So if you hit them with your excitement that you've been building up for months or however long you've been working on this thing, and they aren't with you, they can't meet you, because they don't have the same anticipation, of course they're not going to just jump on the bandwagon the way that you want them to. So instead, my go-to line here, I'm such a broken record if anyone's ever heard me say this before, but think about movies. You get hit with movie trailers a year in advance. You get a preview. Everywhere you go, there's billboards, there's signs, like coming summer 2026 Like you'll see things literally up to a year in advance. And the reason why they do that is that they know that they need to build momentum so that on day one, you are in the theater or you're planning on going to an opening weekend. And like opening weekend sales are generally huge because they do such a good job of helping you prepare for this moment.

**Justin Simon** (3:37)
That's really good.

**Erica Schneider** (3:38)
Why the hell do we expect that we can launch things into the market without that? I mean, movies are giving you a year. Like, come on. I love saying that to people because everyone's just like, oh, yeah.

**Justin Simon** (3:50)
And it makes sense, right? Because like if a new movie came out and there was a day's notice or no day's notice, like movies out today, like go see it, it might perform, but it's not nearly going to perform as well, right?

**Erica Schneider** (4:02)
Yeah. I mean, like something with massive, what's the word? I don't know what word I'm trying to use.

**Justin Simon** (4:08)
Like if Apple, so here's the thing, right? Like if Apple launches something out of the blue, okay, fine.

**Erica Schneider** (4:12)
Exactly. Like massive brand recognition is, I think, the phrase I was going for there. If Apple launched or like the next Marvel movie just like suddenly dropped, everybody would run.